Couples (novel)

Couples is a 1968 novel by American author John Updike.

Summary

The novel focuses on a promiscuous circle of ten couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox. (The author was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts when he composed the book.)

Plot and characters

Much of the plot of Couples (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962 and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS Thresher on April 10, 1963, the Profumo affair, and the Kennedy assassination in November 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex in the 1960s. The book suggests that this relaxation may have been driven by the development of birth control and the opportunity to enjoy what one character refers to as "the post-pill paradise."

The book is rich in period detail. (In 2009, USA Today called the novel a "time capsule of the era.) The lyrical and explicit descriptions of sex, unusual for the time, made the book somewhat notorious. TIME magazine had reserved a cover story for Updike and the novel before knowing what it was about; after actually reading it they got embarrassed and discovered that "the higher up it went in the Time hierarchy, the less they liked it."

Couples (The Long Blondes album)

"Couples" is the second album by Sheffield band The Long Blondes. It was released on 7 April 2008 via Rough Trade Records, with the first single, "Century", released on 24 March 2008. The quotation marks in the album title were included as a reference to the David Bowie album "Heroes".

Recording

The album was recorded in October 2007 with Erol Alkan reprising production duties, having already produced many of their b-sides including "Fulwood Babylon", "All Bar One Girls" and "Five Ways to End It".

Reception

The album was generally well received by critics.The Independent called it "one of the albums of the year from one of the bands of the decade".The Fly described it as "a dark, sultry and sublime album" and gave it a four out of five stars.Uncut gave the album four stars and called it a "sleek, sexy affair....Flirtations with a darker sound and Donna Summer-style disco emerge",Mojo labelled the album "ambitious and close to unique".Drowned In Sound said that the band had created "an ambitious, forward-thinking pop record that tops their debut by quite some distance", and Allmusic called the LP an "exciting, challenging, daring listen that's full of brains".

Couple

Couple ( pronunciation ) or couples may refer to:

Basic meaning

People

Books

Film and TV

Novel

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

The genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years". This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Ian Watt, however, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century,

Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

The romance is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". However, many romances, including the historical romances of Scott,Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."

Moon of Israel (novel)

Moon of Israel is a novel by Rider Haggard, first published in 1918 by John Murray. The novel narrates the events of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt told from the perspective of a scribe named Ana.

Haggard dedicated his novel to Sir Gaston Maspero, a distinguished Egyptologist and director of Cairo Museum.

Adaptation

His novel was the basis of a script by Ladislaus Vajda, for film-director Michael Curtiz in his 1924 Austrian epic known as Die Sklavenkönigin, or "Queen of the Slaves".

References

External links

Novel (disambiguation)

A novel is a long prose narrative.

Novel may also refer to:

See also