Collected Stories

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099748304 ISBN 13: 9780099748304

Publisher: Vintage Uk, 1990

These outstanding stories of American award-winning novelist, John Cheever, show the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the century. Stories of love and squalor, set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness contend with time, social change, and the chaos of history.

Review:

"These stories," writes Cheever in the preface to this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of 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 stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' set sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."

From the Inside Flap:

Winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER live in the community of emotions and dreams. The men and women are creatures of beauty, tragedy and restless privilege. And always they soar from the sadness of life to the older and more elegant realms of light, desire, memory, and love....
"Dazzling."
THE BOSTON GLOBE