Oh What a Paradise It Seems

By John Cheever

From one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers, this “luminous ephiphany of life ... [is] a charming fable of old age, nostalgia, and loss” (The Washington Post Book World).

Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever's final novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes.

But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful.

"This is perfect Cheever—it is perfect." —The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307759986

John Cheever

John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.