John Updike

And Other Stories';Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.' That's how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories. He might have been writing about himself. In My Father's Tears, the author revisits his signature characters,...

A NovelIn this antic riff on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries...

A NovelThe Jewish American novelist Henry Bechprocrastinating, libidinous, and tart-tongued, his reputation growing while his powers declinemade his first appearance in 1965, in John Updike's ';The Bulgarian Poetess.' That story won the O. Henry First Prize, and it and the six Bech adventures that followed make up this collection....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award The hero of John Updike&'s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the events of Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as the chief sales representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is...

A NovelIn 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,...

A new anthology of short fiction features twenty-two diverse tales that explore the magical fragility, memory, nostalgia, and translucent quality of life beyond middle age....