NATIONAL BESTSELLERWinner of the Pulitzer PrizeWinner of the National Book AwardWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Stories of John Cheever is a seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest … has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written.
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Cheever has now been gone since ’82 and is starting to be forgotten. So this is just a reminder of a great short story writer who produced a lot of work and performed a feat that has probably not been equalled or really attempted since: he raised a family on what he made from selling short stories to the country’s best magazines. And the lion’s …
Beautifully written, it’s a window into the New York of the thirties, forties and fifties.
Cheever was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, and he was a master of the short story. Essential reading.
Cheever is an exceptional writer
Cheever’s short stories are wonderful classics that teach us about the human condition. And entertaining when you have some free reading time for a standalone story. One of the greats.
Sentence by sentence, Cheever really writes amazing prose. It might seem stiff, even formal by contemporary standards of what a sentence should feel like, but his way of gently, patiently exposing the interior of the characters and their society always amazes me. I teach some of his stories and they can put off the students for the first read. But …
3 of 5 stars to The Swimmer, a short story written in 1964 by John Cheever. Why on Earth would a man want to swim from one end of a county to the other? There would have to be something wrong with him to even want to accomplish something like that! Yet, Neddy Merrill, a character in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”, wanted to do it, which …