Product Description

These outstanding stories of American award-winning novelist, John Cheever, show the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the century. Stories of love and squalor, set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness contend with time, social change, and the chaos of history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6666 in Books
• Published on: 1990-10-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Review
Cheever's accomplishment in his exacting art is proportionally large, as solid as it is brilliant, and likely to endure New York Review of Books Currently I'm reading John Cheever's Collected Stories. My God, he was good 'The Swimmer' is a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow I reread Cheever's 'The Swimmer' late the other night. It had the effect that reading Cheever always has: it made me want to get up and start the futile task of trying to write something as measured yet mysteriously, heart-judderingly unexpected for myself Sunday Times Magnificently touching, moving and funny, and often set in an imaginary but archetypically well-heeled American suburb John Cheever understood fallibility and that made for the greatness in his writing The Times A writer of grace and wit, quietly dealing with people, like himself, who sense that their seemly, well-respected lives are being lived upon a precipice Sunday Times

About the 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.

Customer Reviews

A Poet of the Suburbs
Ten years ago when I packed in my job in London and moved back to my mother's place, my first project was to read John Cheever's stories from start to finish. Nobody does what Cheever does - he is romantic, spiritual and funny all at once. He loved the Bible and the atmosphere of a provincial church on a Sunday morning, but he also loved sex, gin and cigarettes. The stories follow the order they were published, beginning with his early New York tales of little people "making it" - or more often not making it. The scene gradually shifts to the suburbs, in which businessmen flounder in debt and lust, although they are often saved by something as simple as a vision of light through the trees. In "The Pot of Gold", an early story, a husband waits years for the moment when he will get rich, realising after many disappointments that his riches - his pot of gold - is his marriage. From another writer such a plot might just be sentimental, but Cheever is very good at describing the degradation of poverty in a society as money-oriented as America's. Most of these stories were written for the New Yorker, and like his hero Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever quickly developed a magazine style that could handle the big themes but is never ponderous.
The stories mainly deal with ordinary men who live ordinary lives, but the solutions to their problems are often extraordinary and miraculous. My own favourite is "The Country Husband", in which Francis Weed survives a plane crash and falls in love with his babysitter on the same day. Anyone who is looking for Updike without the politics, Hemingway without the macho stuff and Fitzgerald without the glamour will love these stories. Since I first read them ten years ago in my mother's house, I have reread them countless times and they have never lost their power.

American fiction at its best...
John Cheever projects such a strong vision of a particular time and place in American history that i think it would be hard not to like these stories. They are, as individual stories, great achievements but as a collection these stories become something much more, they transport the reader into the heart of the post war American suburb, describing societies lonliest and most vunerable characters. Those for whom achieving their 'American Dream' is not an option but a necessity, it is their sheer belief that against all odds they will succeed, which keeps them going.

My personal favourites are those which describe Cheever's fictional 'Shady Hill' suburb, in particular, 'O Youth and Beauty' which tells the story of the once great sportsman Cash Bently who spends his weekends hurdling over the furniture in his neighbours houses, as a desperate attempt to win back some of his former glory.

This is a great collection, one which you will come back to time and again.

Melt-in-the-mouth stories.
Cheever is one of the best American short story writers of the 20th century, along with Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Richard Yates and Carver. He is not just a "poet of the suburbs"; he is describing YOU, wherever you live, breathe and have your being. His work is easily available and should be read by anyone who professes to be at all interested in writing.