Shop Categories
- Fernandes, Eugenie
- ( F )
- Sports
- Tennis
- Quantum Theory
- Beginner's Guides
- Leonard, Elmore
- Romantic Suspense
- Tertullian
- Grant, John
- Shell
- Vertebrate
- Masters, Edgar Lee
- Medical Law & Legislation
- Analogies
- Palmer, Diana
- Multilingual
- Ziglar, Zig
- System Theory
- Paperback
- Garton, Ray
- Paperback
- Kenya
- Great Destinations
- Healing
- Jokes & Riddles
- Weapons & Warfare
- Medicine
- Teletubbies
- Gaiman, Neil
- Some of our other sites:
- Books
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Cosmetics, Beauty Products and Fragrances
- Cellphones, Call Plans and Accessories
- Video Games
- DVDs
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- Health and Personal Care
- Home and Garden
- Home DIY
- Jewelry
- Magazines and Newspapers
- Music Downloads
- Musical Instruments
- Office Equipment and Supplies
- Software and Games
- Sporting Goods
- Toys and Games
- Watches
- UK Books
- UK Video Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- UK Software and Games
- UK Sporting Goods
- UK Toys and Games
Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( U )
-
Originally published in 1854, Walden, or Life in the Woods, is a vivid account of the time that Henry D. Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature.
This new paperback edition--introduced by noted American writer John Updike--celebrates the 150th anniversary of this classic work. Much of Walden's material is derived from Thoreau's journals and contains such engaging pieces as "Reading" and "The Pond in the Winter." Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden--as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows.
For the student and for the general reader, this is the ideal presentation of Thoreau's great document of social criticism and dissent.
-
BEFORE THEY WERE THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, OUR HEROINES WERE A TRIO OF DELIGHTFULLY WICKED WITCHES.
In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, 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, the wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose strobe-lit hot tub room became the scene of satanic pleasures.
To tell you any more, dear reader, would be to spoil the joy of reading this hexy, sexy novel by the incomparable John Updike.
Praise for New York Times Bestseller The Witches of Eastwick:
“A dazzling book . . . Updike is devilishly clever.”
–Los Angeles Times
“New England’s past and present are brilliantly interwoven in this narrative . . . [Updike] has brought [this] culture wittily and radiantly to life.”
–The New York Times
“A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A wicked entertainment . . . In book after book, Updike’s fine, funny impressionistic art strips the full casings of everydayness from objects we have known all our lives and makes them shine with fresh new connections.”
–The New Republic
“Witty, ironic, engrossing, punctuated by transports of spectacular prose.”
–Time
“Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.”
–Newsday
Selected by Time as one of the Five Best Works of Fiction of the Year
-
Paul Theroux: Dog Days (30 min)
It was a time of excessive heat, unwholesome influences – and an overpowering lust for the Chinese servant girl.
Theroux is a novelist, short story and travel writer. His more than two dozen books include Riding the Iron Rooster and Mosquito Coast.
DOG DAYS, by Paul Theroux, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (November, 1971) ©1971 Playboy.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Fortitude (30 min)
She was a lovely old lady – at least what was left of her – and she had the best set of sweetbreads that money could buy.
Vonnegut is the bestselling author of many works, including Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and, most recently, Hocus Pocus.
FORTITUDE, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (September, 1968) ©1968 Playboy.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Unlocking the Air (28 min)
This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the palace, their muskets ready. Stefana is ready too.
Le Guin is best known for her fantasy and science fiction, including The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea trilogy, but she has also published poetry, plays, and several children's books.
UNLOCKING THE AIR, by Ursula K. Le Guin, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1990) ©1990 Playboy.
Lawrence Sanders: The Further Adventures of Chauncey Alcock (32 min)
In which our hero is called upon to exhibit his manhood and does so courageously, to the gratification of new friends and the heartfelt approbation of fellow citizens.
Sanders is the author of many bestselling thrillers, including the Deadly Sin series (The First Deadly Sin...) and the Commandment series (The Third Commandment...).
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CHAUNCEY ALCOCK, by Lawrence Sanders, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1972) ©1972 Playboy.
Andre Dubus: Anna (56 min)
They knocked off the drugstore because they thought that money would change their lives. It did – but not enough.
Dubus taught for eighteen years at Bradford College in Massachusetts before an automobile accident forced his retirement. Many of his short stories are set in that area.
ANNA, by Andre Dubus, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (June, 1981) ©1981 Playboy.
-
-
-
-
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life.
Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story.
This Rabbit Angstrom volume is comprised of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.
-
Edward Gorey's off-kilter depictions of Yuletide mayhem and John Updike's wryly jaundiced text examine a dozen Christmas traditions with a decidedly wheezy ho-ho-ho. This long out-of-print classic is the perfect stocking-stuffer for any bah humbug. 32 pages, smyth-sewn casebound book, with jacket.
-
Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run--from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....
-
A collection of twelve poems describing the activities in a child's life and the changes in the weather as the year moves from January to December.
-
-
-
For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.
-
The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam.
The son of a bohemian Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.
But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot is God the best.
-
-
John Updike’s sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading “General Considerations,” books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces—reminiscences, friendly forewords, comments on the author’s own recent works, responses to probing questions.
In between, many books are considered, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz. Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk. In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.
Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.
-
-
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....
From the Paperback edition.
-
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.
-
“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.