John Updike
1) Rabbit, Run
Rabbit, Run is the book that 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...
3) Rabbit Redux
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab...
To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike’s title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy...
6) Selected Stories: The Alligators, A & P, Pigeon Feathers, The Family Meadow, Witnesses, Separating
"A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story.
"Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds.
"The Family Meadow" describes a piece of America, a picnic reunion in New Jersey.
"The Witnesses" and...
The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.
In describing
...“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.”—The New York Times Book Review
Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is
On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful...
11) Rabbit at Rest
“Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”—The...
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 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
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