Oh What a Paradise It Seems

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"John Cheever is an enchanted realist, and his voice, in his luminous short stories and in incomparable novels like Bullet Park and Falconer, is as rich and distinctive as any of the leading voices of postwar American literature." —Philip Roth

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

"A luminous epiphany of life.... A charming fable of old age, nostalgia, and loss...engaging and complex ... vivid and alive." —The Washington Post Book World

"Beautiful ... graceful ... winning ... both upbeat and true to life.... Oh, what a literary paradise is John Cheever!" —San Francisco Chronicle

"Filled with the master's wonderful word magic.... There simply isn't another writer like him ... a delight." —Chicago TribuneJohn Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 The Stories of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.