A Vision of the World

A Vision of the World

Selected Short Stories

Summary

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

Reviews

  • One of the great writers of the previous century
    John Self, The Times

About the author

John Cheever

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.
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