"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Like most men my age, I’ve probably seen every episode of Seinfeld at least twenty-three times. But the fourteen-year-old MacEvoy certainly wouldn’t have known who John Cheever was when the episode entitled “The Cheever Letters” aired in 1992. Twenty years later I can say his short stories rank among my very favorites.

Anyway, here is a clip from that episode that riffs off of the then-fairly recent publication of the author’s very private, very forthright letters and journals. “The letters” make their appearance at about the one-minute mark...

Happy Holidays!

As usual, we mark the holiday with some short fiction appropriate for the occasion. Here is John Cheever's "Christmas Is A Sad Season For the Poor," (which is hardly a sad story, it should be pointed out.)

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

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