John Updike, página 4 de 10

El día de verano en que se celebra la feria organizada por un pequeño asilo de Nueva Jersey es la jornada más importante del año para sus ancianos y enfermos residentes. Se trata de un acontecimiento que anualmente organizan con mucha ilusion para vender a los vecinos de la pequeña poblacion los productos que han hecho ellos mismos. Sin embargo, parece que en esta ocasion las cosas no se van a desarrollar como se habian planificado en un principio. A lo largo del dia, los extraordinariamente cercanos personajes de La feria del asilo se desnudan ante nosotros y nos desvelan sus anhelos, sus esperanzas, sus creencias y sus angustias, mostrandonos su desarmante humanidad. La primera novela publicada por Updike, una tragicomica fabula sobre la compasion y la comprension, prefigura ya muchos de los temas, los ambientes y los caracteres que seran recurrentes a lo largo de toda su trayectoria narrativa. Una excelente oportunidad para recuperar las raices de un referente de la literatura estadounidense.

On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes . . .

More than three decades have passed since the events described in The Witches of Eastwick and the three divorcees - Alexandra, Jane and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world to exotic lands such as Canada, China and Egypt and renew old acquaintances. And then, one summer, they decide to go back to Eastwick. The old Rhode Island seaside town where they once indulged in sensuous mischief still holds enchantment for the three, but it also holds memories, and there are those who remember them and wish them ill . . .

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...

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all.

"He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time." —William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972) A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, "Olinger Stories," already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as "a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern." These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled "Out in the World," "Married Life," and "Family Life," tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of "The Two Iseults," a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. "Tarbox Tales" are followed by "Far Out," a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and "The Single Life," whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduringAtlantic Monthly and Harper's to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review. All show Mr. Updike's wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world. From the Hardcover edition.

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 life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

In an evolving relationship between two women - interviewer and interviewee - the women move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, annunciatory ang

The trilogy comprises of "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux" and "Rabbit is Rich". It is intended as an amusing, sympathetic study of a man, Rabbit Ang

Roger Lambert, profesor universitario de Teología, recibe un día en su despacho a Dale Kohler, un joven informático que asegura tener una noticia extraordinaria. Está buscando evidencias científicas de que Dios existe y se esta manifestando. El paradojico debate sobre la existencia de Dios que mantiene con Dale Kohler no es mas que el principio de una serie de cambios en la vida de Roger, que vera como las relaciones que mantiene con su mujer Esther y con la hija de su medio hermana, Verna Ekelof, haran temblar los cimientos de su existencia.

La parroquia de una población de Nueva Inglaterra tiene como pastor episcopaliano al reverendo Tom Marshfield, un hombre ingenioso, inteligente y encantador. El problema de Marshfield es que le gustan mucho las mujeres, tanto como para saltarse sus obligaciones como ministro de la Iglesia y tener aventuras con sus feligresas. ¿Es posible reformar a un cura mujeriego capaz de utilizar la religion como un instrumento para justificar sus acciones? Un mes de domingos es una profunda y, al mismo tiempo, irreverente novela, en la que John Updike plantea una serie de dilemas e interrogantes en torno a la religion en el seno de la sociedad norteamericana, sobre todo en relacion con el sexo. Escrita en un tiempo record y publicada originalmente en 1975, Un mes de domingos se convertiria con el paso del tiempo en la primera novela de una brillante trilogia conocida como La letra escarlata, en referencia al clasico de Nathaniel Hawthorne, del cual Updike partio para analizar incisivamente la dualidad entre espiritu y carne, y las dificultades intrinsecas para conciliar ambos aspectos de la naturaleza humana.

Golpe de estado, fábula política sobre un país africano imaginario en el que ha sido implantada una revolución de corte marxista e islámico y que se debate entre una sequía pertinaz y la insidiosa infiltracion del imperialismo americano, es una magistral obra narrativa en la que John Updike, con audacia imaginativa, virtuosismo estilistico y aires de gran comedia burlesca, escarnece las antitesis politicas del mundo de hoy y nos ofrece una lucida y comica reflexion acerca de las formas del poder despotico. Con Golpe de estado, Updike, el mas brillante narrador norteamericano de las ultimas decadas, ha creado una magistral comedia de absurda yuxtaposicion cultural, una burlesca parodia de las antitesis ideologicas en que se debate el mundo moderno con un gran despliegue de erudicion geografica, teologica e historica que recuerda con frecuencia la extraordinaria capacidad creadora de otro gran prosista moderno: Vladimir Nabokov.

Charles Lindsay's photographs offer a humorous and inquisitive foray into the hazards of lost golf balls - rough, woods, bunkers and wetlands - as well as unexpected encounters with wildlife on and off the green. An avid golfer, he photographs his way to the heart of the matter with a light touch and an eye for telling details. In the process he discovers balls ravaged by golfers, 'gators and foxes. Lindsay even comes face to face with what is believed to be the world's oldest golf ball - unearthed in a cellar in the Netherlands alongside a primitive club - and the infamous spot in the tall grass where Tiger Woods lost a ball that cost him the British Open. There are photographs from golf courses all over the world. The Foreword by John Updike is a celebration of golf and nature and why the two are not always compatible. A humorous anecdote by Greg Norman and quotes from other well-known golfers and celebrities also appear throughout the book.

Taking its title from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, In the Beauty of the Lilies traces one family's profound journey through four generations - and across the spiritual landscape of twentieth-century America. It is one of John Updike's fullest and finest work of fiction.

En Tarbox, una apartada y pequeña comunicad de Nueva Inglaterra, todo parece transcurrir en armonía en un grupo de parejas que practican entre sí intercambios sexuales. Pero algo empieza a distorsinarse con la llegada de un joven matrimonio, y la desconfianza, la insidia, las intrigas y... ¿Como no?, los celos.