John Updike

A dazzling collection of “remarkably elegant essays” (Newsday) on art—and the companion volume to the celebrated Just Looking and Still Looking—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. In this book, readers are treated to a collection in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” (The New York Times Book Review). Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.

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 buckets! thinking big! minting miracles!—he writes an ingeniously tawdry bestseller. Bech’s aesthetic and moral embarrassments reveal acid truths about both his trade and our times.

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 them, her father harries them with hirelings, and neither lover is absolutely faithful. Yet Tristao and Isabel hold to the faith that each is the other's fate for life, as they pass - in Shakespeare's phrase - "through nature to eternity. " Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-Sixties to the late Eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence.

Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less did they expect him to acquire four wives... SUMMARY: Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less did they expect him to acquire four wives!

*“A drop of truth, of lived experienced, glistens in each.”* This is how John Updike modestly described his nonfiction pieces, of which *Due Considerations* is perhaps his most varied, stylish, and personal collection. Here Updike reflects on such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Don DeLillo, A. S. Byatt, Colson Whitehead, and ** Margaret Atwood. He visits China, goes to art exhibitions, provides a whimsical and insightful list of “Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido,” and shares his thoughts on the fall of the Twin Towers, which he witnessed from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn. John Updike was always more than simply one of America’s most acclaimed novelists; he was also, as the *Los Angeles Times* noted in appraising this volume, ** “one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced.” ** ### From Publishers Weekly *Starred Review.* Updike's latest is an endlessly welcoming series of essays—every nonfiction piece he has published in the past eight years—offering Updike's characteristically reasoned perspective on a familiar range of subjects, including Old Masters artwork, literary biography and the history of the *New Yorker*. The heart of the book is Updike's literary criticism, characterized by a wide lens that summarizes a good portion of an author's output: this collection is invaluable for Updike's generous assessments of contemporaries such as Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk and Alan Hollinghurst. Updike is still at his most vibrant when sexual politics are close at hand, and his summary undressing of David Allyn's history of the sexual revolution, *Make Love, Not War,* is brilliant in its mingling of personal and social history. As a collection, this is also notable for its high volume of occasional writing: book introductions, short speeches and responses to magazine requests, no matter how ephemeral, are all gathered to overwhelming effect. It is hard to complain about too much of a good thing in this addition to the formidable Updike collection. 25 illus. *(Oct. 29)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Booklist Updike is one of the few remaining true men of letters, the kind of writer who is equally at home in almost all forms and formats. Following two other staggeringly incisive, broad-ranging collections of his nonfiction prose, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999), his latest such compilation is, like its predecessors, an elegant leviathan. Books, primarily, are the raison d'etre for these pieces; most are reviews, and most were previously published in Updike's favorite home-away-from-home, the New Yorker. As a critic, Updike has long demonstrated honesty, intelligence, judiciousness, open-mindedness, and never an ounce of superciliousness. For instance, what he writes about Margaret Atwood here is particularly perceptive (especially in his comparison of her to fellow Canadian Alice Munro), and his commentary on Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient may come as a surprise: that the movie version "elucidates the novel and was the clearer, more unified work." Other essays gathered here are of a more personal nature—that is, not geared to book reviewing or to introducing new editions of books. These essays range topically from art and architecture to the author's estimation of his own personal predilections. A lush book to be savored over a long period of time. Hooper, Brad ### From Publishers Weekly *Starred Review.* Updike's latest is an endlessly welcoming series of essays—every nonfiction piece he has published in the past eight years—offering Updike's characteristically reasoned perspective on a familiar range of subjects, including Old Masters artwork, literary biography and the history of the *New Yorker*. The heart of the book is Updike's literary criticism, characterized by a wide lens that summarizes a good portion of an author's output: this collection is invaluable for Updike's generous assessments of contemporaries such as Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk and Alan Hollinghurst. Updike is still at his most vibrant when sexual politics are close at hand, and his summary undressing of David Allyn's history of the sexual revolution, *Make Love, Not War,* is brilliant in its mingling of personal and social history. As a collection, this is also notable for its high volume of occasional writing: book introductions, short speeches and responses to magazine requests, no matter how ephemeral, are all gathered to overwhelming effect. It is hard to complain about too much of a good thing in this addition to the formidable Updike collection. 25 illus. *(Oct. 29)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Booklist Updike is one of the few remaining true men of letters, the kind of writer who is equally at home in almost all forms and formats. Following two other staggeringly incisive, broad-ranging collections of his nonfiction prose, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999), his latest such compilation is, like its predecessors, an elegant leviathan. Books, primarily, are the raison d'etre for these pieces; most are reviews, and most were previously published in Updike's favorite home-away-from-home, the New Yorker. As a critic, Updike has long demonstrated honesty, intelligence, judiciousness, open-mindedness, and never an ounce of superciliousness. For instance, what he writes about Margaret Atwood here is particularly perceptive (especially in his comparison of her to fellow Canadian Alice Munro), and his commentary on Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient may come as a surprise: that the movie version "elucidates the novel and was the clearer, more unified work." Other essays gathered here are of a more personal nature—that is, not geared to book reviewing or to introducing new editions of books. These essays range topically from art and architecture to the author's estimation of his own personal predilections. A lush book to be savored over a long period of time. Hooper, Brad

