The first authorised selected collection of the twentieth-century's most influential short story writer.
Selected and Introduced by Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes
'Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles- these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room' Anne Enright
John Cheever - the 'Chekhov of the suburbs' - forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature. In a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his short stories, often published in the New Yorker, gave voice to the repressed desires and smouldering disappointments of 1950s America as it teetered on the edge of spiritual awakening and sexual liberation in the ensuing decades.
Selected for the first time, these satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent stories show Cheever in all his brilliance and continue to speak directly to the heart of human experience.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
The first authorised selected collection of the twentieth-century's most influential short story writer.
Selected and Introduced by Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes
'Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles- these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room' Anne Enright
John Cheever - the 'Chekhov of the suburbs' - forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature. In a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his short stories, often published in the New Yorker, gave voice to the repressed desires and smouldering disappointments of 1950s America as it teetered on the edge of spiritual awakening and sexual liberation in the ensuing decades.
Selected for the first time, these satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent stories show Cheever in all his brilliance and continue to speak directly to the heart of human experience.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
John Cheever (Author)
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he
went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the
author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first
novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In
1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National
Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book
Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer prize. Shortly before his
death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.
Julian Barnes (Introducer)
Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense
of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and
Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He
has also written three books of short stories, four collections of
essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times
number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened
Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he
was awarded the Legion d'honneur.
One of the great writers of the previous century
*The Times*
There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a
support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I
would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does
that feel like, to be able to have that felicity of language
*Elizabeth Strout*
As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain
sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and
place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best
*Washington Post*
[Cheever's] magical capacity for marrying the quotidian with the
surreal, so often soars. The new volume feels capacious, stuffed as
it is with wonders
*Sunday Times*
John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his
luminous short stories...is as rich and distinctive as any of the
leading voices of postwar American literature
*Philip Roth*
Profound and daring...some of the most wonderful stories any
American has written
*Boston Globe*
Cheever shows a sublime psychological understanding of all that
goes unsaid - whatever's not mentioned between couples is fully
present and felt
*A M Homes*
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