John Irving
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In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County-to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto-pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. A tale that...
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In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. Owen Meany believes he didn't hit the ball by accident. He believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after 1953 is extraordinary and terrifying.
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First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch–saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
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"As we grow older--most of all, in what we remember and what we dream--we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. "An aura of fate had marked him," John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. "The chain of events, the links in our...
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While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant.
But what if the donor's widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally...
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Dedicated to the memory of two wrestling coaches and two writer friends, The Imaginary Girlfriend is John Irving's candid memoir of his twin careers in writing and wrestling. The award-winning author of best-selling novels from The World According to Garp to In One Person, Irving began writing when he was fourteen, the same age at which he began to wrestle at Exeter. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, was certified as a referee at twenty-four,...
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A commemorative hardcover edition of the only collection ever published of the celebrated novelist's shorter works. Here is a treat for devoted fans of John Irving. First published twenty years ago, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by the author, beginning with three memoirs. The longest of the memoirs is "The Imaginary Girlfriend," his candid account of his twin careers in writing and wrestling, which, as the Denver Post observed,...
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For teachers
We know that the Common Core State Standards are encouraging you to reevaluate the books that you assign to your students. To help you decide which books are right for your classroom, each free ebook in this series contains a Common Core–aligned teaching guide and a sample chapter.
This free teaching guide for A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is designed to help you put the new Common Core State Standards into practice.
"Among...
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Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
2005
Description
Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. His father, William, is an Edinburgh organist who is addicted to being tattooed. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports - Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and Amsterdam, in search of his father, who is missing. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns...
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His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving's In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love--tormented, funny, and affecting--and an intimate, unforgettable portrait of the novel's bisexual narrator and main character, Billy Abbott. As Billy says: "We are formed by what we desire."
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"THERE is no more agreeable mode of passing a day, and thereby breaking in upon the tedium of a long summer's residence in Charleston, than taking advantage occasionally of the opportunity now afforded for a weekly excursion on Cooper River….."So begins this wonderful reminiscence of South Carolina plantation life, written by Charleston physician-and rice planter himself-John B. Irving. Originally published in 1842, this reads as beautifully today...
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Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years — a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics.
In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor.
Her son,...
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Publisher
Modern Library
Pub. Date
1998
Description
The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.
----"Nothing...
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Publisher
Dutton
Pub. Date
c1981
Description
“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends...