Couples
by John Updike | 
In the Beauty of the Lilies
by John Updike | 
Poorhouse Fair
by John Updike | 
S.
by John Updike | 
The Poorhouse Fair
by John Updike | 
Memories of the Ford Administration
by John Updike | 
The Maples Stories
by John Updike | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers | 
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy | 
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens | 
Embers
by Sandor Marai | 
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy | 
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding | 
Rabbit at Rest
by John Updike | 
To Have and Have Not
by Ernest Hemingway | 
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion | 
Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens |
In this antic riff on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past-his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne. A testament for our times.