The Witches of Eastwick

The Witches of Eastwick PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645888
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.”—The New York Times Book Review Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick—and through the even darker fantasies of the town’s collective psyche. “A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.”—Newsday

The Witches of Eastwick

The Witches of Eastwick PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645888
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.”—The New York Times Book Review Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick—and through the even darker fantasies of the town’s collective psyche. “A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.”—Newsday

The Witches of Eastwick

The Witches of Eastwick PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141188979
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie ply their individual witcheries in contemporary Eastwick, Rhode Island, and are themselves bewitched by a dark, wealthy, decadent stranger.

My Father's Tears

My Father's Tears PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307272028
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

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.

Dragon Tears

Dragon Tears PDF Author: Dean Koontz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0425253775
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Police Detective Harry Lyon is caught in a whirlwind of terror that threatens to sweep away not only him but his partner and everyone he loves.

Terrorist

Terrorist PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141921803
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In his extraordinary and highly charged new novel, John Updike tackles one of America's most burning issues – the threat of Islamist terror from within. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Terrorist traces the journey of one young man, from radicalism to fundamentalism to terrorism, against the backdrop of a fraying urban landscape and an increasingly fragmented community. In beautiful prose, Updike dramatizes the logic of the fundamentalist terrorist – but also suggests ways in which we can counter it, in our words and our actions . . .

The Widows of Eastwick

The Widows of Eastwick PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0345517512
Category : Rhode Island
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.

Rabbit Angstrom

Rabbit Angstrom PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0679444599
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1562

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Book Description
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.

Ancient History

Ancient History PDF Author: Victor LaValle
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101974184
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Horse and Ahab share the kind of contempt and love for one another that only true friends can. Months after graduating high school, Horse is getting married to his longtime girlfriend, Melissa, and moving into her apartment in Manhattan, and Ahab has enlisted in the Marines. They’ve found ways to escape the neighborhood, just not together. From the extraordinary fiction debut, Slapboxing with Jesus, that launched Victor LaValle to literary stardom—a raw, gritty, and unremittingly truthful look into the lives of two friends who go to say goodbye to each other and their neighborhood on the shores of Rockaway Beach. An ebook short.

Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Fiction

Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Fiction PDF Author: Michial Farmer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Frontcover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Hawthorne, Updike, and the Immoral Imagination -- 1: John Updike and the Existentialist Imagination -- Part I. The "Mythic Immensity" of the Parental Imagination -- 2: "Flight," "His Mother Inside Him," and "Ace in the Hole"--3: The Centaur -- 4: Of the Farm, "A Sandstone Farmhouse," and "The Cats"--Part II. Collective Hallucination in the Adulterous Society -- 5: "Man and Daughter in the Cold," "Giving Blood," "The Taste of Metal," and "Avec la Bébé-Sitter" -- 6: Marry Me -- 7: Couples and "The Hillies" -- Part III. Imaginative Lust in the Scarlet Letter Trilogy -- 8: "The Football Factory," "Toward Evening," "Incest," "Still Life," "Lifeguard," "Bech Swings?" and "Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author" -- 9: A Month of Sundays -- 10: Roger's Version -- 11: S. -- Part IV. Female Power and the Female Imagination -- 12: "Marching through Boston," "The Stare," "Report of Health," "Living with a Wife," and "Slippage" -- 13: The Witches of Eastwick -- Part V. The Remembering Imagination -- 14: "In Football Season," "First Wives and Trolley Cars," "The Day of the Dying Rabbit," "Leaving Church Early," and "The Egg Race" -- 15: Memories of the Ford Administration -- 16: "The Dogwood Tree," "A Soft Spring Night in Shillington," and "On Being a Self Forever" -- Conclusion: Updike, Realism, and Postmodernism -- Bibliography -- Index -- Credits