John Cheever

"The Journals of John Cheever" edited by Robert Gottlieb (Vintage) "Good Friday. I neither fast nor make any observations of this somber time. I roam from the post office to the church, unsober. The central altar is dark, but on the left the priest has...

"The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III" edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador) "Have you found any professional criticism of your work illuminating or helpful? Edmund Wilson, for example?" asks Julian Jebb, the guy sent by the Paris Review to interview...

By Ed Park Looking backward, briefly: It went unremarked that 2007 was the year when the weirdness of time dilation hit Sgt. William Mandella. Battling the far-flung Taurans meant interstellar travel via "collapsars" (black holes); two years of army...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which forms the basis for the new David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt, originally appeared in Collier's on May 27, 1922 (earlier the story had been rejected by Metropolitan), and was then...

"I shall not, for example, try to evoke a rhetorical chiaroscuro of an intellect suspended in the twilight of the last divine monarchy, exposed to the philosophies of anarchy, communism and socialism, stricken by a loss of free speech; an intelligence...

WOMEN of the world rejoice: This is not the season of the skimpy swimsuit. Michael Kors put full-cut bikinis on the runway two years ago, and Abaeté designer Laura Poretzky has been making pinup-style suits since 2004. But the retro swimwear trend really...

Blake Bailey does not make it easy for the casual reader of his gargantuan John Cheever biography. But those who persevere will be rewarded with a compelling portrait of a complicated and tortured author, some of whose stories are among the best ever...

Since Joyce Carol Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall, came out in 1964, she has averaged two books a year. Many of them are novels, though she's also written plays, poetry, children's books, literary criticism, and a highly regarded sports book, On...

This morning's Variety has what I believe to be one of the more exhaustive discussions of "Mad Men" I've seen, and the guy doing the discussing is none other than creator Matthew Weiner. I could send you to Variety,......

Until the rise of the suburbs after the Second World War, you could pretty much divide American authors of fiction into country writers and city writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner are in the former category; Henry...

Friday October 17, 1997      More aptly named than it's prepared to acknowledge, "The Ice Storm's" glacial saga of New England WASPs behaving badly is as frigid as its name. Burdened with a story of some of the world's least interesting people going...

I am now the proud owner of an American Library in Paris card, which cost about $125 for a year's subscription. When you walk through the front door on rue du General Camou, in the 7th arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower, you may as well be at a public...