• Introduction
• Rabbit, run
• Rabbit redux
• Rabbit is rich
• Rabbit at rest.

"Four novels trace the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom against the changing American society from the sixties to the eighties."-- Provided by publisher.

"A beautiful Selected volume of this masterly writer's poetry, giving us five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse. Though John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers of prose, he began and ended his career with books of poems, and between them published six other accomplished collections. Now, six years after Updike's death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his lifework in poetry: 132 of his most significant and accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to well-known anthology classics to the late-life mastery of the blank-verse sonnet sequence "Endpoint." Art, nature, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and personal history--these recurring topics provided the poet ever-surprising occasions for metaphysical wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as fellow-poet Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century, and no one but Updike "captured upon the page, in prose and in poetry, so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is yet another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant.""-- Provided by publisher.

• Ace in the hole
• Friends from Philadelphia
• A game of Botticelli
• Tomorrow and tomorrow and so forth
• Dentistry and doubt
• The kid's whistling
• Toward evening
• Snowing in Greenwich Village
• Who made yellow roses yellow
• His finest hour
• Sunday teasing
• The lucid eye in silver town
• A trillion feet of gas
• Incest
• A gift from the city
• Intercession
• The alligators
• The happiest I've been
• Walter Briggs
• The persistence of desire
• Still life
• Flight
• Should Wizard hit Mommy
• Dear Alexandros
• A sense of shelter
• Wife-wooing
• Pigeon feathers
• Home
• Archangel
• The sea's green sameness
• You'll never know, dear, how much I love you
• The astronomer
• A & P
• The doctor's wife
• Lifeguard
• The crow in the woods
• The blessed man of Boston, my grandmother's thimble, and Fanning Island
• Packed dirt, churchgoing, a dying cat, a traded car
• Unstuck
• In football season
• The Indian
• A madman --

• My uncle's death
• Solitaire
• Leaves
• The stare
• Museums and women
• Avec la bebe-sitter
• Four sides of one story
• The morning
• At a bar in Charlotte Amalie
• The Christian roommates
• My lover has dirty fingernails
• Eclipse
• Harv is plowing now
• The music school
• The rescue
• The dark
• God speaks
• The Bulgarian poetess
• The family meadow
• Man and daughter in the cold
• The hermit
• During the Jurassic
• The witnesses
• The pro
• The slump
• Under the microscope
• The corner
• The day of the dying rabbit
• I am dying, Egypt, dying
• Cemeteries
• The deacon
• I will not let thee go, except thou bless me
• One of my generation
• The hillies
• The orphaned swimming pool
• Plumbing
• The carol sing
• Minutes of the last meeting
• The baluchitherium
• The Tarbox police
• When everyone was pregnant
• The beloved
• The invention of the horse collar
• Jesus on Honshu
• Commercial
• The gun shop
• Believers --

• How to love America and leave it at the same time
• Nevada
• Son
• Daughter, last glimpses of
• Ethiopia
• Transaction
• Augustine's concubine
• Killing
• The chaste planet
• A constellation of events
• The man who loved extinct mammals
• Problems
• Love song, for a Moog synthesizer.

The Library of America presents the first of two volumes in its definitive Updike collection. Here are 102 classic stories that chart Updike's emergence as America's foremost practitioner of the short story, "our second Hawthorne, " as Philip Roth described him. Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Domestic life in America
• From the journal of a leper
• The fairy godfathers
• The egg race
• The parade
• The faint
• Guilt-gems
• Atlantises
• Morocco
• Trust me
• More stately mansions
• Still of some use
• The lovely troubled daughters of our old crowd
• Venezuela for visitors
• Pygmalion
• The city
• Learn a trade
• The ideal village
• Deaths of distant friends
• First wives and trolley cars
• The other
• One more interview
• Slippage
• Poker night
• Made in heaven
• Getting into the set
• The wallet
• The other woman
• Beautiful husbands
• Leaf season
• The afterlife
• Wildlife
• The burglar alarm
• Comjunction
• Brother grasshopper
• Spat
• The journey to the dead
• The football factory
• Part of the process
• The lens factory
• The man who became a soprano
• Short Easter
• A sandstone farmhouse
• The other side of the street
• Aperto, chiuso
• Tristan and Iseult
• Farrell's caddie --

• The rumor
• Falling asleep up North
• The brown chest
• His mother inside him
• Bluebeard in Ireland
• Baby's first step
• Playing with dynamite
• Scenes from the fifties
• The black room
• Cruise
• The woman who got away
• Lunch hour
• New York girl
• The cats
• My father on the verge of disgrace
• Licks of love in the heart of the Cold War
• Oliver's evolution
• Natural color
• How was it, really?
• Metamorphosis
• Personal archaeology
• Free
• The guardians
• The walk with Elizanne
• The laughter of the Gods
• Varities of the religious experience
• Spanish prelude to a second marriage
• Delicate wives
• The accelerating expansion of the universe
• German lessons
• The road home
• My father's tears
• Kinderszenen
• The apparition
• Blue light
• Outage
• The full glass.

