Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....

From the Paperback edition.

John Updike's two Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to him for the last two Rabbit novels, and yet only now is the Rabbit tetralogy appearing in audio form (as indeed is its sequel, the novella "Rabbit Remembered"). A long wait, perhaps, but many of the infelicities of the early days of audio books have thus been avoided. The match between reader Arthur Morey and the life and times of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) couldn't be improved upon; in fact, for this reader and listener, the work has been enhanced. Morey's down-to-earth, matte-finished voice complements the novels' intense materiality and dailiness. He shades it in various degrees to reflect the characters, male and female, old and young, their race, their class and even, most entertainingly, the formulaic hack journalism of the Linotype-setting passages in "Rabbit Redux." Morey delivers the general narration with impeccable understatement, conveying the sense of dissatisfaction, the air of moribundity and of "stifled terror," that pervades the work as a whole. His slow pacing allows the reader to savor the precision of Updike's imagery, as — to quote a passage describing Rabbit's existence after his wife leaves him — the "days, pale slices between nights ... blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade."

Powers, who reviews audio books for The Washington Post Book World, writes a literary column for the Boston Globe.

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It's incredible! No, I think it's the most interesting American novel I've read in quite a long time"

-- Mary McCarthy, interviewed in The Paris Review

"The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe"

-- Norman Mailer, Esquire

"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically cynical. And good luck to it."

-- Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer

And Rabbit Redux

"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and popular acclaim."

-- Brendan Gill, The New Yorker

"I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written."

-- Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review

From the Hardcover edition.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews. He is the author of sixteen other books of fiction and the father of two sons and two daughters. Since 1957 he has resided in Massachusetts.

From the Hardcover edition.