These autobiographical stories about growing up in small-town Pennsylvania are among John Updike’s best, and were the closest to his heart. Selected by the author from his first eight years of work for The New Yorker, these tales set in the fictional town of Olinger were first gathered in one volume in 1964, in a paperback edition that has long been out of print. They are brought together again now - for the first time ever in hardcover - in a fiftieth-anniversary edition. The eleven stories include ‘Pigeon Feathers’ in which a farm boy’s innocent faith is tested by the seeming faithlessness of parents and clergy; ‘The Happiest I’ve Been’, a timeless tale of leaving home and taking the first steps towards adulthood; and ‘Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car’, a reverie on the everyday that is, magically, as detailed and eventful as any novel. Updike considered this his signature collection, one that communicated his freshest impressions of life in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s and ‘40s. This new edition of Olinger Stories, including the author’s original preface, restores a significant work to the Updike canon.

A brilliant, far-reaching collection of stories from Washington Irving to John Updike.

A brilliant, far-reaching collection of stories from Washington Irving to John Updike.

These eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village’, about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding and losing moments of romantic rapport, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Now these stories appear in a single volume in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story ‘Grandparenting’, which returns us to the Maples long after their wrenching divorce. Together, The Maples Stories offers a nuanced portrait of a flawed marriage between two sympathetic, well-intentioned practitioners of twentieth-century family life.

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.

John Updike was a master storyteller, and this collection, from his final years, reveals that up to the end he remained the finest short-story writer of his generation. 'Magnificent, exhilarating, crisply evocative, rippling with irony. Updike's genius can be seen on peak form. With this book, a talent that burnt brightly goes out in a blaze of brilliance' Sunday Times 'A haunting valedictory alive with characteristic preoccupations: small-town life; "domestic duplicity"; travel; aging rituals; and the transience of existence. This is a collection filled with nuanced observations, descriptive flair and sentences that stop you in your tracks' Metro

A brilliant, far-reaching collection of stories from Washington Irving to John Updike. The Classic Stories Edgar Allan Poe s "Ms. Found in a Bottle," Bret Harte s "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," Sherwood Anderson s "Death in the Woods," Stephen Vincent Benet s "By the Waters of Babylon" The Great Writers Melville, James, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, McCullers The Little-Known Masterpieces Edith Wharton s "The Dilettante," Finley Peter Dunne s "Mr. Dooley on the Popularity of Fireman," Charles M. Flandrau s "A Dead Issue," James Reid Parker s "The Archimandrite's Niece""

Owen Mackenzie's life story abounds with sin and seduction, domesticity and debauchery. His marriage to his college sweetheart is quickly followed by his first betrayal and he embarks upon a series of affairs. His pursuit of happiness, in a succession of small towns from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, brings him to the edge of chaos, from which he is saved by a rescue that carries its own fatal price.

Owen Mackenzie's life story abounds with sin and seduction, domesticity and debauchery. His marriage to his college sweetheart is quickly followed by his first betrayal and he embarks upon a series of affairs. His pursuit of happiness, in a succession of small towns from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, brings him to the edge of chaos, from which he is saved by a rescue that carries its own fatal price.

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 . . .

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 banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west...

An intoxicating yet sensitive novel about the sexual experiences of ten couples from Tarbox, New England. Well-to-do, sociable, articulate but dangerously unfulfilled; they play word games in the evening and adultery all year round.

Книга для чтения. Джон Апдайк - знаменитый американский писатель, поэт, критик. Неоднократный обладатель Пулитцеровской премии. "Rubbit, Run" ("Кролик, беги") - первый из серии романов про "Кролика". В нем перед читателями предстает Гарри Энгстром, бывший баскетболист, пытающийся бежать от угнетающей обыденности окружающего мира. В книге представлен неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала.

A post-humous, autobiographical collection of poetry from John Updike, one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth cenury and author of modern classic novel Rabbit, Run Updike had a boundless capacity for curiosity and delight. This collection of poems from across his career displays his extraordinary range in form and subject: from metaphysical epigrams, and lyrical odes to blank-verse sonnets, on topics from Roman busts to Lucian Freud to postage stamps. These poems are nimble and inventive, exploring art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, growth, decay and rebirth. Collected in chronological order, from precocious undergraduate efforts to frequently anthologized classics, this is an autobiography in verse for every Updike fan and a celebration of twentieth century American life.

The first book in his award-winning 'Rabbit' series, John Updike's Rabbit, Run contains an afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'. John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at The New Yorker. Updike was the author of twenty-one novels as well as numerous collections of short stories, poems and criticism, and is one of only three authors to win more than one Pulitzer Prize. His most famous works are the Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom series, all of which are published in Penguin Modern Classics: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail...