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  • Published: 27 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473572164
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

A Vision of the World

Selected Short Stories




The first authorised selected collection of the twentieth-century’s most influential short story writer.

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

  • Published: 27 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473572164
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

John Cheever

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and he went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.

Also by John Cheever

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Praise for A Vision of the World

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do… I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like, to be able to have that felicity of language

Elizabeth Strout

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place — our time and place—John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

Washington Post

John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his luminous short stories…is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature

Philip Roth

Cheever shows a sublime psychological understanding of all that goes unsaid – whatever’s not mentioned between couples is fully present and felt

A M Homes

Ultimately, it is the stories which make the case for Cheever as a great American writer, one who continues to deserve our attention and admiration

Jay McInerney

John Cheever has a voice filled with irony and comedy and pain that, on some level, I’m always seeking to emulate

Matthew Weiner, Creator of Mad Men

Profound and daring...some of the most wonderful stories any American has written

Boston Globe

[Cheever's] magical capacity for marrying the quotidian with the surreal, so often soars. The new volume feels capacious, stuffed as it is with wonders

Adam Begley, Sunday Times

One of the great writers of the previous century

John Self, The Times

Going back to these stories decades after first reading them, I remember what brought me to them in my youth. I loved them because of their relationship to the truth, which is always lurking, waiting to break through the surface of the characters' lives... the way Cheever moved on the page, how he could shift and shift again from paragraph to paragraph, how he could swoop from the mundane to the tragic, which just a comma in between

Anne Enright, Times Literary Supplement

Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room

Anne Enright

[Cheever's] magical capacity for marrying the quotidian with the surreal, so often soars. The new volume feels capacious, stuffed as it is with wonders

Sunday Times

One of the great writers of the previous century

John Self, The Times

As stories go, as compellingly readable narratives of a certain sort of people in a certain time and place - our time and place-John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best

Washington Post

Cheever shows a sublime psychological understanding of all that goes unsaid - whatever's not mentioned between couples is fully present and felt

A M Homes

John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his luminous short stories...is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature

Philip Roth

Profound and daring...some of the most wonderful stories any American has written

Boston Globe

There was a time in my life when I thought I would have to find a support group for people who loved Cheever as much as I do... I would write out his sentences by hand at times to see what does that feel like, to be able to have that felicity of language

Elizabeth Strout