John Updike
1) Rabbit, run
Author
Series
Rabbit Angstrom volume 01
Language
English
Description
Tired of the responsibility of married life, Harry Angstrom leaves his wife and home.
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Series
Rabbit Angstrom volume 04
Language
English
Formats
Description
Ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, now living in a Florida condominium, faces middle age, heart trouble, and a wife who has suddenly gone to work.
3) Villages
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English
Description
This novel is a bildungsroman describing the education, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education (at M.I.T.) and his successful software company take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskell's Crossing, in eastern Massachusettes, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life's journey, the communal humanity of villages, chiefly embodied in their female citizens, seeks to...
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English
Description
Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie return to the old Rhode Island seaside town where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne. Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish...
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Series
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English
Description
In a small New England town in the late 1960s, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard, a sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, content but always ripe for adventure, our three wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub was the...
6) Rabbit redux
Author
Series
Rabbit Angstrom volume 02
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1969, the times are changing in America. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife leaves him, and suddenly, into his confused life comes Jill, a runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail.
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English
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Description
Tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father's slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair...
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English
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Description
John Updike's seventeenth novel begins in 1910, and traces God's relation to four generations of an American family, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith, and becomes an encyclopedia salesman and a motion-picture addict. The remainder of Clarence's family moves to the small town of Basingstoke, Delaware, where his cautious son, Teddy, becomes a mailman. Faithless himself, Teddy marries...
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English
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The time is 1962, and the place is a fiefdom of Camelot called Greenwood, Connecticut. Jerry Conant and Sally Mathias are in love and want to get married, though they already are married to others. A diadem of five symmetrical chapters describes the course of their affair as it flickers off and on, and as their spouses react, in a tentative late-summer atmosphere of almost-last chances. For this is, as Jerry observes, “the twilight of the old morality,...
13) The coup
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English
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Updike presents the story of a fictitious modern African state called Kush, narrated tongue-in-cheek by Kush's exiled president, Colonel Felix Ellellou.
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English
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least...
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least...
Author
Language
English
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Description
The confessions of a clergyman. In this antic riff on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style...
16) Brazil
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English
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Description
John Updike's sixteenth novel takes place in a stylized Brazil where almost anything is possible, if you are young and in love. Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach; their flight into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them; his mother curses...
17) The centaur
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English
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This story retells the Greek myth of the centaur, Chiron, who sacrifices his immortality for Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes Olinger High School; Chiron teaches general science; and, Prometheus is his 15-year-old son. Set in 1947 Pennsylvania.
18) Bech is back
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English
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In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel, where she falls in love with the land, and to Scotland, where he does. And—sweating...
19) Couples
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English
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Description
Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read -- and remembered -- for a long time to come.--