John Irving

'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.' Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is both extraordinary and terrifying.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

20th ANNIVERSARY EDITIONwith a new Afterword from the author The "New York Times" bestseller This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes--even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with "lunacy and sorrow"; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries--with more than ten million copies in print--this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."

The World According to Garp

By E.L. Doctorow

City of God

Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming

The Hotel New Hampshire

Twenty years after The World According to Gary, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy and the "difficult" women who survive.
--back cover

A Widow for One Year

a novel

In One Person

Last night in twisted river

A Son of the Circus

The Fourth Hand

Until I find you

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, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees. John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

The Last Chairlift

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 his dreams and memories will travel with him; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. 'An aura of fate had marked him,' John Irving writes. 'The chain of events, the links in our lives - what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do - all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.'

Avenue of Mysteries

The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive.

The 158-pound Marriage

"John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist."--Los Angeles Times Fred "Bogus" Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark. "Three or four times as funny as most novels."--The New Yorker Praise for The Water-Method Man "Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years]."--Terrence Des Pres "Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry."--Time

The Water-method Man

It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller. From the Paperback edition.

Setting Free the Bears

A collection of one dozen short works includes the title piece, a loving portrait of the author's grandmother, and additional stories, including "The Pension Grillparzer" and "Dinner at the White House"

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

""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 by the remarkable author of "A Widow for One Year" and "The Cider House Rules,"

Roman

Das Hotel New Hampshire

T. S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals

The author combines a portrait of the world of wrestling with a memoir that portrays a father's dedication to his children.

A Memoir

The Imaginary Girlfriend

“Truly remarkable . . . encompasses the longings and agonies of youth . . . a complex and moving novel.”—Time “Astonishing . . . a writer of uncommon imaginative power. Whatever [John Irving] writes, it will be worth reading.”—Saturday Review It is 1967. Two Viennese university students, Siggy and Hannes, roam the Austrian countryside on their motorcycles—on a quest: to liberate the bears of the Vienna Zoo. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences in this first novel from John Irving, already a master storyteller at twenty-five years old. “Imagine a mixture of Till Eulenspiegel and Ken Kesey . . . and you've got the range of the merry pranksters who hot rod through Mr. Irving's book . . . tossing flowers, stealing salt shakers, and planning the biggest caper of their young lives.”—The New York Times

John Irving

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