Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, Rabbit Remembered - Paperback

by John Updike (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

A TOUCHING, ELEGIAC COLLECTION OF STORIES about infidelity, about the weight of family, about the dwindling of years, about the heart and other organs. . . . [Updike] works so slowly and carefully that you rarely see the emotional punches coming.
-"Newsweek
"THESE STORIES SHARE A THEME OF RETROSPECT AND A BITTERSWEET TONE OF FORGIVENESS. . . . Updike, who has found in Rabbit an indispensable, if unlikely, vehicle for his truest insights into the mysterious of manhood, the promise of American life and the operations of divine grace, could no more pass up the opportunity for a further Rabbit report than Rabbit himself could forgo a bowl of macadamia nuts. . . . His observations eddy and swirl into the main stream of his narrative, swelling it with life."
"-The New York Times Book Review
" 'RABBIT REMEMBERED' IS A THING OF RICH SATISFACTION. . . . IMPOSSIBLE TO FORGET . . . Throughout the collection are passages of stylistic certainty and bittersweet intimacy."
"-The Boston Sunday Globe
"OUTSTANDING WORK . . . We always suspected that Updike would try to pull one more Rabbit out of his hat. Now, some 10 years after the death of everybody's favorite Updike character, Updike has done just that, and with great success. . . . 'Rabbit Remembered' ranks with his best work."
"-The Star-Ledger
"GLIMMERING . . . SEDUCTIVE . . . JOHN UPDIKE HITS HIS STRIDE"
"-Entertainment Weekly

Author Biography

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.