Download or read book John Updike Remembered written by Jack A. De Bellis and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-three individuals present a prismatic view of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and his work through anecdote and insight. Interviews and essays from family, friends and associates reveal sides of the novelist perhaps unfamiliar to the public--the high school prankster, the golfer, the creator of bedtime stories, the charming ironist, the faithful correspondent with scholars, the devoted friend and the dedicated practitioner of his craft. The contributors include his first wife, Mary Pennington, and three of their children; high school and college friends; authors John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates and Nicholson Baker; journalists Terri Gross and Ann Goldstein; and scholars Jay Parini, William Pritchard, James Plath, and Adam Begley, Updike's biographer.
Download or read book Memories of the Ford Administration written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974–77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past. Alf’s highly idiosyncratic contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857–61). The alternating texts mirror each other and tell a story in counterpoint, a frequently hilarious comedy of manners contrasting the erotic etiquette and social dictions of antebellum Washington with those of late-twentieth-century southern New Hampshire. Alf’s style is Nabokovian. His obsessions are vintage Updike.
Download or read book The Half God of Rainfall written by Inua Ellams and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.
Download or read book Roger s Version written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Licks of Love written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Several strands of the Rabbit saga come together here as, during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, Harry’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike’s fictional world go round—married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.
Download or read book Rabbit at Rest written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to live. “Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”—The Washington Post Book World Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live. The geographical locale is divided between Brewer, in southestern Pennyslvania, and Deleon, in southwestern Florida.
Download or read book The Coup written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel that charts the violent events in an imaginary African nation, as told by the colonel and leader of the country—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. "What a rich, surprising, and often funny novel.”—The New York Times Book Review “A leader,” writes Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish.” Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion—cultural, ideological, and personal—to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into the nation of Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story—always elegantly, and often in the third person—from an undisclosed location in the South of France.
Download or read book My Father s Tears written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Picked Up Pieces written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Between Them written by Richard Ford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman—were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. Between Them is his vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction. Bringing his celebrated candor, wit, and intelligence to this most intimate and mysterious of landscapes—our parents’ lives—the award-winning storyteller and creator of the iconic Frank Bascombe delivers an unforgettable exploration of memory, intimacy, and love.
Download or read book A Child s Calendar written by John Updike and published by Lerner Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...This read-along is a richly sensory experience.... sound effects of chirping birds, tromping feet, lowing cows, whirring insects, exploding fireworks, pounding surf, buzzing bees, barking dogs, honking geese, and tolling bells create their own aural metaphors that echo the poet's verse and clearly reflect the seasons." -Booklist
Download or read book American Melancholy written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history. Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades. Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.
Download or read book John Updike Remembered written by Jack A. De Bellis and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-three individuals present a prismatic view of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and his work through anecdote and insight. Interviews and essays from family, friends and associates reveal sides of the novelist perhaps unfamiliar to the public--the high school prankster, the golfer, the creator of bedtime stories, the charming ironist, the faithful correspondent with scholars, the devoted friend and the dedicated practitioner of his craft. The contributors include his first wife, Mary Pennington, and three of their children; high school and college friends; authors John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates and Nicholson Baker; journalists Terri Gross and Ann Goldstein; and scholars Jay Parini, William Pritchard, James Plath, and Adam Begley, Updike's biographer.
Download or read book Pigeon Feathers written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”
Download or read book U and I written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1992-02-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.
Download or read book Just Looking written by John Updike and published by . This book was released on 2014-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Comic Timing written by Holly Pester and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.
