These stories create a bright and enchanted New York City that teems with buried secrets behind apartment doors and in quiet alleys. The people that populate this world—bored housewives, ambitious career-men, tired nannies—are daringly real, familiar in their tragedies petty and profound, and in their earnest desire for love and happiness. In prose that is elegant and powerful, John Cheever captures all the angst, innocence, jealousy, and good intentions that define the American psyche.