John Irving

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...

The author's most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, this novel is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself "worthwhile."

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that...

"The bestselling coming-of-age classic novel by John Irving-now in a limited 40th anniversary edition with a new introduction by the author. The opening sentence of John Irving's breakout novel, The World According to Garp, signals the start of sexual violence, which becomes increasingly political. "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater." Jenny is an unmarried nurse; she becomes a single...

"'The first of my father{u2019}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...

A collection of short stories and essays. The story, My Dinner at the White House, is an amusing piece on a dinner with President Reagan, The Imaginary Girlfriend is on the arts of writing and wrestling, while the title story is on a pig farmer who is being harassed by boys.

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,...