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

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.

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.

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307777790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "The brainy, sarcastic, tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out loud: they can also move you to tears." —People Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as: American politics: "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb." Chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike

Passion and the Passion

Passion and the Passion PDF Author: Francis Leo Kunkel
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Discusses the work of D.H. Lawrence, William Golding, John Updike, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, and others.

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.

Victor Gollancz

Victor Gollancz PDF Author: Ruth Dudley Edwards
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571294804
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
Victor Gollancz was a teacher, publisher, author and campaigner who spent his life passionately trying to make people see the truth as he saw it. If it's as a publisher that he is remembered above all, nonetheless in many ways he epitomised the social conscience of the mid-twentieth century: he founded the Left Book Club, Save Europe Now and the Campaign Against Capital Punishment. For this biography, first published in 1987, Ruth Dudley Edwards had access to all the Gollancz family and firm papers, and produced an honest, searching work which not only reveals an extraordinary man but throws light on many of the political and social events of his times. 'Frequently gripping and always readable.' John Gross, Observer 'Consistently enthralling and a brilliant achievement.' Hilary Rubinstein, Spectator 'One of the fullest and richest portraits of a contemporary individual we have had.' Anthony Curtis, Financial Times 'I would trust anyone's life to Ruth Dudley Edwards.' Terence De Vere White, Irish Times