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  • Published: 17 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780141188485
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $39.99

The Poorhouse Fair




'A work of art' - The New York Times

At the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair, a summer celebration at which the old and infirm sell their produce on stalls to the people of the local town. Bitter, resentful and edging towards senility, the elderly residents of the Home take pride every year in the responsibility and self-respect they gain from this one day. But when the fair goes less well than the old folks had hoped, they are in no doubt who to blame: Conner, the new prefect of the home. Together, they begin to revolt against the younger man, and reassert their own independence.

  • Published: 17 July 2006
  • ISBN: 9780141188485
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

John Updike

JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

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