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Toward the End of Time (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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John Updike began his career as one of America’s most skilled and most revered novelists forty years ago with the publication of The Poorhouse Fair (1959), a parable about social disintegration revolving around an old man and set twenty years in the future. Now, on the verge of the turn of the millennium, Updike has written another novel with a similar premise. Toward the End of Time is set in the year 2020, after the federal government has disintegrated in the wake of the Sino-American nuclear war. The old man this time is Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six-year-old retired...

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