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The John Updike Encyclopedia

Author : Jack De Bellis

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 584 pages

File Size : 41,83 MB

Release : 2000-09-30

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0313007209

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Book Description

John Updike is one of the most seminal American writers of the 20th century and one of the most prolific as well. In addition to his best-selling novels, he has written numerous poems, short stories, reviews, and essays. His writing consistently reveals stylistic brilliance, and through his engagement with America's moral and spiritual problems, his works chronicle America's hopes and dreams, failures and disappointments. Though he is an enormously popular writer, the complexity and elegance of his works have elicited growing scholarly attention. Through several hundred alphabetically arranged entries, this book provides both casual and serious readers an exceptional guide to his life and writings. Whether the reader is seeking a novel summary, an authoritative analysis of subjects, elucidation of an allusion, or a point about Updike's life or manner of composition, the encyclopedia is indispensable. A chronology summarizes the major events in Updike's career, while an introductory essay examines his progress as a writer, from his crafted light verse and informed reviews to his innovative novels and stories. The entries that follow summarize Updike's books, describe all major characters, explain allusions, identify major images and symbols, analyze principal subjects, discuss his life and career, and draw on the most significant scholarship. Entries include bibliographies, and the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.



Terrorist

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Penguin UK

Page : 275 pages

File Size : 42,17 MB

Release : 2007-07-26

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0141921803

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Book Description

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 we can counter it, in our words and our actions . . .



The Centaur

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Random House

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 30,41 MB

Release : 2012-06-05

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 067964587X

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Book Description

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”



Rabbit Redux

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Random House

Page : 451 pages

File Size : 46,34 MB

Release : 2010-08-26

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0307744086

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Book Description

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.



John Updike's Early Years

Author : Jack De Bellis

Publisher : Lehigh University Press

Page : 200 pages

File Size : 16,53 MB

Release : 2013-01-11

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 1611461316

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Book Description

John Updike’s Early Years reveals for the first time the young Updike’s developing personality and precocious creativity. Relying upon interviews with classmates and friends, and offering extensive connections to his mature work, De Bellis shows how his school years incubated his mature work.



John Updike

Author : Jack De Bellis

Publisher :

Page : 632 pages

File Size : 10,27 MB

Release : 2007

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN :

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Book Description

This definitive guide to materials by and about this prolific American author consists of a printed first volume and a second volume on CD-ROM. The A and B sections of Volume I, concern separately printed works by Updike and books to which he has contributed. The volume also features over 500 grayscale images of book covers, jackets, broadsides, and many seldom seen items. It includes comprehensive listings of Updike's short fiction, poems, articles, essays and reviews, as well as extensive documentation of letters, speeches, dramatic works, manuscripts, interviews, and blurbs. Volume II contains entries for material about Updike and his work (reviews, commentary, and theses), several appendices (media appearances, work read by others, works in translation, exhibits and catalogs), and full-color versions of images appearing in the printed volume.



In the Beauty of the Lilies

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Random House

Page : 514 pages

File Size : 49,8 MB

Release : 2009-07-22

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0307421333

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Book Description

In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels.



The Music School

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Random House

Page : 215 pages

File Size : 25,54 MB

Release : 2012-09-18

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0679645748

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Book Description

The Music School is a place of learning, in which a sheltered South Dakota boy meets his roommate at Harvard, a rebel with whom he will have a violent—and ambiguous—physical encounter; a warring married couple, Richard and Joan Maple, try and try again to find solace in sex; and Henry Bech, an unprolific American writer publicizing himself far from home, enjoys a moment of improbable, poignant, untranslatable connection with a Bulgarian poetess. In these twenty short stories, each evidence of his early mastery, John Updike brings us a world—a world of fumbling, pausing, and beginning again; a world sensitively felt and lovingly expressed; a world whose pianissimo harmonies demand new subtleties of fictional form.



The Poorhouse Fair

Author : John Updike

Publisher : Random House

Page : 177 pages

File Size : 33,50 MB

Release : 2012-03-13

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0679645772

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Book Description

“Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book Review The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home for the aged and infirm—overseen by Stephen Conner, a righteous young man who considers it his duty to know what is best for others. The action of the novel unfolds over a single summer’s day, the day of the poorhouse’s annual fair, a day of escalating tensions between Conner and the rebellious Hook. Its climax is a contest between progress and tradition, benevolence and pride, reason and faith. Praise for The Poorhouse Fair “A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal



John Updike

Author : Bernard F. Rodgers

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 39,5 MB

Release : 2012

Category :

ISBN : 9781587658327

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Book Description

Essays include a discussion of the social and historical context of Updike's work and a consideration of Updike's recurrent Jewish-American character, the blocked writer, Henry Bech.