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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( U ) : Updike, John
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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
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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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.
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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.
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Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, athlete, is Mr Midd le America. Often erotic in description and coruscating with realistic details which recreate a world in each novel, the se books give a complete picture of their age. '
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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....
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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.
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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.
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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.
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John Updike has written a brilliant novel that ranks among the most provocative of his distinguished career. Terrorist is the story of Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an alienated American-born teenager who spurns the materialistic, hedonistic life he witnesses in the slumping New Jersey factory town he calls home. Turning to the words of the Holy Qur’an as expounded to him by the pedantic imam of a local mosque, Ahmad devotes himself fervently to God. Neither the world-weary guidance counselor at his high school nor Ahmad’s mischievously seductive classmate Joryleen succeeds in deflecting him from his course, as the threads of an insidious plot gather around him.
“One compelling and surprising ride.”–USA Today
“The startlingly contemporary story of a high school student . . . whose zealous Islamic faith and disaffection with modern life make him a pawn in the larger conflict between Muslim and Christian, East and West. They also make him a powerful voice for Updike’s ongoing critique of American civilization.”
–Time
“A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from Sept. 11.”
–People (Critic’s Choice)
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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.
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"A triumph."
NEWSDAY
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. 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.
From the Paperback edition.
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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.
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“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.
From the Hardcover edition.