John Updike: Novels 1986–1990 (LOA #354)

John Updike: Novels 1986–1990 (LOA #354) PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1598537172
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
John Updike, at the peak of his powers, concludes his unforgettable Rabbit series and reimagines Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter for contemporary America The latest volume in Library of America’s John Updike edition presents two essential novels by the master stylist of postwar American fiction. Roger’s Version (1986) stakes out ground that encompasses Updike’s recurring themes of sex, desire, and adultery as well as an emerging interest in the cosmic implications of contemporary scientific breakthroughs. In a dazzling refashioning of the love triangle at the heart of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, twin adulteries unfold, revealing the heightened contrasts and inequalities of Ronald Reagan’s America. Widely hailed upon publication as a masterpiece, awarded a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle prize, Rabbit at Rest (1990) wraps up the saga of Updike’s most enduring protagonist and concludes his “surpassingly eloquent elegy for his country,” in the words of Joyce Carol Oates. Now in his mid-fifties, the outwardly comfortable and complacent Harry Angstrom has settled into leisured obsolescence, dividing his time between Pennsylvania and the Valhalla Village retirement community in Florida. But alongside his golfing, junk-food consumption, and other forms of ease there loom unavoidable markers of Rabbit’s human fragility and his mortality.

John Updike: Novels 1986–1990 (LOA #354)

John Updike: Novels 1986–1990 (LOA #354) PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1598537172
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
John Updike, at the peak of his powers, concludes his unforgettable Rabbit series and reimagines Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter for contemporary America The latest volume in Library of America’s John Updike edition presents two essential novels by the master stylist of postwar American fiction. Roger’s Version (1986) stakes out ground that encompasses Updike’s recurring themes of sex, desire, and adultery as well as an emerging interest in the cosmic implications of contemporary scientific breakthroughs. In a dazzling refashioning of the love triangle at the heart of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, twin adulteries unfold, revealing the heightened contrasts and inequalities of Ronald Reagan’s America. Widely hailed upon publication as a masterpiece, awarded a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle prize, Rabbit at Rest (1990) wraps up the saga of Updike’s most enduring protagonist and concludes his “surpassingly eloquent elegy for his country,” in the words of Joyce Carol Oates. Now in his mid-fifties, the outwardly comfortable and complacent Harry Angstrom has settled into leisured obsolescence, dividing his time between Pennsylvania and the Valhalla Village retirement community in Florida. But alongside his golfing, junk-food consumption, and other forms of ease there loom unavoidable markers of Rabbit’s human fragility and his mortality.

John Updike: Novels 1968-1975 (LOA #326)

John Updike: Novels 1968-1975 (LOA #326) PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1598536494
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolution Here for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

Roger's Version

Roger's Version PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked strategies that Roger employs to disembarrass Dale of his faith, form the substance of this novel—these and the current of erotic attraction that pulls Esther, Roger’s much younger wife, away from him and into Dale’s bed. The novel, a majestic allegory of faith and reason, ends also as a black comedy of revenge, for this is Roger’s version—Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—made new for a disbelieving age.

Couples

Couples PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645721
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
“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

Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307744086
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

Paperbound Books in Print

Paperbound Books in Print PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Paperbacks
Languages : en
Pages : 1624

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Book Description


From Puritanism to Postmodernism

From Puritanism to Postmodernism PDF Author: Richard Ruland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317234146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.

The Ebsworth Collection

The Ebsworth Collection PDF Author: Bruce Robinson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This book, the companion volume to an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Seattle Art Museum, showcases the extraordinary collection of modern American masterworks assembled by Barney A. Ebsworth, a St. Louis businessman.The collection includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by artists such as Patrick Henry Bruce, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Marsden Hartley, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, and Wayne Thiebaud.With more than 135 illustrations and an illuminating essay by distinguished art historian Bruce Robertson, this book will be a revelation to anyone who loves 20th-century American art.

Stealth Democracy

Stealth Democracy PDF Author: John R. Hibbing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521009867
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Americans often complain about the operation of their government, but scholars have never developed a complete picture of people's preferred type of government. In this provocative and timely book, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, employing an original national survey and focus groups, report the governmental procedures Americans desire. Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else. People's wish for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people's largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude by cautioning communitarians, direct democrats, social capitalists, deliberation theorists, and all those who think that greater citizen involvement is the solution to society's problems.

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.