The Stories of John Cheever

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John Cheever

Literature

Aug 25, 2018

The sixty-one stories gathered here were written in the three decades after the end of World War II; most were originally published in The New Yorker, then collected in slim volumes that had been largely forgotten by the time this fat, retrospective tome was issued to popular success and critical acclaim in 1978. While the nearly seven-hundred-page Stories of John Cheever delivers much more than the sum of its parts, it must also be proclaimed—with pleasure and admiration—that those parts remain more gloriously particular than its author’s enduring reputation as the “Chekhov of suburbia” implies. And although Cheever’s people seldom prove themselves up to the task of redemption, they seldom lose hope of its embrace; like nymphs pursued by insatiable divinities, these recognizable modern Americans survive—and perhaps even triumph—through their transformation by Cheever’s hands into figures of warning, yearning, and human imperfection.

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Miceal O Coileain

Dec 4, 2018

A brilliant, and now much overlooked, observer of the fraught American lifestyle of the 50s-70s. An outstanding use of language as well ... the stories excellent, but The Wapshot books truly magnificent.

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