John Cheever Libros

These stories from the pen of American award-winning novelist John Cheever show the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the century.

The American writer, John Cheever, died in 1982, leaving behind 29 loose-leaf notebooks begun in the late Forties. They form the content of this book. His commitment to them was of central importance to his life - as a workbook and a retreat, an unhindered act of self-revelation where he could explore his ambiguities. 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.

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

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.

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

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer 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. Only John 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.

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

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer 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. Only John 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.

Jürgen Manthey, geboren 1932 in Forst (Lausitz). Er leitete die Literatur-Redaktion beim Hessischen Rundfunk und war viele Jahre Lektor im Rowohlt Verlag, wo er unter anderem die Reihe «das neue buch» herausgab. Von 1986 bis 1998 lehrte er als Professor für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Essen. Jürgen Manthey lebt als freier Autor und Literaturkritiker in Lübeck. John Cheever wurde 1912 als Sohn eines Kaufmanns in Quincy/Massachusetts geboren. Er besuchte die Thayer Academy in South Braintree. Er zog nach Boston, wo sein langwieriger Weg zum Schriftsteller begann - der Durchbruch gelang ihm mit seinen Short Stories. Für sein Gesamtwerk erhielt er 1979 den Pulitzer-Preis. John Cheever starb 1982.