Ossining Review of Books

My five favorite books set in and around Westchester

by Benjamin Cheever

Ben Cheever, who grew up in Ossining and lives in Pleasantville, is a novelist, essayist and editor of The Letters of John Cheever, published after his father's death in 1982. His reading recommendations:

  1. John Cheever's Bullet Park. (Forgive me for that. But blood is sometimes thicker than water. It may even be thicker than ink.)
  2. Sol Stein's The Magician. Set right in Ossining, real as life, but a lot more dramatic.
  3. Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. So sad as to be almost funny, and beautifully written. The pleasure of this book lead me to Blake Bailey's biography of the novel's author.
  4. Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates.
  5. Carl Oeschner's Ossining, N.Y. An Informal Bicentennial History. So basic, so simple as to almost be a children's book, this is nevertheless a treat to read, as vital as it is brief.

If you've remarked that I haven't included my mother's own history of Briarcliff and Scarborough, (The Changing Landscape by Mary Cheever) also note that I also failed to list any of my four novels, all of which are based in the county. (The most recent, The Good Nanny, is set in Scarborough).