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.

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.

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.

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""

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.

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 . . .

The short story is one of the most varied and exciting genres in American literature. This collection brings together many of its finest examples from the early nineteenth century to the present. It contains a richly diverse cast of characters, including convicts, artists, farm labourers, slaves, soldiers and salesmen, witches and ghosts, families and lovers. Their stories are told by some of America's most celebrated writers (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver) and a few, like Fanny Fern or Charles W. Chestnutt, who may be less familiar. The collection offers a stimulating combination of acknowledged classics, including Mark Twain's hilarious 'Jim Smiley's Jumping Frog' and Edgar Allan Poe's chilling 'The Tell-Tale Heart', and some remarkable pieces that deserve a wider audience, such as Ernest Hemingway's story of miscommunication, 'Out of Season', or Lorrie Moore's tale of modern love and wit, 'Starving Again'. Kasia Boddy's introduction traces the history of the American short story and explores the changes and continuities in its forms and preoccupations. This edition also contains a chronology, explanatory and biographical notes and suggestions for further reading. Table of contents Washington Irving - The Little Man in Black (1807) Nathaniel Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown (1835) Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Fanny Fern - Aunt Hetty on Matrimony (1851) Mark Twain - Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865) Joel Chandler Harris - The Tar Baby Story (1880) Mary Wilkins Freeman - Two Friends (1887) Charles W. Chesnutt - The Wife of his Youth (1898) Henry James - The Real Right Thing (1899) Stephen Crane - An Episode of War (1899) O. Henry - Hearts and Hands (1903) Sherwood Anderson - The Untold Lie (1917) Ernest HemingwayOut of Season (1923) Edith Wharton - Atrophy (1927) Dorothy Parker - New York to Detroit (1928) Eudora Welty - The Whistle (1938) William Faulkner - Barn Burning (1939) F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Lost Decade (1939) Zora Neale Hurston - Now You Cookin' with Gas (1942) Bernard Malamud - The First Seven Years (1950) Flannery O'Connor - A Late Encounter with the Enemy (1953) John Updike - Sunday Teasing (1956) John Cheever - Reunion (1962) Grace Paley - Wants (1971) Alice Walker - The Flowers (1973) Donald Barthelme - I Bought a Little City (1974) Raymond Carver - Collectors (1975) Richard Ford - Communist (1985) Lorrie Moore - Starving Again (1990) Jhumpa Lahiri - The Third and Final Continent (1999) Lydia Davis - The Caterpillar (2006)

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright and literary critic, one of the key writers of the early twentieth century, most famous for his criticism of rationalism and industrialization. "A Fragment of Stained Glass and Other Stories" is a delightful collection of author's early short stories like "The Thorn in the Flesh", "Daughters of the Vicar", "The Shadow in the Rose Garden", and "Goose Fair".

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright and literary critic, one of the key writers of the early twentieth century, most famous for his criticism of rationalism and industrialization. "A Fragment of Stained Glass and Other Stories" is a delightful collection of author's early short stories like "The Thorn in the Flesh", "Daughters of the Vicar", "The Shadow in the Rose Garden", and "Goose Fair".

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright and literary critic, one of the key writers of the early twentieth century, most famous for his criticism of rationalism and industrialization. "A Fragment of Stained Glass and Other Stories" is a delightful collection of author's early short stories like "The Thorn in the Flesh", "Daughters of the Vicar", "The Shadow in the Rose Garden", and "Goose Fair".

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright and literary critic, one of the key writers of the early twentieth century, most famous for his criticism of rationalism and industrialization. "A Fragment of Stained Glass and Other Stories" is a delightful collection of author's early short stories like "The Thorn in the Flesh", "Daughters of the Vicar", "The Shadow in the Rose Garden", and "Goose Fair".

At the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair, a summer celebration at which the old and infirm sell their produce on stalls to the people of the local town. Bitter, resentful and edging towards senility, the elderly residents of the Home take pride every year in the responsibility and self-respect they gain from this one day. But when the fair goes less well than the old folks had hoped, they are in no doubt who to blame: Conner, the new prefect of the home. Together, they begin to revolt against the younger man, and reassert their own independence.

John Updike was always as much a poet as a storyteller and the poems in this, his final collection, celebrate the everyday, even as they address his own imminent mortality. It is in the connected series of poems, Endpoint, written on his last few birthdays and culminating with the illness that killed him, that Updike's work is at its most touching and poignant.

'Graham Greene's masterpiece' John Updike During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, a worldly priest, the 'whisky priest', is on the run. With the police closing in, his routes of escape are being shut off, his chances getting fewer. But compassion and humanity force him along the road to his destiny, reluctant to abandon those who need him, and those he cares for.