Bøger af John Updike

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 . . .

Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for novels about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, John Updike, though very much aware of his gifts and blessings, believed himself to be, like Rabbit, an everyman- 'a relatively fortunate American male'-and his life a specimen life, 'representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.' This belief animated his more than sixty autobiographical books-fiction, poetry, collections of first-person essays and memoirs-a body of creative work universal in its literary appeal but intimately based upon, as Updike himself called it, 'this massive datum that happens to be mine.'Now, more than a decade after his death, comes a generous volume of letters both personal and professional. We see, at last, Updike in 'real time,' documenting with preternatural facility every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Harvard scholarship student, from young father negotiating his first book contract to freelance writer revelling in the 'post-Pill paradise' of the swinging 1960s.Here too are letters to fellow practitioners of the writer's craft including Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, and Ian McEwan. Central to the collection are dozens of letters to Updike's mother, the aspiring novelist Linda Grace Hoyer, who modelled for him the life of a writer and was, until her death in 1989, his closest confidante. But the most moving, perhaps, are the letters of Updike's final year-farewells to his children, to colleagues and friends, and to a world that, in his letters as much as in every other form of writing he practiced, he had daily strived to give its 'beautiful due.'

"Two late masterpieces by John Updike that take on the American Century and Shakespeare's Hamlet, and a bittersweet coda to the Rabbit series: In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, and Rabbit Remembered"--

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolutionHere for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

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.

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, RunUpdike 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.

More Matter is a collection of John Updike's best-loved critical essays and reflections.From the journals of John Cheever to the Queen of England, More Matter is a lively discussion on contemporary art, issues and people, told from the inimitable perspective of Pulitzer prizewinner John Updike. Wide ranging, incisive, witty and always superbly written, it has something to say about almost everyone - from Graham Greene to Bill Gates to Mickey Mouse - and everything - from sexual politics to spiritual matters to unopenable packages. It provides any number of intimate glimpses into how this remarkable mind works.Praise for More Matter:'Unlike most journalism, Updike's occasional writing is so exquisite as to repay multiple readings' Publishers Weekly'More Matter attests to Mr. Updike's remarkable versatility and to his ardent drive to turn all his observations into glittering, gossamer prose. . . . In his strongest pieces, Mr. Updike's awesome pictorial powers of description combine with a rigorous, searching intelligence to produce essays of enormous tactile power and conviction' New York Times'More Matter will leave even his closest followers amazed. . . . Updike can write about anything, in any form and at any length, and do it with intelligence and knowledge and grace and agility and wit-and oh, the prose' Pittsburgh Tribune Review John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.

In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown.

Higher Gossip is a last collection of essays, poems, short stories and criticism from the late John Updike. 'Gossip of a higher sort' was how the incomparable John Updike described the art of the review. Here then is the last collection of his best, most dazzling gossip. Influential reviews of Toni Morrison, John le Carr and Ann Patchett and expert critique on exhibitions of El Greco, Van Gogh and Schiele are included alongside previously uncollected short stories, poems and essays on his 'pet topics'. Following earlier prose collections More Matter and Due Considerations, Updike began compiling Higher Gossip shortly before his death in 2009. Displaying his characteristic humour and insight on subjects as varied as ageing, golf, dinosaurs, make-up and his own fiction, the delightful Higher Gossip bookends a legacy of over fifty celebrated titles.Praise for Higher Gossip:'All illuminating cross-section of his whole career. It will be required reading for Updike's many fans, but it also serves as an excellent pick'n'mix introduction to his omnivorous intellectual range' Daily Telegraph'Measured, erudite, and humorous writings' Boston Globe'Updike was that rare creature: an all-around man of letters, a literary decathlete who brought to his criticism an insider's understanding of craft and technique; a first-class appreciator of talent . . . an ebullient observer [with] a contagious, boyish sense of wonder' Michiko Kakutani, New York TimesJohn Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.Christopher Carduff, the editor of this volume, is a member of the staff of The Library of America.

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.

'Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.'As an earnest golfer for over forty years, John Updike wrote frequently about the game. In Golf Dreams, Updike directs his inimitable style, his humour and shrewd insights towards a sport that, in turns, enthralled and infuriated him. This gathering of his pieces covers everything from the peculiar charms of bad golf and the satisfactions of an essentially losing struggle to the camaraderie of good golf and its own attendant perils.Praise for Golf Dreams:'John Updike has anatomized the greatness of golf with an eloquence only Wodehouse, in a lighter vein, has matched. It makes for a lyrical book which is also thought-provoking . . . his lowest handicap was 18, but, in this delightful book, he has not dropped a stroke' Max Davidson, Daily Telegraph'A stylish celebration of golf's propensity to transmogrify perfectly normal people into gibbering wrecks; not just 28-handicap novices but superstars, too' Jeff Randall, Sunday Times'There's a crafty pastiche of golf coaching manuals . . . and there's a delicious rumination on the dazzling green luxury of televised golf. There are high, arching flights of fancy concerning swing thoughts, the moral aspects of golf, the etiquette of the gimme . . . It is a treat both for Updike fans and for golf nuts' Robert Winder, Independent on SundayJohn Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959. Other novels by Updike include, Marry Me, The Witches of Eastwick, the Rabbit series and Villages. He has also written a number of volumes of short stories such as My Father's Tears and Other Stories and a poetry collection entitled Endpoint and Other Poems. His criticism, essays and other non fiction appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He died in January 2009.