John Updike

A collection of twelve poems describing the activities in a child's life and the changes in the weather as the year moves from January to December.

Seventy-year-old Owen Mackenzie does what people his age often do: he dwells on the past. For Owen, this means he obsessively recollects the places he's lived and how these locations functioned as settings for what the women in his life--his mother, two wives, and assorted lovers--gave him. He feels that these females are what provided life to his life, the material of his true existence, which, in this remembrance, he stretches like a canvas on the...

Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie return to the old Rhode Island seaside town where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne. Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish...

John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading "General Considerations," books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords,...

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read -- and remembered -- for a long time to come. --Publisher.

His son's return and reminders of a former romance threaten "Rabbit" Harry Angstrom's comfortable new prosperity.