Description

**A TIMES BEST BOOK TO READ THIS SUMMER**

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.

‘Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room’ Anne Enright

Publisher Review

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like, to be able to have that felicity of language 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 * Washington Post * 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 Cheever shows a sublime psychological understanding of all that goes unsaid - whatever's not mentioned between couples is fully present and felt Ultimately, it is the stories which make the case for Cheever as a great American writer, one who continues to deserve our attention and admiration