Everyman's pocket classics

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike's career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, "Grandparenting," which returns us to the Maples's lives long after their wrenching divorce.From the Hardcover edition.

"Shaken and Stirred is an enticing literary cocktail of stories about drinking and making merry by great writers from the past two centuries. In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppances at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; innocents overimbibe in tales by Jack London and Alice Munro; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Clarice Lispector, Joy Williams, Penelope Lively, and many more. The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a cafe in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties, and the occasional jail cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, bartenders and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers waking with hangovers. Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred"--