One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series—delivers the intimate, generous, insightful, and beautifully written collection he was compiling when he died. This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic. It concludes with a moving meditation on a modern world robbed of imagination—a world without religion, without art—and on the difficulties of faith in a disbelieving age. In between are previously uncollected stories and poems, a pageant of scenes from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, five late “golf dreams,” and several of Updike's commentaries on his own work. At the heart of the book are his matchless reviews—of John Cheever, Ann Patchett, Toni Morrison, William Maxwell, John le Carré, and essays on Aimee Semple McPherson, Max Factor, and Albert Einstein, among others. Also included are two decades of art criticism—on Chardin, El Greco, Blake, Turner, Van Gogh, Max Ernest, and more. Updike’s criticism is gossip of the highest order, delivered in an intimate and generous voice.

In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels.

Sally is big, blonde and pampered. She’s married to Richard. But she loves Jerry. Jerry loves Sally in return, but he’s also still in love with his wife Ruth. Who’s been sleeping with Richard ... As a hot, feverish summer of snatched weekends, secret phone calls and illicit lovemaking on the beach comes to a head, it turns out everyone knows more than they’ve been letting on. And that no one knows quite when to stop.

<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Ever since he made his two-pronged prose debut in 1959 with <em>The Poorhouse Fair</em> and <em>The Same Door</em>, John Updike has delivered approximately one work of fiction per year. Few modern novelists have approached this level of productivity, which suggests a kind of late-Victorian stamina and linguistic lust for life. Even fewer have simultaneously churned out, as Updike has, a constant stream of reviews, essays, reminiscences, and occasional pieces. His custom is to collect this abundance every decade or so, disguising the substantial nature of these volumes with throwaway titles like <em>Picked-Up Pieces</em> and <em>Odd Jobs</em>. The latest such cornucopia is <em>More Matter</em>--and, like its predecessors, this 928-page behemoth reminds us that Updike is among our most discerning and omnivorous critics.</p><p>His title, this time, echoes Queen Gertrude's editorial advice to Polonius: "More matter, with less art." Only reluctantly does Updike assent to our age's appetite for facts, facts, and more facts, with fiction relegated to a kind of imaginative finger bowl: </p><blockquote><p>Human curiosity, the abettor and stimulant of the fiction surge between Robinson Crusoe's adventures and Constance Chatterley's, has become ever more literal-minded and impatient with the proxies of the imagination. Present taste runs to the down-home divulgences of the talk show--psychotherapeutic confession turned into public circus--and to investigative journalism that, like so many heat-seeking missiles, seeks out the intimate truths, the very genitals, of Presidents and princesses.</p></blockquote><p>Strong stuff, that last line, especially from the man whom Nicholson Baker called "the first novelist to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphoric prose."</p><p>But if Updike's critical investigations tend to stay above the belt, they remain as wide-ranging and elegant as ever. In <em>More Matter</em>, he takes on Herman Melville and Mickey Mouse, Abraham Lincoln and the male body--not to mention the cream of modern cosmology. His formulations on almost any subject seem ripe for the commonplace book. Here he is on sexual appetite: "Lust, which begins in a glance of the eye, is a searching, and its consummation, step by step, a knowing." On the short story: "The inner spaces that a good short story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion." On the austerity of biblical narrative: "The original Gospels evince a flinty terseness, a refusal, or inability, to provide the close focus and cinematic highlighting that the modern mind expects." And finally, on the raw intimacies of John Cheever's published journals: </p><blockquote><p>His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the deep gulf between outward appearance and inward condition; they present, with an almost unbearable fullness, a post-Adamic man, an unreconciled bundle of cravings and complaints, whose consolations--the glory of the sky, the company of his young sons--have the ring of hollow cheer in the vastness of his dissatisfaction. Comparatively, the journals of Kierkegaard and Emerson are complacent and academic.</p></blockquote><p>These sentences neatly unite the author's literary and theological concerns--although the latter topic takes something of a back seat in <em>More Matter</em>--and remind us of the compound pleasures of his prose. In his preface, Updike refers to the book as "my fifth such collection and--dare we hope?--my last." We very much hope not. <em>--James Marcus</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Many American writers this century have been called brilliant and accomplished, but Updike is the real thing, as this huge collection of personal essays, social commentary, book reviews, introductions, interviews and occasional pieces amply attests. It is astonishing that a volume of nearly 200 piecesAmost written for such intellectual venues as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, but some penned for the mass audiences of Newsweek and USAir MagazineArepresents only eight years' work at a time when Updike was producing roughly a novel every two years. But perhaps even more surprising is his range, depth and originality. Segueing freely from the latest biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the nature of evil to cars, cartoons and burglar alarms, these essays are bursting with sentiments and observations that defy ideology or neat categorization. Just when you think Updike is a cultural conservative (he deems young men's haircuts "hostile," mocks Borges and debates the serial comma), he defends Jacques Derrida (against Camille Paglia, no less). Just when you think he is refined and cautious (shaving the metaphysical line between "freedom" and "equality"), he turns irreverent (referring to Helen Keller jokes and "God in a lilac shortie nightgown" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Some pieces are prophetic, such as his comments in 1996 on our fascination with the Titanic disaster. Unlike most journalism, Updike's occasional writing is so exquisite as to repay multiple readings. And not least among the many virtues of this book, the 50th of his career, is its sheer fact of convenient assembly. BOMC alternate selection. (Sept.) <br />Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

