Posts by Sneed
The 158-Pound Marriage
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.
Read MoreThe Water-Method Man
The main character of John Irving’s second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract—and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first.
Read MoreSetting Free the Bears
It is 1967. Two Viennese university students 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 written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller.
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