The Stories of John Cheever - Vintage International Paperback

About the Book

This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection features 61 stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." "Profound and daring . . . some of the most wonderful stories any American has written."--"The Boston Globe."

Book Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - 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 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 Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written.

"Cheever's crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." --The Guardian

Review Quotes

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

"Profound and daring.... Some of the most wonderful stories any American has written." --The Boston Globe

"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

"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." --The Washington Post

"A grand occasion in English literature." --The New York Times

"Cheever's crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." --The Guardian

About the Author

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. 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 The Stories of John Cheever 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 from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.