This book looks past the frequently discussed autobiographical nature of John Updike's fiction to consider the role in Updike's work of the most powerful and peculiar human faculty: the imagination. Michial Farmer argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a neces[...]

The Library of America presents the second of two volumes in its definitive Updike collection. Here are 84 classic stories that display the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was Updike's signature.. Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its f[...]

In 1956 John Updike wrote a short story about newly-weds Joan and Richard Maple. Over the next two decades he returned to this couple again and again, tracking their years together as they raise children and deal with the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Gathered here for the first time in[...]

Master storyteller Mark Twain hilariously recreates the very first days, portraying Adam as something of a recluse, and a man who is ill prepared for the arrival of Eve, a talkative, emotional and highly charged female. Yet, in time, and after many moments of conflict, they begin to learn to live to[...]

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naive, wry and avuncula[...]

"Istvikskie vedmy» vozvraschajutsja! Avantjuristki i iskatelnitsy prikljuchenij, oni nikak ne mogut zabyt demonicheskogo Darrila Van Khorna. A potomu Aleksandra, Dzhejn i Sjuki reshajut nenadolgo zagljanut tuda, gde perezhili samoe uvlekatelnoe prikljuchenie v svoej zhizni.No? «sentimentalnoe pute[...]