Download or read book The Stories of John Cheever written by John Cheever and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 1093 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheever’s crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." —The Guardian

Download or read book E E Cummings written by Susan Cheever and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of American Bloomsbury, Louisa May Alcott, and Home Before Dark, a major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America’s preeminent twentieth-century poets. At the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. E. E. Cummings was and remains controversial. He has been called “a master” (Malcolm Cowley); “hideous” (Edmund Wilson). James Dickey called him a “daringly original poet with more vitality and more sheer uncompromising talent than any other living American writer.” In Susan Cheever’s rich, illuminating biography we see Cummings’s idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his Calvinist father—distinguished Harvard professor and sternly religious minister of the Cambridge Congregational Church; his mother—loving, attentive, a source of encouragement, the aristocrat of the family, from Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers. We see Cummings—slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood, bred to be flinty and determined; his love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head, which he himself would often do, literally, to amuse. At Harvard, he roomed with John Dos Passos; befriended Lincoln Kirstein; read Latin, Greek, and French; earned two degrees; discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque at the Old Howard Theater; and raged against the school’s conservative, exclusionary upper-class rule by A. Lawrence Lowell. In Cheever’s book we see that beneath Cummings’s blissful, golden childhood the strains of sadness and rage were already at play. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority and the critical establishment, devouring the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses pushed Cummings away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem toward a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We see that Cummings’s self-imposed exile from Cambridge—a town he’d come to hate for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness, racism, and self-righteous xenophobia—seemed necessary for him as a man and a poet. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway, Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford . . . his ongoing stand against the imprisonment of his soul taking a literal turn when he was held in a makeshift prison for “undesirables and spies,” an experience that became the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room. We follow Cummings as he permanently flees to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day—Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas—and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism and through the influences of his contemporaries: Stein, Amy Lowell, Joyce, and Pound. Cheever’s fascinating book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition. (With 28 pages of black-and-white images.)

Download or read book As Good As I Could Be written by Susan Cheever and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-06-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having children transforms us -- by the amazing power of our love for them and theirs for us, by the anger they are able to evoke in us, and because in order to be good parents to our children, we must admit we are no longer children ourselves. In As Good as I Could Be, bestselling author Susan Cheever describes that transformation in passionate, compelling, moving prose. Susan is raising a daughter, 18, and a son, 11; they have all survived divorce, blending families, issues at school, eating disorders, and alcoholism. They have negotiated the rocky shoals of adolescence and the teenage years with their love and respect for each other intact. Cheever describes her children as smart, kind, and connected; As Good as I Could Be is the story of how that happened. Cheever reveals the challenges, the joys, and the heartbreaks of being a parent. Using the domestic details of her family's life, she illuminates larger truths, starting with the most basic: in order to raise happy, stable, successful children, parents can't be afraid to use their authority -- financial, emotional, and experiential; a family is not -- and should not be -- a democracy; teaching your children to celebrate their mistakes may help them to forgive you yours; and no matter how damaged or unhappy an adult's childhood was, it should not affect the way they parent their children. Provocative, perceptive, wise, and unflinchingly honest, As Good as I Could Be is a touchstone for all parents who are doing the best they can.

Download or read book The Swimmer written by and published by Pioneer Drama Service, Inc.. This book was released on with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Strides written by Benjamin Cheever and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a deeply personal history of running, the novelist-author of The Plagiarist traces the evolution of the sport from the ancient world to the present day while reflecting on his personal, decades-long devotion to and experiences of the sport.

Download or read book Falconer written by John Cheever and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

Download or read book Selling Ben Cheever written by Benjamin Cheever and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, America was in the throes of downsizing fever. Many thousands then, as now, were losing their jobs to the corporate demand of more money for the top, by tightening the belt below. Unable to sell his latest novel, Ben Cheever started to think about what employment opportunities were out there. Selling Ben Cheever is the frank, self-effacing, and enlightening chronicle of his five years in the service industry. As we watch Ben confront his own demons about what a particular job means to him, we are compelled to consider how our egos are affected by not only what we do, but how we do it. Through his experiences, we begin to think about our approach to our own jobs and to confront our fears about what we would do if we didn't have them.

Download or read book Drinking in America written by Susan Cheever and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In DRINKING IN AMERICA, bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation's history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped American events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Seen through the lens of alcoholism, American history takes on a vibrancy and a tragedy missing from many earlier accounts. From the drunkenness of the Pilgrims to Prohibition hijinks, drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history-the illegal Mayflower landing at Cape Cod, the enslavement of African Americans, the McCarthy witch hunts, and the Kennedy assassination, to name only a few-alcohol has acted as a catalyst. Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, DRINKING IN AMERICA unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation's tumultuous affair with alcohol.

