Over the course of several years beginning in the 1950s, a man and his oddball family run hotels in New England and Vienna, as unexpected events change their lives forever.

本書在美國甫出版即登上美國暢銷書排行榜冠軍。 作者榮獲二○○一年美國文藝學院獎。 即將改拍成電影，由約翰‧厄文親自編劇，並和「狗臉的歲月」瑞典導演萊塞赫‧爾斯多再度合作，暫定由喬治‧庫隆尼主演。 主角是一名新聞記者──派屈克‧華靈福，他無時無刻都在等待災難、等待八卦、等待醜聞。 有一回，採訪印度馬戲團的新聞時，全國觀眾在電視機前，看著他的左手當場被獅子吃掉。後來，有一個寡婦願意捐贈她丈夫的手給他，條件是她擁有手的看護權，而他要付出的代價就是給她一個小孩。 俊美的派屈克身邊盡是一些古怪的女人，他也都順著她們，從來沒有自己的想法。 一個一心想要和他上床幫他生小孩的女主管、一個和他上床的女性主義者要他改變他的一生、一個要他陪她去墮胎的祖母級女人……而他真正愛的卻是那個把丈夫的手捐給他、卻不愛他的寡婦…… 書中有大量滑稽好笑的情節和極盡諷刺新聞媒體的描述，但它不只是一部喜劇而已。約翰‧厄文就說：「這不是關於一個傢伙如何要回他的手的故事，而是要探討，到底有什麼東西從我們的生活中遺失了。」

"Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications." --The Washington Post 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. "One of the most remarkable things about John Irving's first three novels, viewed from the vantage of The World According to Garp , is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise. . . . The 158-Pound Marriage is as lean and concentrated as a mine shaft." --Terrence Des Pres

John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory. In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you. Lupe doesn’t know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future? As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. 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. Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.

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.... "Three or four times as funny as most novels." THE NEW YORKER

‘The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud’s so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer’s intention to make St Cloud’s his home.’ Homer Wells’ odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage’s founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend…

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Not least, it is an intimate portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.” Beginning with his first love—an older, transgender woman—and including the classmates and lovers he will lose to AIDS, William Abbott makes an unforgettable statement about sexual repression in America.

A writer's young assistant becomes both pawn and catalyst in his boss's disintegrating household.

‘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.

'One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole awoke to the sound of lovemaking - it was coming from her parents' bedroom'. This is the story of Ruth Cole. It is told in three parts: on Long Island, in the summer of 1958, when she is only four; in 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career; and, in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's also about to fall in love for the first time...

In 1954．in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire，an anxious twelve—year-old boy fatallv mistakes the local constable’S girlfriend for a bear．Both the twelve-year．old and his father become fugitives—to Boston，to southern Vermont，to Toronto—pursued over the years by the implacable constable．Their lone protector IS a fiercely libertarian logge~once a river drive~who befriends them and distantly watches over them like a vast，idiosyncratic guardian…

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis. ----"Nothing in contemporary fiction matches it," said critic Terrence Des Pres. "Irving's blend of gravity and play is unique, audacious, almost blasphemous. . . . 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 disrupt, often fatally. Life, in Irving's fiction, is always under siege." Time magazine commented: "Irving's popularity is not hard to understand. His world is really the world according to nearly everyone." ----This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the author. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editons of impor-tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoringas its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

‘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 this funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.