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Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor book cover
Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor
2009
First Published
3.84
Average Rating
19
Number of Pages

Here are twelve magnificent stories in which John Cheever celebrates—with unequaled grace and tenderness—the deepest feelings we have. As Cheever writes in his preface, 'These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.' 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. Benjamin Cheever is the author of The Plagiarist, The Parisian and Famous after Death. The Enormous Radio read by Meryl Streep The Five-Forty-Eight read by Edward Herrmann O City of Broken Dreams read by Blythe Danner Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor read by George Plimpton The Season of Divorce read by Edward Herrmann The Brigadier and the Golf Widow read by Peter Gallagher The Sorrows of Gin read by Meryl Streep O Youth and Beauty! read by Peter Gallagher The Chaste Clarissa read by Blythe Danner The Jewels of the Cabots read by George Plimpton The Death of Justina read by John Cheever The Swimmer read by John Cheever

Avg Rating
3.84
Number of Ratings
98
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
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Author

John Cheever
John Cheever
Author · 34 books

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.

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