Gertrude and Claudius is a novel by John Updike. It uses the known sources of Shakespeare's Hamlet to tell a story that draws on a rather straightforward revenge tale in the medieval Denmark depicted by Saxo Grammaticus in his twelfth-century Historiae Danicae, but incorporates extra plot elements added by François de …
Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and …
The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker. The French translation of the novel won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
Roger's Version is a 1986 novel by John Updike about Roger Lambert, a theology professor in his fifties, whose rather complacent faith is challenged by Dale, an evangelical graduate student who believes he can prove that God exists with computer science. Roger becomes obsessed with the thought that Dale is having an …
One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples …