Uncollecting Cheever: The Family of John Cheever vs. Academy Chicago Publishers
Brit Lit Blogs (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
It took me a few weeks to read Blake Bailey’s exhaustive and exhausting (770 pages tip to tail) biography of John Cheever. Living with Cheever even for a month was no picnic: as his wife or children would tell you. He was a depressive, conflicted alcoholic, notably “enchained within the prison of self” even for a writer: when his children read some of the thousands of pages of his...
Poor Mojo Newswire (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories - Review - NYTimes.com Here is a sample, but please read the whole thing. The bits about how his editor mangled (or improved) his work are shocking. Fun fact: Did you know that once during an alcohol-fueled rage Carver opened his wife's jugular with a broken wine bottle? And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
"In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O'Connor's] collection 'The Complete Stories' was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest's 60-year history." The competition was formidable: collected stories of John Cheever, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as well as Ellison's Invisible Man and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow....
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
What, apart from being dead and, in their different ways, remarkable, do the following authors have in common: Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Janet Frame, Allen Ginsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, Yukio Mishima, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Hunter S Thompson, John Updike, Evelyn Waugh... and Vladimir Nabokov?...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
d r i f t g l a s s (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
Like Neddy Merrill (the protagonist of John Cheever's surrealistic story "The Swimmer" ) paddling boozily though the chain of public and private pools that run the length of his affluent suburban neighborhood, oblivious to the the passage of years, tragedies and the growing hostility of his surroundings as he moves inexorably towards the ruins of his abandoned home, the bizarrely ubiquitous...
Isak (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
The new issue of The Collagist is up and out, and with it comes a vibrant collection of poems, stories, novel excerpts, nonfiction, and book reviews. A new section of the magazine appears this month: Classic Reprint, which features fiction by John Cheever with an introductory column by his son, Benjamin H. Cheever. For my video book review this month, I took on Lori Ostlund's collection of stories,...
Matt Bell (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
The fourth issue of The Collagist is now live! In Issue Four, we've got fiction from Cooper Renner , Chad Benson , Kate Petersen , and Lance Olsen (with art by Andi Olsen) , as well as novel excerpts from Xiaoda Xiao and Ornela Vorpsi . You'll also find poetry from Arlene Ang , Stephen Dobyns , Judy Huddleston , and Keith Taylor , plus non-fiction from Brian Oliu and Melissa Pritchard . In book reviews,...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Adam Mars-Jones finds much to relish in Blake Bailey's life of John Cheever – a writer who had an immense capacity for joy but none for happiness Blake Bailey seems to specialise in writing the lives of self-destructive American writers – first Richard Yates , now John Cheever. He may have a full biographical career ahead of him. Cheever breaks the general pattern by virtue of a late recovery...
georgiasam (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
John Cheever to Allan Garganus: ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’
Guide to Literary Agents (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Agent Interview by contributor Ricki Schultz . "Agent Advice" is a series of quick interviews with literary and script agents who talk with Guide to Literary Agents about their thoughts on writing, publishing, and just about anything else. This installment features Dan Conaway of Writers House . Dan has been Executive Editor at Putnam, Executive Editor at HarperCollins, Director of Literary...
Bertram's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
One of the guest stops on my Daughter Am I blog tour is the Second Wind Publishing Blog. I talk about a fan letter (well, fan email) I received, and cite a quote by John Cheever, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.” Many writers don’t consider readers [...]
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
Geoff Dyer on the publication of a biography John Cheever as well as reissues of his collected stories and journals, which contain the troubled author's best writing Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's Journals via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels...
London Review of Books (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Just as the position of women was changing in America, so, too, the prejudice against homosexuals was fading. While Cheever was threatened by the former, it was clear that the latter would have a profound effect on him once he left his own house in Ossining and took a look at the world. In 1973, when he began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had T.C. Boyle, Ron Hansen and Allan Gurganus...
Salon.com (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
We like to think of "good parenting" as a set of rules built in common sense and human decency, the kind of thing that should be universal, rather than subject to fashion or trends. Yet scratch the surface and all of us know that is manifestly false. The single biggest thing upper-middle-class suburban parents of "Mad Men" and John Cheever stories (with their highballs, drunk driving...
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