The Stories of John Cheever

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize.  In the years since, it has become a classic.  Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.

Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle 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," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life."

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Think of John Cheever's fiction, and a whole world springs to mind--a world of leafy suburbs, summer houses, commuter trains, boarding schools, and inevitably, his own chosen territory, the cocktail hour among WASPs. But it's a mistake to approach Cheever as if he were merely some sort of anthropologist documenting the customs of an obscure and vanishing tribe. Nostalgia and class issues aside, his true subject is the darkness hidden beneath the surface of postwar American life. A case in point is his famous story "The Swimmer," in which an ebullient Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the backyard pools of his neighbors. In the course of his journey, however, summer gives way to autumn, his neighbors turn against him, there are troubling intimations of disgrace and financial ruin, and he arrives to find his house both locked and empty.

Though these stories deal with bright, prosperous, ostensibly happy people, a cold wind blows through them. Age, illness, financial embarrassment, sex, alcohol, death--all of these threaten his suburban Eden. (Is it himself Cheever is mocking in his ironic "The Worm in the Apple"? "Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?") Inanimate objects carry the residue of their past owners' unhappiness and cruelty ("Seaside Houses," "The Lowboy"); expatriates long for but cannot quite find their way home ("The Woman Without A Country," "Boy in Rome"); children vanish or turn out badly (too many stories to count).

All of this is conveyed in prose both graceful and tender. No one is better than Cheever at describing a character's appearance: "He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream." Given his uncanny eye (and ear) for realistic description, it's easy to forget how experimental Cheever could be. His later stories pioneered authorial intrusions in the best postmodern style, and from the beginning, he wrote what would much later be called magical realism. (Think of the sinister broadcasts in "The Enormous Radio," or the phantom love interest in "The Chimera.") A literary event at its publication and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever remains a stunning and enormously influential book. --Mary Park

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The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International)

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In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail.John Cheever's journals provide peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life. The final word from one of modern America's great writers, The Journals of John Cheever provides a powerful and beautiful capstone to a towering oeuvre.

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Bullet Park

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Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles's son. Here is the lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—delivered with unparalleled artistry and assurance.

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Falconer (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A story of human redemption, Falconer explores an ex-professor's experiences as an inmate in Falconer Prison. Ezekiel Farragut, convicted of killing his brother, has been imprisoned in the state prison where he is visited by his wife Marcia, with whom he has a love-hate relationship. Falconer tells the story of Farragut, his crime and punishment and his struggle to remain a man as he comes to terms with how his life has changed forever.

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The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)

Description

When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.

Based in part on Cheever’s adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses’ adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James.

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John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, No. 188)

Description

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking new biography, here is the definitive edition of the stories of John Cheever. Set in the tony suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut, Cheever’s classic stories charted a country as recognizable and essential to American literature as Faulkner’s or Hawthorne’s. “Many people have written about suburbia,” John Updike observed, “only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.” Collected Stories and Other Writings combines the entire Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, with seven selections from his first book, The Way Some People Live (1943)—here restored to print—and seven additional stories first published in periodicals between 1930 and 1953. Included are masterpieces such as “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” and “The Swimmer,” as well as lesser-known gems. Rounding out the volume are essays about writers and writing, including an appreciation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and an account of a visit to Chekhov’s house. A companion volume, Complete Novels, gathers Cheever’s five novels in one volume for the first time.

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