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...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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 days.As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” b...

**“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—***Kansas City StarRabbit, Run* is the book thatestablished John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between ...

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...

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...

“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...

“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—TimeOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsOne of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a ...

Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader brings together the work of contemporary scholars, teachers, and writers into lively discussion on the moral role of literature and the relationship between aesthetics, art, and ethics. Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex...

“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 ReviewToward 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 sculpt...

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines?Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city...

The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife’s twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent l...

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...