“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 of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.
“A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie.”
—New York Times Book Review
THE CIDER HOUSE RULES
First published in 1985 by William Morrow, The Cider House Rules is John Irving’s sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century, it 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. It is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
“[Irving] is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving’s own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
TRYING TO SAVE PIGGY SNEED
Here is a treat for John Irving addicts and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. To open this spirited collection, Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years ending with an homage to Charles Dickens. This irresistible collection cannot fail to delight and charm.
“Hilarious. Highly enjoyable stories with zany plots and unforgettable characters, made all the more readable by Irving’s silky smooth prose.”
—The Independent
A SON OF THE CIRCUS
“Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, reared in Bombay by maverick foes of tradition, educated in Vienna, married to an Austrian and long a resident of Toronto, is a fifty-nine-year-old without a country, culture or religion to call his own.... The novel may not be ‘about’ India, but Irving’s imagined India, which Daruwalla visits periodically, is a remarkable achievement—a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries.”
—New York Newsday
“A Son of the Circus is comic genius.... Get ready for Irving’s most raucous novel to date.”
—Boston Globe
THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND
The Imaginary Girlfriend is a candid memoir of the writers and wrestlers who played a role in John Irving’s development as a novelist and as a wrestler. It also portrays a father’s dedication—Irving coached his two sons to championship titles. It is an illuminating, concise work, a literary treasure.
“The nearest thing to an autobiography Irving has written.... Worth saving and savoring.”
—Seattle Times
A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR
Twenty years after The World According to Garp, John Irving gave us his ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, about a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.
Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
“By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments.”
—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
MY MOVIE BUSINESS
After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and uncounted rewrites, the movie version of John Irving’s acclaimed novel The Cider House Rules at last made it to the big screen. Here is the author’s account of the novel-to-film process. Anecdotal, affectionate, and delightfully candid, My Movie Business dazzles with Irving’s incomparable wit and style.
“Writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.... This short, amiable book is John Irving’s personal history of seeing—or not seeing—his novels made into movies.... The book digresses charmingly and effortlessly into related subjects. There is a beguiling memoir of his grandfather, an eminent surgeon; a brilliant and passionate argument for the freedom of women to choose abortion … observations on the origins of his novels, and so on.... Irving remains cooly objective, and it is clear why: he is a novelist, first and foremost, and his attitude toward the movie business is informed by this security and certainty.... Irving has done us [writers] proud.”
—New York Times Book Review
THE FOURTH HAND