Selected stories & observations from the great American writer & Pulitzer Prize-winning author John UpdikeJohn Updike was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. In a career spanning half a century, he wrote over 50 books chronicling middle-class white America in the postwar years, and its changing attitudes to sex, divorce and religion. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won th...

Containing all the ambience of The Great Gatsby, The Rich Boy is a perfect collection of Fitzgerald stories evoking the trappings and illusions of 1920s high society. Undisputed king of Jazz Age writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly encapsulated all the glamour and despair of 1920s society. These three short stories are supreme examples of his craft. With wealth and privileges beyond measure, 'rich boy' Anson Hunter had every reason to expect life to be a breeze. Yet one by one his dreams...

The first book in John Updike's award-winning 'Rabbit' series, with an afterword by the authorIt's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, b...

A grand collection of John Updike's inimitable early stories.Gathering together almost all the short fiction that John Updike published between 1953 and 1975, this collection opens with Updike's autobiographical stories about a young boy growing up during the Depression in a small Pennsylvania town. There follows tales of life away from home, student days, early marriage and young families, and finally Updike's experimental stories on 'The Single Life'. Here, then, is a rich and sa...

The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers — a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final daysIn the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was ‘Our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer’.Over the course of his long and immensely...

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young bl...

Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Neach, and presents her with a ring. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west....

A compilation, featuring more than three hours of some of the greatest short stories of all time, brought to life by distinguished stage and screen actors.Roger Angell and A. Bartlett Giamatti’s "Play by Play"John Updike’s "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" read by Jack Davidson - Ted Williams' miraculous Fenway farewell.Rolfe Humphries’ "Polo Grounds" read by Fritz WeaverRobert Francis’ "Pitcher" and "Base Stealer" read by Arthur FrenchRobert Fi...

Selected Short's most popular volume! Over three hours of stories to tickle your funny bone.Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil"performed by Thomas GibsonA darkly comic thriller about a tractor historian besieged by man-eating potatoes.David Schickler's "Jamaica"performed by Isaiah ShefferA man with his head stuck between the banisters has no choice but to listen in on his wife's "Gorgon Book Club."Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry"performe...

Owen Mackenzie's life story abounds with sin and seduction, domesticity and debauchery. His marriage to his college sweetheart is quickly followed by his first betrayal and he embarks upon a series of affairs. His pursuit of happiness, in a succession of small towns from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, brings him to the edge of chaos, from which he is saved by a rescue that carries its own fatal price.

“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“Here Come the Maples”). “They also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared.” That all blessings are mixed and fleeting does not make them less real, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, th...

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...