### From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In Free, the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a well-bred stick offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe, the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of Personal Archaeology, who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in The Road Home, who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From Kinderszenen, which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to Varieties of Religious Experience, in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious. *(June)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From School Library Journal Starred Review. In the title story of this miraculous final collection, the aging narrator admits, "I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, no matter how infrequently I check on its condition." Most of these stories evoke Updike's Olinger and environs at least in passing, nicely complementing the 2003 retrospective collection *The Early Stories, 1953–1975* , with its tantalizing hints of autobiography. In "Personal Archaeology," a restless retiree uncovers several distinct strata of rusty junk on his small piece of suburban land and realizes that his own lost golf balls will form yet another such layer. In "The Full Glass," an elderly man takes pride in his efficient bedroom routines, such as filling a glass with water before opening the pill bottles. In "Free," a recent widower starts to miss the wife from whom he had longed to escape. A few of the stories take place at high school reunions, where conversations resume midstream after 50 years. Like his ancient characters, Updike rambles on at times, but no one will complain. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, *LJ* 2/1/09.]—Edward B. St John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In Free, the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a well-bred stick offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe, the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of Personal Archaeology, who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in The Road Home, who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From Kinderszenen, which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to Varieties of Religious Experience, in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious. *(June)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From School Library Journal Starred Review. In the title story of this miraculous final collection, the aging narrator admits, "I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, no matter how infrequently I check on its condition." Most of these stories evoke Updike's Olinger and environs at least in passing, nicely complementing the 2003 retrospective collection *The Early Stories, 1953–1975* , with its tantalizing hints of autobiography. In "Personal Archaeology," a restless retiree uncovers several distinct strata of rusty junk on his small piece of suburban land and realizes that his own lost golf balls will form yet another such layer. In "The Full Glass," an elderly man takes pride in his efficient bedroom routines, such as filling a glass with water before opening the pill bottles. In "Free," a recent widower starts to miss the wife from whom he had longed to escape. A few of the stories take place at high school reunions, where conversations resume midstream after 50 years. Like his ancient characters, Updike rambles on at times, but no one will complain. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, *LJ* 2/1/09.]—Edward B. St John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”

The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike’s first novel, was written in 1957 and published in January of 1959. For this, its sixth printing, the author has appended an introduction discussing the book’s inspiration, its aesthetic sources and models in classics of science fiction, and the way in which its future (projected to be about 1977) compares with the present. The Poorhouse Fair was hailed at the time of its publication as “a rare and beautiful achievement” and “a work of intellectual imagination and great charity.” Though its future has degenerated into our present, and Updike’s later work is better known, such critics as Henry Bech have hailed this little novel as, still, “surely his masterpiece.”

