I guess I knew now how awful Chicken Little must have felt. All sorts of things were just not right... very close to me... on the other side of the island. Yet Cassell would have to do his punishment first... So the politicians would feel better. Yeah... midnight had come and gone, we were on our own now, but nobody seemed to be wearing a watch.

“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

Was there really a golden age of the family in the 1950s—or ever? This penetrating history of the American family mounts a withering criticism of the “culture of nostalgia” that clouds current debate and offers a plan for reconstituting the American family dream.

The Commentary, the first full version on Paradise Lost since the Richardsons' in 1734, combines numerous resources with features used for the first time. It includes the best commentary from Annotations like Patrick Hume's (1695), to the variorum editions of Newton (1749) and Todd (1801-42), and the modern professional editions culminating in Alastair Fowler's (1968). Other elements include an essay on the early pre-annotative criticism from 1668, including Marvell, Dryden, Dennis, and others; copious use of the OED; numerous cross-references to Milton's other works and passages in Paradise Lost; fourteen excurses and other contributions by the present editors. This Commentary is itself a research library for Paradise Lost. It uniquely presents biblical, classical, and vernacular citations: the ultimate rather than a more recent source is cited, so dating the comment; every cited passage is quoted, and every question is in English. Only a text of the poem is required. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, William Moeck teaches English at Nassau Community College. Steven Jablonski is a public librari

This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects’ understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam’s sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall.