In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his...

Two unconventional women, neighbors in adjacent New England townhouses--Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator--confront the costs and challenges of love.

"Brettigan's son, a once promising actor, has gone missing, and despite the fact that his wife, Alma, knows he left on purpose, she has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places, churches, storefronts, and benches, and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably...

Bowling? Nope. Another round of beers? Yawn. Three married men and their divorced buddy want to try something more intriguing on their boys' night out: a boy's night in with a blonde tootsie in a secret love pad. Unknown to them, the tootsie is really a doctoral student researching the love life of the suburban male. And she proves her smarts by keeping all four relationships strictly platonic, despite the boys' boasting to the contrary.

"Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the hypermasculine crustacean king who intimidates the other male lobsters, beds all the lady lobsters, and "wins" at life. At least not according to the ego-bursting feedback he's given in his freshman seminar. But Paul finds a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls, and maybe -- oh god, please -- he's beginning to catch the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Gutierrez. Cruising through high school as a sauced-out,...

E. M. Forster's first novel explores the comic and tragic effects of culture clash between insular, provincial British personalities and sensual Italian culture and atmosphere.

Lilia Herriton, an impulsive thirty-three-year-old widow from London, travels to Tuscany, where she falls in love with both Italy and the handsome, carefree Gino Carella, a dentist's son twelve years her junior. When news reaches the snobbish Herriton family that Lilia

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Blending personal accounts with data, Alissa Quart exposes the overwhelming economic, emotional, and social hardships faced by U.S. middle class families. Among the problems affecting them (including highly educated professionals who theoretically should be more economically secure), are gender bias, pregnancy/motherhood discrimination, disdain for care workers, exorbitant housing prices, health insurance and day-care costs, excessive student debt,...

With a radical take on narrative, disturbing yet beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a decaying bourgeois family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of amazing tactility and one of the great...