Best Selling Books by John Cheever

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

In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail. • "A treasure-trove of riches." —The New York Times Book Review The Pulitzer Prize-winning author''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.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) 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. In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut''s suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only 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.

A collection of humorous stories by the American writer focusing on the volume, inhibitions, and dreams of man.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever’s classic novel about one eccentric New England family, inspired by the author''s own adolescence. The Wapshots have called the quintessential Massachusetts fishing village of St. Botolphs home for eons, but now it is time for the next generation—brothers Moses and Coverly—to go out and see the world. Moses heads to New York City and, eventually, a remote island in the South Pacific, while his brother travels south to Washington, D.C., and a job “so secret that it can’t be discussed here.” Meanwhile, back in St. Botolphs, their father, Captain Leander, clashes with his fearsome Cousin Honora, who controls the family purse strings. By turns tragic and deeply funny, The Wapshot Chronicle is a “richly inventive and vividly told” (The New York Times Magazine) work of fiction about one very odd family.

From one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers, this “luminous ephiphany of life ... [is] a charming fable of old age, nostalgia, and loss” (The Washington Post Book World). Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever''s final novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears''s paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever''s accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful. "This is perfect Cheever—it is perfect." —The New York Times Book Review

The stories in this collection are ones that Cheever wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. There are 13 total, 11 of which are not available anywhere else, including the new Library of America edition. Interest in Cheever''s work has been renewed with the publication of a new biography, John Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Readers of Cheever, both new and old, will be fascinated by this essential collection.

John Cheever, novelist, short-story writer, and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a prolific writer of letters, sending as many as thirty in a week. These letters, culled from thousands written to famous writers and celebrities - including John Updike, Josephine Herbst, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Hope Lange and Philip Roth - his family, friends, and lovers, paint an intimate and surprising self-portrait that is as vivid as any character Cheever invented. Edited and annotated by his son Benjamin, Cheever''s letters trace his development as a writer and as a man. They reveal him to be complex, flawed, and full of contradictions. On display are not just his ambitions and weaknesses, his alcoholism and his cloaked bisexuality, but also the evolution of his wit and style and, most of all, his love of life.

From "a master American storyteller" (TIME), Bullet Park traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and the man who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles''s son. 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 Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever delivers a lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—written with unparalleled artistry and assurance. “A magnificent work of fiction.… A novel to pore over, move around in, live with." —The New York Times

This landmark volume combines the entire Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "The Stories of John Cheever," with seven selections from Cheever''s first book, "The Way Some People Live."

From one of the greatest writers of the 20th century—the darkly comic yet deeply compassionate sequel to the National Book Award–winning novel, The Wapshot Chronicles. Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever shares the further adventures of the Wapshot clan, which for generations has called the New England village of St. Botolphs home. Now, though, the family is cast far and wide: Coverly Wapshot to a secretive missile test site and the formidable Cousin Honora self-exiled in Italy after finding herself on the wrong side of the IRS. Meanwhile, closer to home, Coverly’s brother, Moses, is in dire straits—and worried that he’s being haunted by his father’s ghost. A powerful, sometimes bawdy work of fiction, The Wapshot Scandal is the story of one eccentric—and sometimes tragic—family from one of our greatest writers.

This is the first new collection of John Cheever stories in more than fifteen years, and the first time these stories have ever been collected. Originally published in the 1930s and 1940s in magazines which run the gamut from obscure leftist literary periodicals, through The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, to mass circulation glossies like Colliers and Cosmopolitan, these stories deal with themes and use techniques which are not generally considered to be "Cheeveresque". They will undoubtedly surprise those readers familiar only with Cheever''s post-1947 work. Each of these early stories bears the unmistakable stamp of the master storyteller. "Bayonne" is an evocative character study of a waitress whose work serving blue-collar regulars in a diner provides her with more emotional than financial support. "In Passing", which ends with the radical organizer Girsdansky haranguing a small unmoved crowd on the Boston Common at twilight, reveals perhaps more about states of mind during the Depression than standard histories of that era. "Fall River" is an elegy on economic catastrophe in a backwater New England town: Cheever calls up a picture of a wasteland with abandoned factories where "the looms blocked off the floor like discarded machinery in an old opera house". "The Autobiography of a Drummer" is a remarkable portrait of a man who has outlived his time. It anticipates Arthur Miller''s Willy Loman by more than a decade. In this intriguing collection, Cheever plunges us into a stark world; the scenes are reminiscent of Edward Hopper. It is a world of foreclosures, down-and-outs, burlesque shows, desperate gamblers, and deferred hopes. It adds a new dimension to the assessment ofJohn Cheever''s considerable reputation.

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey''s groundbreaking new biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one volume for the first time. In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly and often grotesquely and hilariously cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the dark suburban drama Bullet Park ("a magnificent work of fiction," John Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems. A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the largest edition of Cheever''s stories ever. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Interviews with the late novelist share his veiws on writing, literary fame, his major works, criticism, and his life and career.

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

Letters written by Cheever to John and Harriet Weaver during the four decades he battled with alcohol, publishers, editors, and landlords.

In his finely wrought novels and short stories, John Cheever created men and women, young and old, suburbanites and city dwellers, all of whom, whether they reside in St. Botolphs or Bullet Park or mid-century Manhattan or some other mythic place, are all recognizable as citizens of Cheever country. Vintage Cheever contains an essential selection of the master’s short stories and selections from the novels The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park, Falconer and Oh What a Paradise It Seems. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Short stories reflecting the manners and mores of the country club set.

Collection of sixteen short stories, all from "The New Yorker", expressing an irredeemable sense of loss and loneliness.

A married couple''s new radio tunes into the private lives of everybody else in their New York City apartment building.