### Amazon.com Review It's 1989, and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom feels anything but restful. In fact he's frozen, incapacitated by his fear of death--and in the final year of the Reagan era, he's right to be afraid. His 55-year-old body, swollen with beer and munchies and racked with chest pains, wears its bulk "like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one." He suspects that his son Nelson, who's recently taken over the family car dealership, is embezzling money to support a cocaine habit. Indeed, from Rabbit's vantage point--which alternates between a winter condo in Florida and the ancestral digs in Pennsylvania, not to mention a detour to an intensive care unit--decay is overtaking the entire world. The budget deficit is destroying America, his accountant is dying of AIDS, and a terrorist bomb has just destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. This last incident, with its rapid transit from life to death, hits Rabbit particularly hard: > Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bring the clinking drinks caddy... and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. Marching through the decades, John Updike's first three Rabbit novels-- *Rabbit, Run* (1960), *Rabbit Redux* (1971), and *Rabbit Is Rich* (1981)--dissect middle-class America in all its dysfunctional glory. *Rabbit at Rest* (1990), the final installment and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, continues this brilliant dissection. Yet it also develops Rabbit's character more fully as he grapples with an uncertain future and the consequences of his past. At one point, for example, he's taken his granddaughter Judy for a sailing expedition when his first heart attack strikes. Rabbit gamely navigates the tiny craft to shore--and then, lying on the beach, feels a paradoxical relief at having both saved his beloved Judy and meeting his own death. (He doesn't, not yet.) Meanwhile, this all-American dad feels responsible for his son's full-blown drug addiction but incapable of helping him. (Ironically, it's Rabbit's wife Janice, the "poor dumb mutt," who marches Nelson into rehab.) His misplaced sense of responsibility--plus his crude sexual urges and racial slurs--can make Rabbit seems less than lovable. Still, there's something utterly heroic about his character. When the end comes, after all, it's the Angstrom family that refuses to accept the reality of Rabbit's mortality. Only Updike's irreplaceable mouthpiece rises to the occasion, delivering a stoical, one-word valediction: "Enough." *\--Rob McDonald* ### From Publishers Weekly Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, morbidly depressed, overweight and living with wife Janice in a Florida retirement community, recovers from a heart attack and is led astray by his libido one last time. "Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny," said PW. "If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream." The book took a Pulitzer Prize. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. EDITORIAL REVIEW: "Rabbit at Rest", the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family's conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s. Rabbit, now in his 50s and with a heart condition, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his family come to stay and disaster unfolds. Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating accident with his granddaughter and Nelson has been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit.

<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It's incredible! No, I think it's the most interesting American novel I've read in quite a long time"<br></p><p>-- Mary McCarthy, interviewed in The Paris Review<br></p><p>"The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe"<br></p><p>-- Norman Mailer, Esquire<br></p><p>"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically cynical. And good luck to it."<br></p><p>-- Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer<br></p><p>And Rabbit Redux<br></p><p>"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and popular acclaim."<br></p><p>-- Brendan Gill, The New Yorker<br></p><p>"I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written."<br></p><p>-- Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review </p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>12 1.5-hour cassettes </p></div> SUMMARY: Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot.... SUMMARY: Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot.... <p class="description">The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last – until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.</p>

SUMMARY: It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old 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 ... The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves – or further complicates – his problems, makes for a novel of the first order. Rabbit Redux is the second of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order. The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story.

<p><i>Rabbit, Run </i>is the book that<i> </i>established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his--or any other--generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty--even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler's edge.</p> SUMMARY: It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.

'There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life - impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular-reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past.'In these two short stories, Updike's brilliant observational acuity is matched by a light, comic touch. The writer Henry Bech travels to Europe on a hapless cultural exchange, first to Russia, where he struggles to spend his money when everything - from his meals to his bugged hotel room - is already paid for, and then to Rumania. This book includes Rich In Russia, Foreword, Bech in Rumania, Appendix A and Appendix B.

S. is the story of Sarah P. Worth, a thoroughly modern spiritual seeker who has become enamored of a Hindu mystic called the Arhat. A native New Englander, she goes west to join his ashram in Arizona, and there struggles alongside fellow sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve moksha (salvation, release from illusion). “S.” details her adventures in letters and tapes dispatched to her husband, her daughter, her brother, her dentist, her hairdresser, and her psychiatrist—messages cleverly designed to keep her old world in order while she is creating for herself a new one. This is Hester Prynne’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter; it is also a burlesque of the quest for enlightenment, and an affectionate meditation on American womanhood.

