The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever · 1978
Won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award simultaneously, one of the few story collections to achieve both. Cheever's suburban America (the cocktails, the affairs, the swimming pools, the despair beneath the surface) is both a specific time and a permanent condition.
The case against
Sixty-one stories, one milieu: gin, commuter trains, adultery in Shady Hill. Read straight through, the collection flattens into a single long hangover; the same marriage curdles forty times. Cheever's range is deep but narrow, and seven hundred pages of suburban sorrow, taken at a gulp, all begin to taste of vermouth.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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