Two of John Updike's best novels in one volume. An excellent read.
Rabbit Angstrom Series
This series delves into the complexities of human existence, following a central character's journey through life's myriad challenges. It explores themes of identity, isolation, and the search for meaning in the modern world. The narrative is characterized by its raw realism and profound psychological insight into its characters.
Recommended Reading Order
Rabbit Redux
- 348 pages
- 13 hours of reading
It's 1969 and Rabbit has changed, as America has changed in the intervening ten years since the book "Rabbit, Run". His marriage is collapsing, his job is redundant and the urgency of racial tension present a challenge neither his consciousness nor his sexuality can resist.
Rabbit is Rich
- 467 pages
- 17 hours of reading
Harry Angstrom, now middle-aged and the chief sales representative of a Toyota dealership, attempts to cope with such problems as inflation, governmental ineffectiveness, the return of his prodigal son, and a chance encounter with an old girlfriend.
Rabbit at Rest
- 512 pages
- 18 hours of reading
Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son and daughter-in-law are acting erratically, his wife Janice wants to work, and Rabbit is searching his soul, looking for reasons to live.
Licks of love
- 368 pages
- 13 hours of reading
In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Several strands of the Rabbit saga come together here as, during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, Harry’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike’s fictional world go round—married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.
Related books
Rabbit Angstrom
- 1530 pages
- 54 hours of reading
Newly revised by the author for this edition, and printed together in one volume for the first time, Updike's four Rabbit novels chronicle the history of a man and a nation from the 1950s to the 1980s. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, athlete, is Mr Middle America. Dazzling in style, tender in feeling, often erotic in description and coruscating with realistic details which recreate a world in each novel, these books give a complete picture of their age.
The trilogy comprises of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. It is intended as an amusing, sympathetic study of a man, Rabbit Angstron, putting up a fight against the inevitable.
The first and second novels in John Updike's acclaimed quartet of Rabbit books -- now in one marvelous volume. RABBIT, RUN"Brilliant and poignant . . . By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright prose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and out own.The Washington Post"Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable observer of thoughts and feelings."The Village VoiceRABBIT REDUX"Great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence, wit, imagination, and feeling -- a great and beautiful thing . . . these hyperboles (quoted from a letter written long ago by Thomas Mann) come to mind after reading John Updike's Rabbit Redux.The New York Times Book Review "Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. . . . A masterpiece.Time
