Problems and Other Stories

John Updike

ISBN 10: 0394507053 / ISBN 13: 9780394507057

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979

About this Item

"First Edition" and no statement of printing on the copyright page, with publisher's issue price of $10.00 on jacket front flap, and "10/79" publication date on back flap. Book is in very good+ condition, marred only by former owner name on front end paper, a little spine lean, some light foxing on edge of the text block (not extending onto page faces), and a light bump at bottom of spine. Binding is sound, with no reading crease in the spine. Boards are sharp cornered, unmarked and otherwise unworn, with bright silver and gilt titles on the spine. Pages are unworn and otherwise unmarked. The unclipped dust jacket, now protected by a removable mylar cover, is also in very good+ condition: whole and unmarked, with very light wear at top and bottom of spine, and a very thin line of foxing along top edge (mostly visible on verso, not front.) As with all Space Age Book purchases, I will ship this book in a moisture proof zip-loc bag, padded in bubble wrap, inside a sturdy box to assure it reaches its proud new owner in the same condition as my description.

Seller Inventory # 000766

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Problems and Other Stories
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394507053
• ISBN 13: 9780394507057
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 1.03 pounds

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.