Customer Reviews

The John Cheever Audio Collection Low Price CD

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The John Cheever Audio Collection is an audiobook compendium of twelve unabridged stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author John Cheever. Skillfully performed by a diversity of celebrities, The John Cheever Audio Collection brings these modern tales to vivid life, and is a fantastic choice for public library collections or anyone who loves great storytelling while on the go. The short stories are "The Enormous Radio" (read by Meryl Streep), "The Five-Forty-Eight" (Edward Herrmann), "O City of Broken Dreams" (Blythe Danner), "Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor" (George Plimpton), "The Season of Divorce" (Edward Herrmann), "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" (Peter Gallagher), "The Sorrows of Gin" (Meryl Streep), "O Youth and Beauty!" (Peter Gallagher), "The Chaste Clarissa" (Blythe Danner), "The Jewels of the Cabots" (George Plimpton), "The Death of Justina" (John Cheever) and "The Swimmer" (John Cheever). 6 CDs, 6 1/2 hours.

As lovely as it gets. If you like Cheever, or if you simply enjoy the spoken word, these are deeply moving, haunting, lovely, touching and wondrous tales read aloud. Cheever and the readers invite us in, sit us down, and reveal for us a world which cannot but be enthralling. Beautiful from beginning to end.

As anyone reading this review would know, Cheever and John Updike defined "The New Yorker story" in the second half of the last century. Collected in this audio book are the cream of his crop--"The Enormous Radio," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Sorrows of Gin," "O Youth and Beauty!." "The Swimmer," among others--read by Meryl Streep, Edward Herrmann, Blythe Danner, George Plimpton, Peter Gallagher, and the author himself. Cheever's prose is fine crystal; hearing them read by professional actors lends them another dimension of radiance. For 6 and 1/2 hours at $15.00, it's excellent value for money. Listen, if you can bear the poignance of post-WW II, middle-class American dreams shattered.

Talk about performance art! You can scour every fringe festival from L.A. to Edinburgh, and while you might find some fascinating music or mime or puppetry, or innovative visual sleight-of-the-eye, I don't think any of these works of art will stay in your soul as long as an evocation of these preternatural (in the denotative and evaluative senses) as you will with these audio stories.

Great spoken Cheever. Of course Meryl Streep is wonderful, but the revelation on this CD is Blythe Danner. I've only heard her speak in movies, and she is, of course, astonishing beautiful. But here, only her voice is what you get, and her talent just blows you away.