The Library of America presents the second of two volumes in its definitive Updike collection. Here are 84 classic stories that display the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was Updike's signature.. Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Following on from the acclaimed "Just Looking" and "Still Looking", "Always Looking" is an insightful collection of art criticism and a masterclass in appreciating art - from the great American man of letters, John Updike. "Always Looking" treats readers to a series of elegant and sensitive essays on art, and includes writing on a comprehensive array of subjects, both American and European. In "The Clarity of Things", Updike looks closely at Copley, Homer, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, in order to explore what is 'American' in American art. From here he moves to masterpieces of American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from the sublime landscapes of Frederic Church and the series paintings of Monet and Degas, to the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte and the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. With more than two-hundred full-colour reproductions, "Always Looking" is an invitation to see the world afresh through the eyes of John Updike, a matchless connoisseur. "Our time's greatest man of letters - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable". (Philip Roth). "He was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence". (Ian McEwan). "Updike was that rare creature: an all-around man of letters, a literary decathlete who brought to his criticism an insider's understanding of craft and technique; a first-class appreciator of talent, capable of describing other artists' work with nimble, pictorial brilliance; an ebullient observer, who could bring to essays about dinosaurs or golf or even the theory of relativity a contagious, boyish sense of wonder". (Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times"). John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009. Christopher Carduff, the editor of this volume, is a member of the staff of The Library of America. He is also the editor of Higher Gossip, a collection of John Updike's essays and criticism.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Hub fans bid kid adieu
• Ted Williams, 1918-2002.

On September 28, 1960-a day that will live forever in the hearts of fans-Red Sox slugger Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last at-bat in Fenway Park. Seizing the occasion, he belted a solo home run- a storybook ending to a storied career. In the stands that afternoon was 28-year-old John Updike, inspired by the moment to make his lone venture into the field of sports reporting. More than just a matchless account of that fabled final game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" is a brilliant evocation of Williams' competitive spirit, an intensity of dedication that still "crowds the throat with joy." Now, on the 50th anniversary of the dramatic exit of baseball's greatest hitter, The Library of America presents a commemorative edition of "Hub Fans, " prepared by the author just months before his death. To the classic final version of the essay, long out-of- print, Updike added an autobiographical preface and a substantial new afterword. Here is a baseball book for the ages, a fan's notes of the very highest order.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Snowing in Greenwich village
• Wife-wooing
• Giving blood
• Twin beds in Rome
• Marching through Boston
• The taste of metal
• Your lover just called
• Waiting up
• Eros rampant
• Plumbing
• The red-herring theory
• Sublimating
• Nakedness
• Separating
• Gesturing
• Divorcing : a fragment
• Here come the Maples
• Grandparenting.

In 1956 John Updike wrote a short story about newly-weds Joan and Richard Maple. Over the next two decades he returned to this couple again and again, tracking their years together as they raise children and deal with the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Gathered here for the first time in hardcover - and with the addition of a later story, "Grandparenting", that shows us the Maples after their divorce - "The Maples Stories" offers a nuanced portrait of two deeply flawed but moving characters and their entwined lives. 'Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing really succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.' - From the Foreword by John Updike.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, "My Father's Tears" finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. "Personal Archaeology" considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and "The Full Glass" distills a lifetime's happiness into one brimming moment of an old man's bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in "The Walk with Elizanne" and "The Road Home, " restore their hero to youth's commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, "the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition." Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in "The Guardians, " "The Laughter of the Gods, " and "Kinderszenen." Love's fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of "Free, " "Delicate Wives, " "The Apparition, " and "Outage." In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the wake of race riots and an airline strike, John Updike came to the University of Cincinnati in April 2001 as an honored guest. Over two spring days, he engaged and charmed his audiences, reading from his fiction, fielding questions, sitting for an interview, participating in a panel discussion, and touring Cincinnati. Successful writers typically spend a portion of their non-writing lives traveling the country to give readings and lectures. While a significant experience for author and audience alike, this public spectacle, once covered in detailed newspaper accounts, now is barely noticed by the media. "Updike in Cincinnati" - composed of a wealth of materials, including session transcripts, short fiction read and discussed by the author, photographs, and anecdotal observations about Updike's behavior in the Queen City - is unique in comprehensively documenting a literary visit by a major American author. Updike's verbal eloquence, intelligence, improvisational skills, and gift for comedy are displayed in full vigor. With natural grace, the author discusses a range of topics, including his own work, his mother and his oldest son as writers, Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Nobel Prize, his appearance on "The Simpsons", the divine right of kings and Ottoman sultans, and "Hamlet". "Updike in Cincinnati" portrays one of America's literary giants as an adept and talented public performer.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Nobody has done more to chart American life through fiction over the last half-century than John Updike, and he is as much a master of the short story as of the novel as this collection proves.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)