John Updike

It's 1989, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore, but somehow can't. He has to make the most of life, after all. He doesn't have much time left ...

Taking its title from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES traces one family's profound journey through four generations--and across the spiritual landscape of twentieth-century America. It is one of John Updike's fullest and finest work of fiction.

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?

Schon als 22jähriger Student hat Updike erzählerische Meisterschaft bewiesen: 1954 erschien in The New Yorker seine erste Erzählung über die Bewohner des ländlichen Olinger, das nicht mehr von der literarischen Landkarte wegzudenken ist. Auch die anderen Geschichten dieser Sammlung der Stories aus den Jahren bis 1964, darunter eine Erstübersetzung, sind in anderen Ausgaben nicht verfügbar.

? John Updikes Künstlerroman ist ein Generationenbuch und zugleich ein Buch über Amerika. Eindringlicher und unterhaltender ist das kaum möglich.? (Literaturen)
 
 Hope, 78, die bekannte Malerin und Witwe berühmter Maler, wird von der jungen Kunsthistorikerin Kathryn interviewt. In Hopes drei Ehen spielte Kunst die Hauptrolle: Sie war mit einem Maler des Abstrakten Expressionismus, der Pop-Art und danach mit einem Sammler verheiratet. Hope und Kathryn wechseln ihre Rollen, sind bald Tochter und Mutter, Therapeutin und Patientin, Jägerin und Beute. Nie hat jemand die Geschichte der amerikanischen Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts amüsanter und ironischer beschrieben.
 
 ? Nur wenige Autoren wären ein solches Wagnis eingegangen.? (Financial Times Deutschland)

Edward Gorey's off-kilter depictions of Yuletide mayhem and John Updike's wryly jaundiced text examine a dozen Christmas traditions with a decidedly wheezy ho-ho-ho. This long out-of-print classic is the perfect stocking-stuffer for any bah humbug. 32 pages, smyth-sewn casebound book, with jacket.

Zwölf neue Erzählungen von dem Meister der short story. Erinnerungen an das Seelenleben und das sexuelle Paradies der Sechziger, als man sich getrost nachts mit einer Frau verabreden konnte, weil man sicher war, dass die eigene bei deren Mann schlief.

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 satisfying feast of Updike - his wit, his easy mastery of language, his genius for recalling the subtleties of ordinary life and the excitements, and perils, of the pursuit of happiness.

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--writers whose reputations would be as considerable, or nearly, if short stories had been all that they had written. From his] remarkable early short story collections . . . through his beautifully nuanced stories of family life and] the bittersweet humors of middle age and beyond . . . John Updike has created a body of work in the notoriously difficult form of the short story to set beside those of these distinguished American predecessors. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks are due to John Updike for having brought such pleasure and such illumination to so many readers for so many years."

"A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm, John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction."--The New York TimesIn 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 the strategies they use to stand their ground.

On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes ...

Im letzten Rabbit-Roman hat Updike seinen Helden Harry Angstrom sterben lassen - zehn Jahre später ist er wieder im Mittelpunkt einer neuen Geschichte. Eines Tages steht eine junge Frau bei Harrys Witwe Janice vor der Tür: "Ich glaube, Sie waren mit meinem Vater verheiratet." Verblüffung. Nur Sohn Nelson ist beigeistert und lädt Annabelle zum Thanksgiving ein. Der Abend gerät zum Fiasko...

A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her--from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. "A brief novel of deep feeling."--Time On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-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 the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

Die Vorgeschichte zu Shakespeares Hamlet: Gertrude, Tochter König Roriks, will den Mann nicht heiraten, den ihr Vater für sie ausgesucht hat. Doch die Staatsräson siegt. Der Schwager umwirbt sie, und in einer der schönsten Verführungsszenen, die Updike je geschrieben hat, erliegt sie seinem Begehren. Als der König Verdacht schöpft, bringen sie ihn gemeinsam ums Leben. Gertrude und Claudius feiern Hochzeit in Moll.

Collected with a dozen wonderful stories, all set in classic Updike territory, the short novel 'RABBIT REMEMBERED' is a major work in its own right - a riveting return to Updike's most celebrated fictional world. Janice and Nelson Angstrom, plus several other survivors of the irreducible Rabbit, fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium, as a number of old strands come together in entirely unexpected ways.

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 fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike's fictional world go round--married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.

Using details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that were the inspiration for Hamlet, John Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair with her husband's younger brother. As only he could, Updike recasts a tale of medieval violence and presents the case for its central couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude's warmth and lucidity, Claudius's soldierly yet peaceable powers of command are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince.

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 from the mists of Scandinavian legend into the daylight atmosphere of the Globe. I sought to narrate the romance that preceded the tragedy."

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way. The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime Talk reporter and New Yorker staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section's most original writers. Only in a collection of Talk stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter's field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano's; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the Times got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world.

"Erstens kann Updike auch im Faktischen das Erzählen nicht lassen; zweitens sieht er im Golfspiel keine Sache, sondern einen Daseinszustand, der Lust und Leid an der physischen und an der metaphysischen Welt mit besonderer Intensität zugänglich macht ... Die Lektüre dieser fachkundigen und zudem höchst amüsanten Betrachtungen dürfte auch jenen Leser erfreuen, der noch nie einen Fairway betreten konnte." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)