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Must-read classic books set in prison

A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

We've selected six of the most unforgettable garden parties in books

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The greatest garden parties in literature

VINTAGE Letters and Diaries to inspire you

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VINTAGE letters and diaries to inspire you

Illustration by Ryan MacEachern for Penguin 2019

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Literary hangovers: how the morning after brings out the best in writers

Vintage Minis

Drinking

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

John Cheever understood fallibility and that made for the greatness in his writing

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. 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 he 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.

What’s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents’ liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories suffused with beauty, sadness, and the gathering storm of a bender well-done. Seen through the gin-lacquered looking glass of Cheever’s writing, your next drink may have you reaching for a lime and soda instead. 
 
Selected from the book Collected Stories by John Cheever 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Calm by Tim Peaks 
Love by Jeanette Winterson

Falconer

The raw, rage-filled final novel from a master American storyteller

A whole swathe of poor and underprivileged America is evoked by one of the country's most rarified stylists

One of the most important novels of our time.. Read it and be ennobled

Splendid...it is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the USA.

One of our truly fine writers...Moving and excellent

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. 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 he 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.

Discover John Cheever’s quirky psychological novel that is the perfect book club read. 
 
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 possibility 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.

The Journals

'Invariably thoughtful, honest, beautifully written' Guardian

One of the most compelling and intimate books you'll ever read

Beautifully written, lyrically spiritual, sexually candid memoirs

Cheever's journals include the struggle for recognition, the problem-drinking and covert homosexuality of a public figure and, finally, cancer. His intelligence and honesty powerfully communicate the sense of life as an urgent predicament

These diaries are so painfully personal...that they were not published until after his death. But they also concentrate the true essence of what made his short stories great

In superb prose, Cheever records his alcoholism, homosexuality, life of frustration and anxiety, success and chaos. Agonising and unforgettable

Will cause readers to give Cheever 'the respect and admiration' he deserves.

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. 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 he 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.

John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he hated himself for his drinking, but for much of his life was dependent upon it; he was a great writer, but one whose acute levels of perception often crippled him as a person. His journals are candid, beautiful and often startling.

Bullet Park

'I fell hopelessly in love with John Cheever last year... He was, and his fiction is, extraordinary. I love the way you never know what on Earth is going to happen next' Philip Hensher

In a class by itself, not only among Cheever's work but among all novels I know

John Cheever's prose is always a pleasure to read because it is both graceful and governed

Cheever writes a restrained, half -mocking hymn to the delusions of comfortable America which is a pleasure to read

Cheever's intelligence and honesty powerfully communicate the sensations of being alive

Eliot Nailles loves his wife and son to distraction; Paul Hammer is a bastard named after a common household tool. Neighbours in Bullet Park, the two become fatefully linked by the mysterious binding power of their names in Cheever's sharp and funny hymn to the dubious normality of the American suburbs.

The Wapshot Chronicle

The first novel John Cheever wrote is a wonderful introduction to his writing; clever, funny, charming and bursting with life

Cheever's debut novel is skittish, mercurial and ringing with life

The best introduction to Cheever's work...richly inventive and vividly told

A tapestry woven from the threads of emotion, tragedy, comedy...and the irony so wonderfully evident in the author's short stories...a literary mosaic...Cheever is a pleasure to read

A brilliantly written novel, vastly and sometimes sadly, amusing

Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James

Oh What A Paradise It Seems

'A delight to read' Evening Standard

This delightful fable shows him at the height of his powers

John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his luminous short stories and in incomparable novels like Bullet Park and Falconer, is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature

This curious novella is Cheever's wry pastoral fable about the state of modern America

Sheer pleasure...his prose is charged like Scott Fitzgerald's

In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime. Can Sears thwart the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save his beloved village? 
 
Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution of the ice-skate.

