The Stories Of 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

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."

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

#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.

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

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.