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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
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
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
Author: John Updike
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0394410505
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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: James Campbell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520252373
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
"At a time when much literary criticism remains deliberately abstruse and unduly professionalized, this book, at once anecdotal and quietly argumentative, feels like nothing so much as a fine collection of short stories about the most fascinating people you never met."—Morris Dickstein, author of A Mirror in the Roadway "To read this book is to watch the workings of a brilliant mind—sharp, quirky, always ready to reimagine texts we thought we knew well and to shed light on others we might have passed over. Campbell fits into no theoretical camp: he is simply one of the rare critics on whom, to cite Henry James, 'nothing is lost.'"—Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder "Rises above the usual divisions in American literature. James Campbell is one of the most eloquent and consistently challenging writers on the British literary scene."—Caryl Phillips, author of Dancing in the Dark
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983807
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”: “Better to praise and share,” he says in his Foreword, “than to blame and ban.” And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early “golf dreams,” and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life, books, wit—and John Updike.
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062564536
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates. "Why do we write?" With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work? In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, "who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?" Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.
Author: Renée Rose Shield
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
"If we continue, we grow old, and this is how it could be for us," writes Renée Rose Shield in her candid and sympathetic account of life in one American nursing home. Drawing on anthropological methods and theory to illuminate institutional life, she probes the sources of the profound sense of unease she found at the place she calls "The Franklin Nursing Home."For fourteen months Shield participated in life at a nursing home in the northeastern United States. She got to know many of the people associated with the home—doctors, nurses, custodians, kitchen workers, administrators, social workers, visiting relatives, and above all, the residents, who emerge in this book as the individuals they are. Sections in which the residents speak poignantly in their own voices are woven throughout her richly detailed observations of everyday routines and events. We see them using guile and humor to get by, struggling to approach the end of their lives with a measure of autonomy and dignity, and we meet an often conscientious and caring staff constrained by conflicting professional perspectives and by the bureaucratic structure in which they work.There are no villains here. Rather, Shield explains how conditions in the nursing home create a difficult and uncomfortable "liminality"—the transition from an accustomed role to a new one-for the residents. In characterizing nursing-home existence, she goes beyond Erving Goffman's classic definition of the "total institution" to show how residents pass from adulthood to death without the comfort of ritual or community support common in rites of passage. In addition to the isolation created by this solitary passage, she finds restrictions on "reciprocity"—the old people are always recipients whose need and obligation to repay are seen as unnecessary and difficult to satisfy. The system encourages their passivity, which deepens their dependency and helps to explain why they are often perceived as children. Offering concrete suggestions for improving the quality of nursing-home life, Uneasy Endings will find a broad audience among those who work with the aged.
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571135111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
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:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gazettes
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Author: Michigan. State Welfare Commission
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
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.
