Couples
by John Updike | 
In the Beauty of the Lilies
by John Updike | 
A Month of Sundays
by John Updike | 
Poorhouse Fair
by John Updike | 
S.
by John Updike | 
As Max Saw It
by Louis Begley | 
The Poorhouse Fair
by John Updike | 
The Tunnel
by William H. Gass | 
Of the Farm
by John Updike | 
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
by John Fante | 
The Disenchanted
by Budd Schulberg | 
God's Little Acre
by Erskine Caldwell | 
1933 Was A Bad Year
by John Fante | 
Desperate Characters
by Paula Fox | 
Whores for Gloria
by William T. Vollmann | 
The Groves of Academe
by Mary McCarthy | 
Roger's Version
by John Updike | 
Reinhart's Women
by Thomas Berger | 
The Messiah of Stockholm
by Cynthia Ozick | 
Mrs. Ted Bliss
by Stanley Elkin |
Alfred Clayton, the hero of John Updike's fifteenth novel, has received a request from the Northern New England Association of American Historians for his memories and impressions of the Gerald Ford Administration (1974-77). "Alf" obliges with his memories of a turbulent period in his personal history, as well as pages of an unpublished book he was writing at the time, on the life of James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States (1857-61). The alternating texts body forth an arresting contrast between the life-styles and social dictions of two American centuries. The contemporary characters include Clayton's wife, Norma, whom he thinks of as the Queen of Disorder, and his mistress, Genevieve Mueller, whom he thinks of as the Perfect Wife, as well as his various colleagues on the faculty of Wayward College in New Hampshire. The characters around Buchanan include his doomed fiancee, Ann Coleman, and such eloquent contemporary politicians as Andrew Jackson, Edwin Stanton, and (in his capacity as American Consul in Liverpool) Nathaniel Hawthorne. All come unsettlingly to life in Clayton's wide-ranging confessions, which bring us down to the year 1991.