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