"A major literary event. Here are the collected stories of one of America's greatest writers: the best of the matchlessly brilliant short fiction that has, with the Wapshot books, Bullet Park, and Falconer, secured John Cheever's preeminent place in contemporary literature. Here are 61 magnificent stories, bringing together everything from five earlier collections (most out of print) - The Enormous Radio; The Housebreaker of Shady Hill; Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel; The Brigadier and the Golf Widow; and The World of Apples - as well as four major stories that have never been published in book form. The stories range from the gripping and profound "Goodbye, My Brother," in which two brothers, on a seaside vacation with their wives and children, enact a contest of desire and belief as ancient as Cain and Abel's, through the long list of stories that, one after another, have confirmed Cheever's importance and his genius - "O City of Broken Dreams," "The Sutton Place Story," "Torch Song," "The Pot of Gold," "The Season of Divorce," "The Chaste Clarissa," "The Cure," "The Country Husband," "The Geometry of Love," "The Swimmer," and "The Jewels of the Cabots.

" As Cheever writes in his preface: "These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.

" Here are the wonderful stories in which, for more than thirty years, John Cheever has celebrated - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

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