John Updike – författare

Ständigt återupptäckt sextiotalsklassiker*Inkluderad i Time Magazines lista över: »De 100 bästa engelskspråkiga romanerna«.*»Så tät skriven och en ren uppvisning i meta­forer. Läsandet blir som att gnaga på ett revbensspjäll.« | JAN GRADVALL, DAGENS INDUSTRI Harry Angstrom var basketesset i High School men lever nu som försäljare av automatiska grönsaksskalare. Smeknamnet »Haren« fick han på grund av sina lustiga ryckningar i näsborrarna. En dag flyr »Haren«, från familjen, Janice och deras tvåårige son. Han vill »söderut«, men råkar köra vilse och flyttar i stället in hos sin gamle baskettränare. »Haren« träffar en annan kvinna, men måste fly från henne också, tillbaka till Janice. Bortsett från sin kroniska bortkommenhet verkar »Haren« själv alltid klara sig smärtfritt. Hittills... Med Haren springer [Rabbit, Run, 1960] pulvriserade John Updike frihetsmyten i en road novel genom att visa vad som verkligen händer när någon sticker från de sina (människor går sönder). En sextiotalsroman som levt vidare på 2000-talet: omtryckt, översatt, refererad, citerad. Den berömda mening ur boken som citeras i anslaget till hip hop-filmen 8 Mile sammanfattar Updikes perspektiv: »If you have the guts to be yourself, other people 'll pay your price.«I översättning av Gottfried Grafström och med ett nyskrivet förord av litteraturkritikern Nils Schwartz.JOHN UPDIKE [1932-2009] var en amerikansk romanförfattare, novellist och kritiker, som flera gånger belönades med Pulitzerpriset. Många av hans böcker skildrar nutidsmänniskans splittring och vilsenhet med den amerikanska småstaden som spelplats. Haren springer [Rabbit, Run, 1960] var den första i en pentalogi med fristående romaner om »Haren«, vilka var och en gavs ut med ett decenniums mellanrum, mellan 1960 och 2000.»Rörande, briljant. Lika känslig som skarpsynt studie över desperationen och hungern inom oss alla.« | NEW YORK TIMES»Romanens kraft kommer från en känsla, inte ovärdig Thomas Hardy, av att universum hänger över våra öden som en stor, grådaskig, hopplös himmel. Det finns verklig smärta i den här boken, men också ett stråk av förundran.« | NORMAN MAILER»Modernista har all heder av återutgivandet av denna klassiker vars innehåll erbjuder en mycket välskriven och överraskande modern berättelse med ett hejdundrande akrobatiskt och suggestivt språk med metaforer som man stannar handlöst beundrande inför.« | BENNY HOLMBERG, TIDNINGEN KULTUREN»Haren springer är något så originellt som en gammaldags moralitet utklädd till beatnikroman.« | RASMUS LANDSTRÖM, ARBETARBLADET

The first book in his award-winning 'Rabbit' series, John Updike's Rabbit, Run contains an afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at The New Yorker. Updike was the author of twenty-one novels as well as numerous collections of short stories, poems and criticism, and is one of only three authors to win more than one Pulitzer Prize. His most famous works are the Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom series, all of which are published in Penguin Modern Classics: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).If you enjoyed Rabbit, Run, you might like Don DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'It is sexy, in bad taste, violent and basically cynical. And good luck to it'Angus Wilson, Observer 'That special polish, that brilliance; Updike is among the best'Malcolm Bradbury'Brilliant and poignant ... By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright rose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and our own'Washington Post

As a golfer for almost forty years, John Updike has written frequently about the game. 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.

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?

It's 1989, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore, but somehow can't. He has to make the most of life, after all. He doesn't have much time left ...

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail ...

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

When the three witches - now old, remarried and widowed - decide to go back to Eastwick to spend a summer together, many things have changed. Darryl Van Horne is gone. Their husbands and lovers have gone. The lithe and supple bodies with which they wrecked marriages and wreaked havoc many years before have gone - and have been replaced with the quiet aches and encumbrances of age. But a chemistry still crackles between the three and magic still lingers in the Eastwick air, and soon it becomes clear that there are those around them who remember them, and wish them ill. The Widows of Eastwick takes the mischief and enchantment of The Witches of Eastwick and reshapes it in a new emotional landscape, resulting in a sensitive study of the passing of youth and a darkly funny novel that shines with luminous sexual reminiscences and satirical observations about modern America.

John Updike was a master storyteller, and this collection, from his final years, reveals that up to the end he remained the finest short-story writer of his generation.'Magnificent, exhilarating, crisply evocative, rippling with irony. Updike's genius can be seen on peak form. With this book, a talent that burnt brightly goes out in a blaze of brilliance' Sunday Times'A haunting valedictory alive with characteristic preoccupations: small-town life; "domestic duplicity"; travel; aging rituals; and the transience of existence. This is a collection filled with nuanced observations, descriptive flair and sentences that stop you in your tracks' Metro

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.

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.

Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by critics and readers across the world. Here, the experiences of this bemused literary icon, one of Updike's greatest creations, are described in hilarious detail, as he travels the world struggling to break his writer's block; returns to his native America to find new success with Think Big, his all-time blockbuster; and visits communist Czechoslovakia, where he is greeted by a dizzyingly adoring public. Brilliantly comic and deeply poignant, The Complete Henry Bech is one of the greatest of all explorations of the writing life and of what happens when an writer becomes a literary celebrity.

Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Neach, and presents her with a ring. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west....

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio, luring them to his mansions...

An intoxicating yet sensitive novel about the sexual experiences of ten couples from Tarbox, New England. Well-to-do, sociable, articulate but dangerously unfulfilled; they play word games in the evening and adultery all year round.

When a history professor - Alfred Clayton, the hero of John Updike's fifteenth novel - is asked to record his impressions of the Ford Administration, he recalls a turbulent piece of personal history as well: his unfinished book on 19th-century president James Buchanan.

Updike's seventh novel concerns a month of seven days, a month of enforced rest and recreation as experienced by the Reverend Tom Marshfield, sent west from his Midwestern church in disgrace.

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 to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels.

Sally is big, blonde and pampered. She’s married to Richard. But she loves Jerry. Jerry loves Sally in return, but he’s also still in love with his wife Ruth. Who’s been sleeping with Richard … As a hot, feverish summer of snatched weekends, secret phone calls and illicit lovemaking on the beach comes to a head, it turns out everyone knows more than they’ve been letting on. And that no one knows quite when to stop.

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.

The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers — a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final daysIn the words of his contemporary, Philip Roth, John Updike was ‘Our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer’.Over the course of his long and immensely productive career, he also proved himself a brilliant correspondent, his letters filled with comic observations, opinions and personal news, told in his characteristically elegant and exquisitely fluid style.In this sparkling selection of his letters, edited by James Schiff, we can see Updike in real time, capturing every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Pulitzer prizewinner; and from young father negotiating his first book contract to the bestselling writer he became, following the international success of his novels Couples and the ‘Rabbit ‘sequence.Here are letters to family, friends, editors and lovers, a remarkable outpouring over six decades – including, most movingly perhaps, the letters of his final year bidding farewell to children, colleagues and friends.Taken together, these missives make a page-turning ‘life in letters’ like no other – an intimate testament to one of the greatest of all American writers.‘Nobody has a better understanding of the capriciousness of the human heart than John Updike’ Daily Telegraph‘He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather’ James Wood‘John Updike mapped our desires, our wishes, our wise and unwise dreams, our uncertainties, with such elegant precision and for so many years’ The Times

Higher Gossip presents John Updike's last collection of essays, poems and short stories.'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 Carré 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.

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.