Download or read book The Letters of John Cheever written by John Cheever and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 5 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cheever, novelist, short-story writer, and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a prolific writer of letters, sending as many as thirty in a week. These letters, culled from thousands written to famous writers and celebrities - including John Updike, Josephine Herbst, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Hope Lange and Philip Roth - his family, friends, and lovers, paint an intimate and surprising self-portrait that is as vivid as any character Cheever invented. Edited and annotated by his son Benjamin, Cheever's letters trace his development as a writer and as a man. They reveal him to be complex, flawed, and full of contradictions. On display are not just his ambitions and weaknesses, his alcoholism and his cloaked bisexuality, but also the evolution of his wit and style and, most of all, his love of life.

Download or read book John Cheever Complete Novels LOA 189 written by John Cheever and published by . This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Library of America presents this definitive collection of Cheever's novels: "The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, Falconer," and "Oh What a Paradise It Seems."

Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Download or read book Home Before Dark written by Susan Cheever and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Cheever uses previously unpublished letters, journals, and her own precious memories to create an insightful and candid tribute to her father, John Cheever.

Download or read book American Bloomsbury written by Susan Cheever and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.

Download or read book Cheever written by Blake Bailey and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cheever was one of the foremost chroniclers of post-war America, a peerless writer who on his death in 1982 left not only some of the best short stories of the twentieth century and a number of highly acclaimed novels, but also a private journal that runs to an astonishing four million words. Cheever’s was a soul in conflictm who hid his troubles - alcoholism, secret bisexuality - behind the screen of genial life in suburbia, but as John Updike came to remark: ‘Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams . . .’ Blake Bailey, writing with unprecedented access to the journal and other sources, has brought characteristic eloquence and sensitivity to his interpretation of Cheever’s life and work. This is a luminous biography that reveals – behind the disguises with which he faced the world – a troubled but strangely lovable man, and a writer of timeless fiction. ‘Stunningly detailed . . . Even more eloquent and resourceful than Bailey’s celebrated biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty . . . Bailey’s interweaving of Cheever’s fiction with his experience is a tour de force’ New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever written by Julia Quinn and published by Avon. This book was released on 2012-12-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2 March 1810 . . . Today, I fell in love. At the age of ten, Miranda Cheever showed no signs of Great Beauty. And even at ten, Miranda learned to accept the expectations society held for her—until the afternoon when Nigel Bevelstoke, the handsome and dashing Viscount Turner, solemnly kissed her hand and promised her that one day she would grow into herself, that one day she would be as beautiful as she already was smart. And even at ten, Miranda knew she would love him forever. But the years that followed were as cruel to Turner as they were kind to Miranda. She is as intriguing as the viscount boldly predicted on that memorable day—while he is a lonely, bitter man, crushed by a devastating loss. But Miranda has never forgotten the truth she set down on paper all those years earlier—and she will not allow the love that is her destiny to slip lightly through her fingers . . .

Download or read book John Cheever written by Scott Donaldson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A biography of great immediacy. . . . There are many sections of great poignancy, many funny things, many of electric intimacy and candor . . . there is spellbinding power, never more so than in describing Cheever’s death, pages that are both terrible and deeply moving; one is losing an old, beloved friend.” —James Salter, Los Angeles Times Book Review “John Cheever: A Biography is clearly an indispensable book. Donaldson moves gracefully from the personal to the literary. . . . Solidly researched and entirely readable, admiring of the writer and knowing about the man. Stuffed with fascinating anecdotes. It’s a gut-wrenching story. Donaldson tells it straight, without embellishment, and our attention never strays.” —Dan Cryer, Newsday “A coup of investigative reporting.” —Publishers Weekly “Both erudite and earthly. What emerges is a rich tapestry that gives the reader extraordinary insight into the workings of a master storyteller’s mind.” —Jean Graham, New York Daily News “John Cheever: A Biography by Scott Donaldson is as readable and ‘unputdownable’ as any thriller.” —T. Coraghessan Boyle “A revelation. What a triumph.” —Frederick Exley “Donaldson has set a high standard that other biographers will find difficult to equal.” —John Blades, Chicago Tribune

Download or read book Cheever written by Blake Bailey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s Cheever is a stunning example of the biographer’s art and a brilliant tribute to an essential author.