ON THE BOOKSHELF

Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking new biography, here is the definitive edition of the stories of John Cheever. Set in the tony suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut, Cheever’s classic stories charted a country as recognizable and essential to American literature as Faulkner’s or Hawthorne’s. “Many people have written about suburbia,” John Updike observed, “only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.” Collected Stories and Other Writings combines the entire Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, with seven selections from his first book, The Way Some People Live (1943)—here restored to print—and seven additional stories first published in periodicals between 1930 and 1953. 

Included are masterpieces such as “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” and “The Swimmer,” as well as lesser-known gems. Rounding out the volume are essays about writers and writing, including an appreciation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and an account of a visit to Chekhov’s house. A companion volume, Complete Novels, gathers Cheever’s five novels in one volume for the first time.

Blue blooded satire never tasted so good. 
"Every WASP must have a picnic basket that's at least sixty years old. If you don't have one, buy a new basket and bury it in the ground for a year."
"WASPs relish an excuse to get bedecked from head to toe in Ralph Lauren wear--khaki jodhpurs (the classy answer to Spandex), tweed jackets, floral scarves, and burgundy calfskin gloves."
"These elegant debutantes, in their Bergdorf white gowns and long white gloves, are presented by their fathers. After the brief ceremony, they are toasted as the paragons of fine breeding, good taste, and decorum. They then spend the rest of the evening getting drunk, smoking cigarettes, and giving new meaning to the term 'fine breeding."

Laced with wit, sophistication and humor, this novel about preppies is filled with colorful characters leading frustrating lives. Set in the resort town of Ketchum, Idaho, the story revolves around a young, insecure, former lacrosse star who owns a fly-fishing shop, his demanding preppy wife, and a bungling older preppy who’s recently moved west to escape his troubles by trout fishing.

Eric Berensen (the fly-fishing shop owner) is a lame former lacrosse star at an unnamed college (Colgate) who has married over his head into an old east-coast family. His preppy debutante wife, Corkie (an elementary school teacher and yoga and riding enthusiast) attempts to transform him into her version of a preppy – something he has no intention of becoming. More conflict arises due to her longing for a child – much to his dismay. To complicate matters, a lovely divorcee (Brooke Lowell) shows up with the intention of seducing the troubled Eric who also struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.