Bullet Park

Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective-to murder Nailles's son. Here is the lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb-and to all the dubious normalcy it represents-delivered with unparalleled artistry and assurance.

John Cheever was born in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. He won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever. He also received the Howells Medal for Fiction and the National Medal for Literature. He died in 1982.