The Brigadier and the Golf Widow

This new collection of sixteen stories reveals John Cheever's expertness employed with greater power to even more impressive effect than heretofore. No one writing in America today can approach Cheever in the province he has made his own. His stance can be imitated, his inflection mimicked, but his vision and purpose are uniquely his, and so is the professional wizardry which serves them. Some of the settings here - suburbia, Cape Cod, New York City, Italy - will be familiar to readers of his earlier books. So, too, will be certain of the predicaments from which the people of these stories hope to run away or to which they submit, dry-eyed. Yet, however recognizable the physical and emotional terrain, each story here is singular indeed, and new.