Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey's groundbreaking new
biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one
volume for the first time. In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the
failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also
the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly and often grotesquely and
hilariously cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of
former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The
Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel
The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the
dark suburban drama Bullet Park (a magnificent work of fiction, John
Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel
Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular
acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems.
A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the
largest edition of Cheever's stories ever.
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