Problems and Other Stories

Updike, John

ISBN 10: 0394507053 / ISBN 13: 9780394507057

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979

About this Item

260 pages. Signed in name only by John Updike on title page. John Updike lecture ticket is laid in, and dated Dec. 08,1998 in Kansas City. Light rubbing and slight fading on edges. Small inked $2.00 price on blank front paste down. Light foxing on edges. Otherwise tight and clean. Price clipped dust jacket shows a one inch closed tear from upper edge over bottom cover. Jacket shows a couple of other small tears, and light scuffs and smudges. Jacket remains bright and is fairly clean, and is now protected in a clear mylar sleeve. Seller Inventory # 033025

Bibliographic Details

Title: Problems and Other Stories

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Publication Date: 1979

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition, Third Printing

About this title

Synopsis:

In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning, suffocation, and guilt. His self-seeking heroes tend to be forty; his heroines are asleep, seductive, longing, or reproachful. None of these characters is innocent, and all are looking vainly for the road back to an imagined Paradise. Pain and comedy closely coexist in this mainly domestic world of the 1970s, where life is indistinguishable from a television commercial (but what is it advertising?) and every morning’s paper brings news of lost Atlantises.

About the Author:

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.