The John Cheever Audio Collection (1000 Books to Read)

Oh dear, I had so much adrenaline still in my system (see "circling the eddy" post) that I was up until 1 am this morning listening to this audio collection by John Cheever. I must have pressed the send button without writing what I thought. 

He is an amazing writer and writes about people and their problems in such a beautiful way. I especially loved this because of all the narrators: Streep, Plimpton, Herrmann (RIP), Blythe Danner, and the actual author. I love it. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

The sixty-one stories (I read a shorter version than Mustich recommends) gathered here were written in the three decades after the end of World War II; most were originally published in The New Yorker, then collected in slim volumes that had been largely forgotten by the time this fat, retrospective tome was issued to popular success and critical acclaim in 1978. While the nearly seven-hundred-page Stories of John Cheever delivers much more than the sum of its parts, it must also be proclaimed—with pleasure and admiration—that those parts remain more gloriously particular than its author’s enduring reputation as the “Chekhov of suburbia” implies. And although Cheever’s people seldom prove themselves up to the task of redemption, they seldom lose hope of its embrace; like nymphs pursued by insatiable divinities, these recognizable modern Americans survive—and perhaps even triumph—through their transformation by Cheever’s hands into figures of warning, yearning, and human imperfection.