"The Stories of John Cheever"

John Cheever is one of the most widely read and influential writers in contemporary American literature. We will read The Stories of John Cheever (Penguin Random House), a selection of his best narratives made by the author himself, which collects and distills a trajectory of almost three decades and, when published in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award.

In his narratives, dense and complex like novels, Cheever tells us about the Americans who live in the suburbs of New England or in the more residential neighborhoods of Manhattan. His gaze captures with great richness of nuance the marital problems, the aspirations of a middle class that lives beyond its means, the loneliness of the losers, but also the grace received by those who maintain faith and hope above all the miseries of life. As Cheever himself writes in his preface, "these stories sometimes seem to speak a lost world to us when the light from the river was still flowing in New York City, when you could still hear Benny Goodman's quartets in the newsstand corner, when almost everyone was wearing a hat on the street."

Session linked to the "Suburbia" exhibition.