The first authorised selected collection of the twentieth-century's most influential short story writer. SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY JULIAN BARNES Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, John Cheever - variously referred to as 'Ovid in Ossining' and 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 Sixties. Up until now, John Cheever's stories have only been available in Collected Stories, but with Julian Barnes' selection we have the first fully authorised introduction to Cheever's work. Satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent, these are stories that speak directly to the heart of human experience, and remain a testament to the wit and vision of one of the most important and influential short story writers of the twentieth century.
Author
John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both—light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
