The Poorhouse Fair

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 : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0394410505
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Poorhouse Fair written by John Updike and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 1977-02-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike’s first novel, was written in 1957 and published in January of 1959. For this, its sixth printing, the author has appended an introduction discussing the book’s inspiration, its aesthetic sources and models in classics of science fiction, and the way in which its future (projected to be about 1977) compares with the present. The Poorhouse Fair was hailed at the time of its publication as “a rare and beautiful achievement” and “a work of intellectual imagination and great charity.” Though its future has degenerated into our present, and Updike’s later work is better known, such critics as Henry Bech have hailed this little novel as, still, “surely his masterpiece.”

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0345468236
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Poorhouse Fair written by John Updike and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. 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 :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Poorhouse Fair written by John Updike and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1598535811
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book John Updike: Novels 1959-1965 (LOA #311) written by John Updike and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library of America launches its definitive multi-volume edition of John Updike's novels with the four early works that signaled the arrival of one of the most gifted young novelists of the 1960s. John Updike had already made a name as a contributor of stories and poems to The New Yorker when, in January 1959, at the age of twenty-six, he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, launching one of the most extraordinary literary careers in American letters. Now, Library of America inaugurates a multi-volume edition of Updike's novels with this volume gathering his first four novels, including the landmark Rabbit, Run, chosen in 2010 by TIME Magazine one of the best 100 novels published in English since 1923. Set in the near future of 1978, The Poorhouse Fair stages a conflict between John Hook, a rebellious ninety-four-year-old former schoolteacher now a resident of a rural poorhouse, and young Mr. Conner, the utilitarian humanist who runs the facility, as an allegory of resistance in a world of systems and efficiencies. Updike's legendary rejoinder to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Rabbit, Run (1960) introduces us to the author's most enduring protagonist, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who, on an impulse, deserts his wife and son, with tragic consequences. The Centaur, a comic-tragic father-son novel that mixes memory and myth, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1964. The novella Of the Farm (1965) is one of Updike's loveliest performances, a kind of chamber music for four voices set during a single memorable weekend. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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 : 067964587X
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Centaur written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141912510
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of the Farm written by John Updike and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-08-30 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the Farm recounts Joey Robinson's visit to the farm where he grew up and where his mother now lives alone. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife, Peggy, and an eleven-year-old stepson, Joey spends three days reassessing and evaluating the course his life has run. But for Joey and Peggy, the delicate balance of love and sex is threatened by a dangerous new awareness.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 044900452X
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bech: A Book written by John Updike and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1998-08-25 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish American novelist Henry Bech—procrastinating, libidinous, and tart-tongued, his reputation growing while his powers decline—made his first appearance in 1965, in John Updike’s “The Bulgarian Poetess.” That story won the O. Henry First Prize, and it and the six Bech adventures that followed make up this collection. “Bech is the writer in me,” Updike once said, “creaking but lusty, battered but undiscourageable, fed on the blood of ink and the bread of white paper.” As he trots the globe, promotes himself, and lurches from one woman’s bed to another’s, Bech views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make followers of the lit-biz smile with delight and wince in recognition.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0345517512
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Widows of Eastwick written by John Updike and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie -- now widowed but still witches -- return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, "the scene of their primes," site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a "haven of wholesomeness" populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike is as his very best - a legendary mster of literary magic up to his old delightful tricks.