Becoming John Updike

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645721
Total Pages : 577 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Couples written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

Author : David Lodge
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1448137799
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Author : Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher : Camden House
ISBN 13 : 1571135111
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming John Updike written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2013 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that Becoming John Updike pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 0878057005
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conversations with John Updike written by John Updike and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1994 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects thirty-two interviews with the writer between 1959 and 1993.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 067964590X
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Month of Sundays written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An antic riff on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, in which a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. “Updike may be America’s finest novelist and [this] is quintessential Updike.”—The Washington Post At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past—his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne. A testament for our times.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645772
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Poorhouse Fair written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book Review The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home for the aged and infirm—overseen by Stephen Conner, a righteous young man who considers it his duty to know what is best for others. The action of the novel unfolds over a single summer’s day, the day of the poorhouse’s annual fair, a day of escalating tensions between Conner and the rebellious Hook. Its climax is a contest between progress and tradition, benevolence and pride, reason and faith. Praise for The Poorhouse Fair “A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812982967
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Self-Consciousness written by John Updike and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.” In the service of this metaphysical effort, he has been hair-raisingly honest, matchlessly precise, and self-effacingly humorous. He takes the reader beyond self-consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into sheer wonder at the miracle of existence.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645756
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of the Farm written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm, John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction.”—The New York Times In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where his aging mother now lives alone. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and the strategies they use to stand their ground.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Lerner Publishing Group
ISBN 13 : 1430129883
Total Pages : 32 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Child's Calendar written by John Updike and published by Lerner Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...This read-along is a richly sensory experience.... sound effects of chirping birds, tromping feet, lowing cows, whirring insects, exploding fireworks, pounding surf, buzzing bees, barking dogs, honking geese, and tolling bells create their own aural metaphors that echo the poet's verse and clearly reflect the seasons." -Booklist

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645837
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Assorted Prose written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.