John Updike aims to shape the pastiche portrait of the homegrown terrorist (a la Richard Reid, John Walker, even Timothy McVeigh) into something psychologically rich and artistically profound. A lesser writer would have stumbled into ...

Finding wonderful stories that you don't already know is one of this collection's great pleasures....Updike has made some surprising--even striking--selections, and in consequence this collection seems far less predictable than it mig...

John Updike's twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful ...

The ever-surprising John Updike's twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the wo...

John Updike's twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts....

BEFORE THEY WERE THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, OUR HEROINES WERE A TRIO OF DELIGHTFULLY WICKED WITCHES.In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard,...

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcees–Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie–have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and s...

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as th...

John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father's Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign ...