Cheever Reading/Listening Lists

March 27, 1964

Here are the stories by John Cheever we will be reading  for the March meeting of Classics Revisited:

"The Enormous Radio"
"The Swimmer"
"The Country Husband"
"The Sorrows of Gin"
"The Housebreaker of Shady Hill"
"The Brigadier and the Golf Widow"
"The Reunion"

For recordings of Cheever short stories, check this out:
Each month the New Yorker invites one of its regular fiction contributors to choose a short story from the magazine's archives, read it aloud, and then discuss it with fiction editor Deborah Triesman. Two Cheever short stories have been featured so far, and with the click of a button you can listen to both of them at the New Yorker website.

On this page you'll find Robert Ford reading "The Reunion,"  and on this one, Anne Enright reads "The Swimmer." The discussions following the reading are always most insightful and interesting.

Resources from Library of America

You've seen those handsome Library of America books around and about--now have a look at the LOA website, where you'll find more treasure for the taking.

Library of America has begun offering a free "Story of the Week" feature: They select a short piece from one of their published volumes and present it on their website. You can read it there, or, by supplying your email address, have it sent to you automatically every week. As I write this, the current selection is Irvin S. Cobb's "Cobb Fights it Over Again" from At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.

You can also listen to recorded readings from some of the great works LOA has published. Here you can listen to a program of poetry reading hosted by Garrison Keillor. It is the recording of a live event sponsored by LOA to celebrate the publication of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, featuring such readers as Harold Bloom, Robert Pinsky, X. J. Kennedy, James Merrill, Roy Blount, and N. Scott Momaday. You can also subscribe to LOA as a free podcast and receive more programs as they are released.

Lovers of classics must be grateful, first and foremost, to the Library of America for offering us, as its motto proclaims, "America's best and most significant writing in durable and authoritative editions" to purchase, but now also for these gifts of wonderful literature we can enjoy with very little trouble and for free.