A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. “A brief novel of deep feeling.”—TimeOn a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

“Marvelously moving . . . These tales evoke a certain peace and a definite wonder at what an astonishingly graceful writer Updike is.”—USA TodayTo the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig . . . each reed of thatch, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass.” All of these stories, each in its own way, partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own exquisite dearness. As death approaches, existence takes on, for some of Updike’s aging characters, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misperception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur. Here is a world where wonder stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses.

As a present to John Updike on his fiftieth birthday, and as a treat for his readers, his first book, a collection of light verse originally published twenty-five years ago, is brought back into print, with an author’s foreword and some small revisions. Many of these poems were written when the author was a young art student in England and a “Talk of the Town” reporter for *The New Yorker* , which published over forty of them. They deal with the quiddities of things, the oddities of science, quirks of American life (especially as reported in *Life* magazine during those smiling Eisenhower years), and moments of epiphany in literature and nature. A number—“Ex-Basketball Player,” “Superman,” “Mirror,” “Quilt”—have been frequently reprinted in anthologies. All show a sharp ear, a fond eye, and an active though not always light-hearted fancy. Written mainly to amuse, Updike’s early verse was also, as his foreword states, “a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word.” Admirers who know him mostly through his fiction should be delighted to encounter what he calls “these old evidences of my own high spirits.” *The Carpentered Hen* , in recent years a hard-to-get collector’s item, now again. *unhinges her wings,* *abandons her nest* *of splinter, and sings.*

In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

“He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.”—William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, “Olinger Stories,” already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled “Out in the World,” “Married Life,” and “Family Life,” tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of “The Two Iseults,” a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. “Tarbox Tales” are followed by “Far Out,” a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and “The Single Life,” whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper's to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review. All show Mr. Updike's wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.

Eighteen classic short stories that form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

The Music School is a place of learning, in which a sheltered South Dakota boy meets his roommate at Harvard, a rebel with whom he will have a violent—and ambiguous—physical encounter; a warring married couple, Richard and Joan Maple, try and try again to find solace in sex; and Henry Bech, an unprolific American writer publicizing himself far from home, enjoys a moment of improbable, poignant, untranslatable connection with a Bulgarian poetess. In these twenty short stories, each evidence of his early mastery, John Updike brings us a world—a world of fumbling, pausing, and beginning again; a world sensitively felt and lovingly expressed; a world whose pianissimo harmonies demand new subtleties of fictional form.

### From Publishers Weekly Motivated by advancing age, loneliness, latent guilt and a sense of unfinished business, the erstwhile Witches of Eastwick return to their former Rhode Island coastal town in this tepid sequel to the 1984 novel. Alexandra, the fleshy Earth Mother; Jane, the wasp-tongued snob; and Sukie, a would-be a sexpot operating beyond her expiration date, have each survived the second marriages that took place following their flight from Eastwick in the early '70s, after a rival, Jenny Gabriel, died as a result of their spell. Where before they were strong, sassy, lusty and empowered, now in late middle-age they are vulnerable, fearful and in thrall to their aging bodies. Witchcraft is now beyond them; when they try to resurrect their supernatural powers to atone for their guilt, an inadvertent death ensues. While Updike remains amazingly capable of capturing women's thoughts about their bodies and their sex lives, the plot never gains momentum; the first hundred pages, in fact, are tedious travelogues covering the widows' travels to Egypt and China. Updike's observations about culture and social disharmony flash with their customary brilliance—a less than sparkling Updike novel is still an Updike novel. *(Oct.)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From If it weren't for the popular film version (1987), it's not certain that *The Witches of Eastwick* —playful rather than powerful like the Rabbit novels and accused by some of misogynist leanings—would have remained as popular as it did. Yet, despite lukewarm reviews, those who enjoyed that first novel may find something to like in this sequel. *Widows* resurrects the fun of the original, and Updike is, as usual, a master stylist with sharp, sensual writing. Some critics, however, were thrown off by the contrived premise, the initial aimless travelogue, and the sappy subplots. A few even suggested that Updike doesn't adequately understand women's aging, though the *New York Times* argued that the witches are most compellingly understood as ordinary women. In sum, *Widows* is a mixed bag, best enjoyed by readers curious to see where Updike's brand of feminism has landed him 25 years later. Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasy depicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources tainted. The hero is Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six-year-old retired investment counselor, who, like Thoreau, sticks close to home and traces the course of one Massachusetts year in his journal. Something of a science buff, he finds that his disrupted personal history has been warped by the disjunctions and vagaries of the “many-worlds” hypothesis derived from the indeterminacy of quantum theory. His identity branches into variants extending back through the past and forward into the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-haunted existence move toward the end of time.

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Home, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio.