Richard Yates, the toughest and least sentimental of American realists, has been getting a lot of good press lately, as his work is reissued, and it’s high time. After all, he died in 1992, too late to benefit from the attention. (This new appreciation for his work has already become absurd, though, almost before it’s begun. His excruciatingly depressing novel Revolutionary Road has just been made into a movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, that will be in theaters later this year.)

I’m a huge fan of Yates, mostly because I admire the heck out of Liars in Love, a story collection I recommend as the best introduction to his work. Reading those stories, it’s mystifying that Roger Angell should ever have written, as Richard Rayner reported in the L.A. Times, “It seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for.”

Nine years after Yates’s death in 1992, though, his story “The Canal” was published in The New Yorker. I wonder if Angell liked it better than Yates’s previous work, or underwent a change of heart.

For a detailed summary of Yates’s sad, angry life and the great fiction it yielded, one can do no better than to read Stewart O’Nan’s passionate essay in The Boston Review. Don’t have time for it? Then I recommend Nick Fraser’s shorter overview, in The Guardian.

If those guys don’t make you want to read Yates, nothing will.