Shangri-La It may be used in this context alongside other mythical and famous examples of somewhat similar metaphors such as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and The Holy Grail. Shangri-La Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia – a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. In the novel, the people who live at Shangri-La
Oh What a Paradise It Seems themes, including love, lust, life in suburbia, and a sense of displacement. Writing in the "New York Times", John Leonard called the novella "perfect Cheever; it is perfect, period." John Updike, a friend of Cheever, preferred it to Cheever's novel "Falconer", and remarked on the theme of ice skating, which he called his "Wordsworthian hike" and his "connection with elemental purity and the awesome depths above and below". Oh What a Paradise It Seems Oh What a Paradise It Seems is a 1982 novella by John Cheever. It is Cheever's last work of fiction, published shortly before his death from