In a moment of sudden inspiration Sarah Worth - S - has walked out on her husband to join the Ashram Arhat. Famous for his transcendent wisdom and divine immobility, the Arhat has transferred his ahram from India to Arizona, where he and his enthusiastic e

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 banal

Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less

Concerns a month of seven days, a month of enforced rest and recreation as experienced by the Reverend Tom Marshfield, sent west from his Midwestern church in disgrace.

John Updike says: Any act of description is, to some extent, an act of praise, so that even when the event is unpleasant or horrifying or spiritually stunning, the very attempt to describe it is, in some way, part of that Old Testament injunction to give praise. Even though my books strike many people as immoral or morally useless, to me they are really moral investigations of how we live, and harsh, perhaps, because the standards are otherworldly. There was a tradition among my peers for frank and open talk, and I'd always been a rather shy, priggish, unexperienced adolescent. So maybe my...

In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with hi

Ein alter Mann wacht auf: Owen Mackenzie, ein Computeringenieur der ersten Generation, der mit einem Partner eine kleine Software-Firma gegründet und rechtzeitig an Apple verkauft hat. Seither hat er keine Geldsorgen mehr. Der Unruhestand seiner 70 Jahre lässt uns teilnehmen an seiner erotischen Biographie. Sie beginnt mit einem dem Knaben unverständlichen Graffito an der Wand der Schule, mit Blicken in den Umkleideraum der Mädchen, der merkwürdigen Reaktion der Mutter, als er bei einem Sonntagsspaziergang ein Kondom findet. Dann: Petting der Teenager in Vaters Auto, Studium am MIT,...

Zunächst 12 Stories, viele davon in nostalgischer Rückschau auf die freizügigen sechziger Jahre ("Ich konnte mich gefahrlos nachts um eins mit einer Frau verabreden, weil ich wußte, daß ihr Mann dann mit meiner Frau schläft"), Erinnerungen an die Mutter, den Vater, die Katzen der Kindheit, auch eigenwillige psychologische Stücke wie die vom SPIEGEL vorab gedruckte 'Metamorphosis'. Ein neuer Bech. Höhepunkt ist Rabbit Remembered, eine weitere Folge der Familiengeschichte der Angstroms, ohne den toten Helden in persona aber als stets gegenwärtigen, mit einem virtuosen Thanksgiving...

Ein Roman der vorläufigen Gewißheiten vom wohl besten Chronisten der amerikanischen Middle Class. Die ungewöhnliche, meisterhaft erzählte Autobiographie des großen amerikanischen Autors.

John Updike's memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his foreword states, "to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world." In the service of this metaphysical effort, he has been hair-raisingly honest, matchlessly precise, and self-effacingly humorous. He takes the reader beyond self-consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into...