John Updike's new novel is set in a New Jersey mill town that has fallen on hard times. Once home to energetic, white immigrants from Eastern Europe, this city, New Prospect, has decayed to the point where "those who occupy the inner city now are brown, by and large, in its many shades." Brown-ness and its discontents are central to the novel, and Updike is acutely aware of the many tints and gradations of this color.
3 сентября - этот день, после Беслана, стал днем солидарности в борьбе с терроризмом.
The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence.
The dozen short stories in Updike's new collection revisit many of the locales of his fiction: the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger, the lonely farm to which the hero moves as an adolescent, the exurban New England of adult camaraderie and sexual mischief, and the New York City of artistic ambition and taunting glamour.
One of the most enduring and prolific American authors of the latter half of the 20th century, John Updike has long been recognized by critics for his importance as a social commentator. "John Updike and the Cold War" examines how Updike's views grew out of the defining element of American society in his time - the Cold War. D. Quentin Miller argues that because Updike's career began as the Cold War was taking shape in the mid-1950s, the world he creates in his entire literary oeuvre - fiction, poetry and nonfiction prose - reflects the optimism and the anxiety of that decade.
