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John Updike

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 23:32:00 +0000

From Harvard to a staff position on The New Yorker, John Updike turned his brainy pedigree into a successful career as a novelist, essayist and critic. His novels "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Couples" (1978) and Pulitzer winner "Rabbit is Rich" (1981) exemplify his sophisticated take on contemporary middle-class tragedy. One of contemporary fiction's most prolific writers, Updike has also written numerous short stories and poems, as well as engineered a group-written mystery story on the Internet.

"Bech at Bay and Before," his 49th book, chronicles the varied literary and personal life of Henry Bech, a New York writer, from Vietnam through the sagging end of the Seventies, and up into the post-Gutenbergian world of the Nineties.

Listen to an excerpt from "Bech at Bay and Before," (Random House Audio) read by actor Ron Rifkin.

Updike in love

Mon, 24 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Loving by Henry Green

An English estate in Ireland during World War II lyrically houses amorous doings among both masters and servants.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

A young bourgeois wife seeks spiritual and sexual fulfillment away from the marital bed and runs grievously into debt.

The Princesse de Clhves by Madame de Lafayette

A long extramarital attraction is consummated by the heroines announcement that the way to keep love alive is not to marry.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos

Polymorphous seduction and betrayal among the terminally jaded 18th century aristocracy: an epistolary novel.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Among the Puritan pioneers of Boston, a promising clergyman falls afoul of a dark-haired proto-feminist and her wizardly older husband.