This is an Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair

This is an Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair PDF Author: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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This is an Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair

This is an Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair PDF Author: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description


An Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair ...

An Excerpt from The Poorhouse Fair ... PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description


The Poorhouse Fair

The Poorhouse Fair PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
“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

Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage PDF Author: W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513288253
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
Of Human Bondage (1915) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by his experiences as an orphan and young student, Maugham composed his masterpiece. Adapted several times for film, Of Human Bondage is a story of tragedy, perseverance, and the eternal search for happiness which drives us as much as it haunts our every move. Orphaned as a boy, Philip Carey is raised in an affectionless household by his aunt and uncle. Although his Aunt Louisa tries to make him feel welcome, William proves an uncaring, vindictive man. Left to fend for himself most days, Philip finds solace in the family’s substantial collection of books, which serve as an escape for the imaginative boy. Sent to study at a prestigious boarding school, Philip struggles to fit in with his peers, who abuse him for his intelligence and club foot. Despite his struggles, he perseveres in his studies and chooses his own path in life, moving to Heidelberg, Germany and denying his uncle’s wish that he attend Oxford. As he struggles to become a professional artist, Philip learns that one’s dreams are often unsubstantiated in the world of the living. Of Human Bondage is a tale of desire, disappointment, and romance by a master stylist with a keen sense of the complications inherent to human nature. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers.

A Month of Sundays

A Month of Sundays PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 067964590X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
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.

Trust Me

Trust Me PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645977
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife’s twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her father’s death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: “Man,” as one of these stories concludes, “was not meant to abide in paradise.”

The Moderate Imagination

The Moderate Imagination PDF Author: Yoav Fromer
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700629521
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential Rust Belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it. Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt “left behind.” In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash. A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.

John Updike

John Updike PDF Author: Jack De Bellis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
This definitive guide to materials by and about this prolific American author consists of a printed first volume and a second volume on CD-ROM. The A and B sections of Volume I, concern separately printed works by Updike and books to which he has contributed. The volume also features over 500 grayscale images of book covers, jackets, broadsides, and many seldom seen items. It includes comprehensive listings of Updike's short fiction, poems, articles, essays and reviews, as well as extensive documentation of letters, speeches, dramatic works, manuscripts, interviews, and blurbs. Volume II contains entries for material about Updike and his work (reviews, commentary, and theses), several appendices (media appearances, work read by others, works in translation, exhibits and catalogs), and full-color versions of images appearing in the printed volume.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

John Updike

John Updike PDF Author: David Thorburn
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A collection of critical essays examining individual texts as well as more general accounts of the religious and sexual themes that run through his fiction.