Twenty-two stories on life in the sunset lane, illustrating the saying that every age has its charm, including old age. By the author of Brazil.

Tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father's slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair...

Traces God's relation to four generations of an American family.

John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading "General Considerations," books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords,...

A collection of 22 short stories which share the theme of trust, mostly betrayed, but sometimes fulfilled

"John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam." "The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of...

Classic love story of Tristao Raposo and Isabel Leme set in Brazil spanning twenty-two years from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Eighties.

"The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty,...

Attempting to cling to the ideals and world of his childhood, anaging conservative finds life increasingly difficult to understandduring the turbulent sixties.