For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.
For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the f...
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...
In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of "Olinger Stori...
John Updike's twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair, takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through stories from her career and many marriages, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, interviewer and subject move in and out of the roles of...
John Updike's twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair, takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain...
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms, reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story. Contemplating John Updike s monumental achievement in the short story, one is moved to think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps William Faulkner...
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction tha...
In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where his aging mother now lives alone. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and...
In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, t...
The terrorist of John Updike's title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur'an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping New Jersey factory town of New Prospect. Neither Jack Levy, his life-weary guidance counselor at Central High, nor Joryleen Grant, his seductive black classmate, succeeds in diverting Ahmad from what the Qur'an calls the...
The terrorist of John Updike's title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappe...
The Blithedale Romance, considered one of Hawthorne's major novels, explores the limitations of human nature set against an experiment in communal living. From mesmerism to illicit love, The Blithedale Romance represents one of Hawthorne's best and most sharply etched works, one that Henry James called his "brightest" and "liveliest" novel, and that Roy Male, acclaimed Americanist scholar, said is "one of the most underrated works in American fiction." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition is set from the definitive Ohio State University Press Centenary edition of...
The Blithedale Romance, considered one of Hawthorne's major novels, explores the limitations of human nature set against an experiment in commu...
Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest...
Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelli...
Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous "Bech: A Book (1970) and "Bech Is Back (1982), has become older but scarcely wiser. In these five new chapters from his life, he is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world ever more cheerfully crass. He fights intimations of annihilation in still-Communist Czechoslovakia, while promiscuously consorting with dissidents, apparatchiks, and Midwestern Republicans. Next, he succumbs to the temptations of power by...
Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous "Bech: A Book (1970) and "Bech Is Back (...
Gertrude and Claudius are the "villains" of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet's father and usurper of the Danish throne; she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband's body is cold. But in this imaginative "prequel" to the play, John Updike makes a case for the royal couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and family dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, erratic, disaffected prince. "I hoped to keep the texture light," Updike said of this novel, "to move...
Gertrude and Claudius are the "villains" of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet's father and usurper of the Danish throne; she his lusty consor...
