The Rumpus Interview with Sandra and Ben Doller
Sandra and Ben Doller talk about The Yesterday Project, a blind collaboration, and about what it means to savor each day when you have stage III melanoma.
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Posts Tagged: Cheever
Justifying the Template
Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? At the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen writes about “the New Yorker story” as a genre that emerged […]
...moreThe Swimmer in New York
“He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” Cheever wrote. I felt the same way. Inspired by Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Carolyn Kormann swam across Manhattan; she wrote about it for the New Yorker.
...moreThe Elusive Happy Ending
Happy endings are hard to come by in great literature, especially in stories that center on affluent American suburbs and their inhabitants. Over at the Atlantic, writer Ted Thompson looks at the hopeful and redemptive (but still believable) dramatic climax of John Cheever’s “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”: This is one of the things that’s […]
...moreLarry Fahey: The Last Book I Loved, Bullet Park
I should say at the outset that while Bullet Park is a good book, and in my opinion a great book, it is not a sound book. Cheever is rightly (though myopically) criticized for never having really solved the novel, and most of the five he wrote, including both Bullet Park and even the one […]
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