LitLovers

Rabbit at Rest (Rabbit Quartet, #4) John Updike, 1990 Random House 480 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449911945 Summary Pulitizer Prize winner, 1991 In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his...

Rabbit Is Rich (Rabbit Quartet, #3) John Updike, 1981 Random House 432 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449911822 In Brief Winner, 1982 Pulitizer Prize Ten years after Rabbit Redux , Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is,...

Rabbit Redux (Rabbit Quartet, #2) John Updike, 1971 Random House 368 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449911938 Summary This second novel of the Rabbit quartet finds the former high-school basketball star working a dead-end job and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, the city of his birth. When his wife leaves him...

Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Quartet, #1) John Updike, 1960 Random House 272 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449911655 Summary Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more...

The Widows of Eastwick John Updike, 2008 Knopf Doubleday 320 pp. ISBN-13: 9780307269607 Summary More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick . The three divorcées—Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie—have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do:...

Roger's Version John Updike, 1986 Knopf Doubleday 480 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449912188 Summary A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife — and...

Couples   John Updike, 1968 Random House 480 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449911907 Summary Couples focuses on a promiscuous circle of married friends in the fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox. Much of the novel (which takes place in 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible...

The Centaur   John Updike, 1963 Random House 320 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449912164 Summary    Winner, National Book Award In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins...

The Coup   John Updike, 1978 Random House 480 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449242599 Summary In his freewheeling satire, Updike dissects government disfunction in Kush, a fictionalized, modern African state. He also skewers America's hapless compulsion to dispense its largesse. Narrated tongue-in-cheek by Kush's exiled president, Colonel Felix Ellellou, Updike...

Summary   |  Author   |  Book Reviews   |  Discussion Questions The Witches of Eastwick   John Updike, 1984 Random House 306 pp. ISBN-13: 9780449912102 In Brief   Before they were the widows of Eastwick, our heroines were a trio of delightfully wicked witches. In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies,...

Too young to die. John Updike was only 76 and, many suspect, still taking copious notes as he drew his last breath in hospice care in Massachusetts on January 27. His lifelong output was astonishing, not just in number but genre: novels, short stories, verse, essays, and criticism. On subject matter, he was equally wide-ranging, moving from...

Collected Stories   Carol Shields, 2004 HarperCollins 693 pp. ISBN-13: 9780060762049 Summary With the profound maturity and exquisite eye for detail that never failed to capture readers of her prize-winning novels, Carol Shields dazzles with these remarkable stories. Generous, delightful, and acutely observed, this essential collection illuminates...

Freedom   Jonathan Franzen, 2010 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 562 pp. ISBN-13: 9780312600846 Summary Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get...

White Teeth   Zadie Smith, 2000 Knopf Doubleday 464 pp. ISBN-13: 9780375703867 Summary   Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her...

Unless   Carol Shields, 2002 HarperCollins 352 pp. ISBN-13: 9780060098896 Summary “Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.” Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year...

The Stone Diaries Carol Shields, 1994 Penguin Group USA 400 pp. ISBN-13: 9780143105503 Summary Canada Governor General's Award (1994) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1995) The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts...

The Surrendered Chang-rae Lee, 2010 Penguin Group USA 435 pp. ISBN-13: 9781594489761 Summary With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered , Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous...