New Releases by John Cheever

In this fabulous short story, the crown jewel of John Cheever’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Stories of John Cheever, a man agonizes about class privilege and racism, confessing to the knowledge of a terrible crime and exposing a quiet American family’s darkest secrets. Wandering about the sleepy Connecticut town of his childhood, where residents lead lives of grueling boredom, a journalist reminisces about the Cabot children: Molly, a sweet girl and his first love; Geneva who pilfered her mother’s diamonds from the clothesline and ran off to the Middle East; Wallace, Mr. Cabot’s bastard son who lives in the tenements across the river; and the dwarf, Mrs. Cabot’s child from an earlier marriage. An ebook short. A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection.

Ezekiel Farragut is a college professor, a drug-addict and a murderer. Locked in Falconer State Penitentiary, he struggles through tormenting visits from his wife, the burden of memory and guilt, and the brutal monotony of his surroundings to retain his humanity, eventually finding the possibiltiy of redemption through an affair with a fellow prisoner. Considered by many to be Cheever''s masterpiece, Falconer is a tour de force from one of America''s greatest storytellers.

In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail. • "A treasure-trove of riches." —The New York Times Book Review The Pulitzer Prize-winning author''s journals provide peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life. The final word from one of modern America''s great writers, The Journals of John Cheever provides a powerful and beautiful capstone to a towering oeuvre.

This is the first new collection of John Cheever stories in more than fifteen years, and the first time these stories have ever been collected. Originally published in the 1930s and 1940s in magazines which run the gamut from obscure leftist literary periodicals, through The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, to mass circulation glossies like Colliers and Cosmopolitan, these stories deal with themes and use techniques which are not generally considered to be "Cheeveresque". They will undoubtedly surprise those readers familiar only with Cheever''s post-1947 work. Each of these early stories bears the unmistakable stamp of the master storyteller. "Bayonne" is an evocative character study of a waitress whose work serving blue-collar regulars in a diner provides her with more emotional than financial support. "In Passing", which ends with the radical organizer Girsdansky haranguing a small unmoved crowd on the Boston Common at twilight, reveals perhaps more about states of mind during the Depression than standard histories of that era. "Fall River" is an elegy on economic catastrophe in a backwater New England town: Cheever calls up a picture of a wasteland with abandoned factories where "the looms blocked off the floor like discarded machinery in an old opera house". "The Autobiography of a Drummer" is a remarkable portrait of a man who has outlived his time. It anticipates Arthur Miller''s Willy Loman by more than a decade. In this intriguing collection, Cheever plunges us into a stark world; the scenes are reminiscent of Edward Hopper. It is a world of foreclosures, down-and-outs, burlesque shows, desperate gamblers, and deferred hopes. It adds a new dimension to the assessment ofJohn Cheever''s considerable reputation.

This collection of letters by John Cheever, a novelist and short story writer, is edited by his son. He was winner of the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize and was a prolific letter writer who addressed every aspect and period of his life in his correspondence.

"A luminous epiphany of life . . . engaging and complex . . . vivid and alive".--Washington Post Book World. An old man falls madly in love and does valiant battle against polluters in this ineffably joyful novel--Cheever''s last.

Tells of the Wapshot family as they carom around the world with considerable velocity, at times veering into outbreaks of wild hilarity.