John Cheever: The Journals - Softcover

Cheever, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099212218 ISBN 13: 9780099212218

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1993

Synopsis

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
  

About this title

About the Author:

John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.

Meryl Streep has been nominated for an Academy Award® thirteen times, winning twice. Her numerous film credits include The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie's Choice, Out of Africa, The Bridges of Madison County, Adaptation, and The Hours.

From AudioFile:

If you've ever wished the characters in an Edward Hopper painting would come alive and tell their stories, then don't miss this luminous recording. In his celebrated stories, John Cheever' captures a burgeoning New York City in the '40s and '50s and makes mythic the suburban world of Westchester County in the '60s and '70s with such characters as "The Swimmer," a man whose answer to a hangover is to swim across the county--swimming pool by swimming pool. An incomparable set of narrators delivers the stories with perfection. The production is elegantly bracketed by Cheevers: son Ben narrates the introduction, and John Cheever himself delivers the final two stories--at a breakneck clip but with the intelligence and vitality that shine throughout his work. E.K.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0099212218
• ISBN 13: 9780099212218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416