Word: cheever
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...substance. In a delivery disastrously aimed at the hip-intellectual readership, Susan Cheever’s “American Bloomsbury” reduces Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau to a group of 19th Century Bennifers and Brangelinas. Cheever aims to make “Bloomsbury” a colorful yet historically accurate piece of literary criticism, and her ostensible desire to liberate her subjects from the stuffy realm of academia and to recapture the vibrant intellectual community they created is certainly laudable. As Cheever assures us in a personal note...
Most people think of Updike and Cheever as the masters of postwar American suburbia. Add Yates to the master list. His greatest novel is a bitterly funny account of lethal disappointment in the Connecticut suburbs in 1955. That may sound like a common enough predicament, but Yates gives it devastating force...
...rejected, as were a few other attempts. But the summer after Updike’s graduation, preparing to study drawing at Oxford on a Knox fellowship in the fall, he wrote a short story in response to a piece by John Cheever that he had read. The New Yorker accepted it and, a bit later, bought a slightly revised version of his ex-basketball-player story, now titled “Ace in the Hole...
...hatchets and skeletons and whatever else would look prettier covered by a manicured lawn or a bluestone patio or a Har-Tru tennis court. Of course, Lee isn't the first to point out that the suburbs hide uncharted depths of misery and discontentment--Updike, Rick Moody and John Cheever, among many others, have been here before. But Lee's portrait feels somehow more up-to-date than anything else out there, complete with postboom McMansions that take up all but a fringe of their .47-acre lots. Never mind that Jerry, a landscaping contractor, thinks in better prose than...
...magazine?s roster of contributors was as distinguished as any in English-language journalism. Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, John Updike, Irwin Shaw, William Styron, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and such cartoonists as Dedini, Barsotti, Kliban: they could be the front table at a New Yorker banquet. Skeptics suspected that Hefner got the second-best from the best, or work the New Yorker had rejected, and that Playboy settled for B material from the A team in order to appropriate their literary celebrity. Some folks in publishing had a dismissive term for Playboy fiction: ?shit from names...