John Updike

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful 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 Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio, l...

This the last novel in the "Rabbit Sequence". Rabbit, now in his middle 50s, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster unfolds as Rabbit has a serious heart attack and it is discovered that Nelson has been embezzling to feed his cocaine hab...

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's ok, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the clu...

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful 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 Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio. T...

This collection of John Updike's non-fiction writings includes a delightful preface, 'Everything Considered', in which he tells of his lifelong love affair with words; essays on travel, and on faith; introductions to some of the classics; reviews of lesser known foreign writers and new books by Engl...

John Updike's Rabbit, Run is a classic story of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school. Now twenty-six, his life seems full of traps, the biggest being his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. He sets out to escape, but it's not clear if ...

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. '

When the three witches - now old, remarried and widowed - decide to go back to Eastwick to spend a summer together, many things have changed. Darryl Van Horne is gone. Their husbands and lovers have gone. The lithe and supple bodies with which they wrecked marriages and wreaked havoc many years befo...

A master class in art appreciation with a great American man of letters. In this lavishly illustrated collection of John Updike's recent art writings, a posthumous companion to the acclaimed "Just Looking" (1989) and "Still Looking" (2005), readers are again treated to "remarkably elegant essays" ("...

'Gossip of a higher sort' was how the incomparable John Updike described the art of the review. Here then is the last collection of his best, most dazzling gossip. Influential reviews of Toni Morrison, John le Carre and Ann Patchett and expert critique on exhibitions of El Greco, Van Gogh and Schiel...

The terrorist of John Updike's title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur'an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by th...

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...

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Hugging the Shore is an enormously intelligent, witty collection of essays by John Updike. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist sheds keen light on everything from the first kiss to going barefoot to the world's greatest writers. First t...

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009. This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzli...

Collected together for the first time on audio, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike's career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young coupl...

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John Updike's memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his foreword states, "to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen...

"The Coup" describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush, a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou. ("A leader," writes Colonel Ellellou, "is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are ...

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009. This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzli...

All twenty-two of the stories in this collection -John Updike's eleventh, and his first in seven years- in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to prescient sexual rumors, from the deaths o...

John Updike was a master storyteller, and this collection, from his final years, reveals that up to the end he remained the finest short-story writer of his generation. 'Magnificent, exhilarating, crisply evocative, rippling with irony. Updike's genius can be seen on peak form. With this book, a tal...

""Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned."" That's how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories. He might have been writing about himself. In "My Father's Tears, " the author revisits his signat...

"A triumph of love and art." THE WASHINGTON POSTIn 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 lose touch wit...

'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...

John Updike's twentieth novel, like his first, "The Poorhouse Fair "(1959), takes place in one day, 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, ans...

"A tour de force . . . Readable, clever." Chicago Tribune Book WorldThe adventures of the Reverend Tom Marshfield -- literate, charming, sexual -- whose outrageous behavior with the ladies of his flock scandalizes his parish . . .