Christopher Carduff – författare

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolutionHere for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

The Library of America's five-volume edition of Updike's novels culminates with three masterful late works: a brilliant exploration of the American Century; a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and a bittersweet coda to the Rabbit seriesThe capstone volume of the Library of America edition of John Updike’s novels contains some of the master stylist and social observer’s most ambitious works.   In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) opens in 1910, when Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, NJ, experiences a devastating loss of faith. This moment of crisis sets in motion an eighty-year, multigenerational saga whose subject is nothing less than the American Century and modernity itself, seen through the fluctuating fortunes of a single representative family.  In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike boldly imagines the long backstory to the world’s most famous play, prompting readers to revisit and perhaps revise their judgments about Hamlet’s notorious uncle and mother. Drawing on the twelfth- and fifteenth century sources for Hamlet, but also inventing a new history for Claudius in his far-flung travels across medieval Europe, Updike creates a vivid and surprising origin story for the fabled rottenness in Shakespeare’s Denmark.  The novella Rabbit Remembered (2000) is a poignant final curtain call for one of the greatest characters in twentieth-century American literature. Once again the setting is Brewer, Pennsylvania, but now Harry Angstrom’s family are figuring out their lives in his absence. Harry’s ghost is insistently present, and the stories shared by his children suggest that the reckoning with those closest to us, for better and for worse, never really ends.   None of these books have ever been published in an annotated edition. This deluxe editions includes six rare pieces by Updike reflecting on the novels collected here.