The Letters of John Cheever

'A writer of grace and wit, quietly dealing with people, like himself, who sense that their seemly, well-respected lives are being lived upon a precipice' Sunday Times

He lies, in American writing, somewhere between Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike

The master of the short story was also the master of the short letter

I enjoyed The Letters of John Cheever enormously... Cheever shone in his three-paragraph masterpieces about temperamental plumbing, pets, and the loneliness of the short story-writer

Cheever's work - a succession of brilliant short stories for the New Yorker and four novels - depends on an edgy eye for detail and a compulsive narrative personality

John's letters and Benjamin's commentary makes a special kind of dialogue that touches and haunts, both in what is said and what is kept silent

Cheever's eldest son Benjamin's insights are as illuminating as the letters

A welcome re-issue.. a great read, full of good-natured but by no means sappy humour and alive with vigorous details

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAY MCINERNEY 
 
John Cheever's letters offer a tantalising glimpse into the life of a writer. They include correspondence with his contemporaries, such as Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, his days as a young, aspiring writer and his battles with bisexuality and alcoholism. In this collection, edited by his son Benjamin Cheever, we see how his private correspondence was as extraordinary as his published works.

With an Introduction by Dave Eggers

The Wapshot Scandal

The sequel to John Cheever's first, extraordinary novel - The Wapshot Chronicle

I read The Wapshot Scandal with pure delight - in the characters, in the firm and deceptively simple style, and most of all in the continual power of invention

One of the finest storytellers writing in English today

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVE EGGERS 
 
Once upon a time the Wapshots of St. Botolphs were distinguished for their unshakeable good opinion of themselves. But the family members have drifted far from their New England village - and into the demented caprices of the mighty, the bad graces of the IRS and the humiliating abyss of adulterous passion. A novel of large and tender vision, The Wapshot Scandal is filled with pungent characters and outrageous twists of fate, and, above all, with Cheever's luminous compassion for all his hapless fellow prisoners of human nature.

Collected Stories

The complete collection of award-winning stories from one of the finest American writers of the last century

I’ve read nothing better this year than The Stories of John Cheever.

Cheever's accomplishment in his exacting art is proportionally large, as solid as it is brilliant, and likely to endure

Currently I'm reading John Cheever's Collected Stories. My God, he was good

'The Swimmer' is a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow

I reread Cheever's 'The Swimmer' late the other night. It had the effect that reading Cheever always has: it made me want to get up and start the futile task of trying to write something as measured yet mysteriously, heart-judderingly unexpected for myself

Magnificently touching, moving and funny, and often set in an imaginary but archetypically well-heeled American suburb

A writer of grace and wit, quietly dealing with people, like himself, who sense that their seemly, well-respected lives are being lived upon a precipice

[They] define what a short story should be - intense, moving and resonant

John Cheever’s Collected Stories explores the delicate psychological frameworks of 20th century suburbia. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HANIF KUREISHI 
 
This outstanding collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever shows the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the last century. Stories of love and of squalor, they include masterpieces such as 'The Swimmer' and 'Goodbye, My Brother' and date from the time of his honourable discharge from the Army at the end of the Second World War.

John Cheever

Julian Barnes

One of the great writers of the previous century

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like, to be able to have that felicity of language

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

[Cheever's] magical capacity for marrying the quotidian with the surreal, so often soars. The new volume feels capacious, stuffed as it is with wonders

John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his luminous short stories...is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature

Profound and daring...some of the most wonderful stories any American has written

Cheever shows a sublime psychological understanding of all that goes unsaid - whatever's not mentioned between couples is fully present and felt

Selected Short Stories

Selected and Introduced by Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes 
 
'Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room' Anne Enright 
 
John Cheever - the 'Chekhov of the suburbs' - forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature. In a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his short stories, often published in the New Yorker, gave voice to the repressed desires and smouldering disappointments of 1950s America as it teetered on the edge of spiritual awakening and sexual liberation in the ensuing decades. 
 
Selected for the first time, these satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent stories show Cheever in all his brilliance and continue to speak directly to the heart of human experience. 
 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

John Cheever

Praise for A Vision of the World

One of the great writers of the previous century

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like ...

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

One of the great writers of the previous century

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like ...

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

One of the great writers of the previous century

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like ...

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

Books by John Cheever

Articles featuring John Cheever

Must-read classic books set in prison

12 short story collections to sink into

The greatest garden parties in literature

VINTAGE letters and diaries to inspire you

Literary hangovers: how the morning after brings out the best in writers

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