Written by John Cheever - Audio book performed by John Cheever, Meryl Streep, George Plimpton, Blythe Danner, Peter Gallagher and Edward Herrmann - Unabridged Stories - Fiction - COMPACT DISCS

Publisher, Harper / Caedmon Audio (June 2003)

Listen to an audio clip NOTE: You will need RealPlayer Basic to listen. It's FREE !

Here are twelve magnificent stories in which John Cheever celebrates -- with unequaled grace and tenderness -- the deepest feelings we have.

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 stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.'

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. 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 The Stories of John Cheever 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 from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Benjamin Cheever, who narrates John Cheever's preface, is the author of The Plagiarist, The Parisian and Famous after Death.

The Enormous Radio read by Meryl Streep
The Five-Forty-Eight read by Edward Herrmann
O City of Broken Dreams read by Blythe Danner
Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor read by George Plimpton
The Season of Divorce read by Edward Herrmann
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow read by Peter Gallagher
The Sorrows of Gin read by Meryl Streep
O Youth and Beauty! read by Peter Gallagher
The Chaste Clarissa read by Blythe Danner
The Jewels of the Cabots read by George Plimpton
The Death of Justina read by John Cheever
The Swimmer read by John Cheever

About the Author: John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.