These stories from the pen of American award-winning novelist John Cheever show the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the century.
John Cheever Books
May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982
John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer whose fiction often explored the lives of those inhabiting the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, and old New England villages. His work primarily delves into the duality of human nature, frequently dramatizing the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and their inner corruption. Many of his narratives express a poignant nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, marked by enduring cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, contrasting with the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. Cheever's writing masterfully probes the tension between outward appearances and inner realities, often with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy.
The American writer, John Cheever, died in 1982, leaving behind 29 loose-leaf notebooks begun in the late Forties. They form the content of this book. His commitment to them was of central importance to his life - as a workbook and a retreat, an unhindered act of self-revelation where he could explore his ambiguities. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for much of his life was dependent upon it; he was a great writer, but one whose acute levels of perception often crippled him as a person.
Fall River and Other Uncollected Stories
- 227 pages
- 8 hours of reading
A collection of 13 early stories from the 1930s and 1940s.
The Letters Of John Cheever
- 416 pages
- 15 hours of reading
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAY MCINERNEYJohn Cheever's letters offer a tantalising glimpse into the life of a writer. They include correspondence with his contemporaries, such as Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, his days as a young, aspiring writer and his battles with bisexuality and alcoholism.
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
Bullet Park
- 256 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Eliot Nailles loves his wife and son to distraction; Paul Hammer is a bastard named after a common household tool. Neighbours in Bullet Park, the two become fatefully linked by the mysterious binding power of their names in Cheever's sharp and funny hymn to the dubious normality of the American suburbs.
The Wapshot Scandal
- 352 pages
- 13 hours of reading
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVE EGGERSOnce upon a time the Wapshots of St. Botolphs were distinguished for their unshakeable good opinion of themselves.
Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, The Wapshot Chronicle is a stirring family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James
Drinking
- 128 pages
- 5 hours of reading
John Cheever understood fallibility and that made for the greatness in his writing The Times
Falconer
- 226 pages
- 8 hours of reading
Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.
