The third volume of Library of America's five-volume edition of Updike's novels features the continuation of the renowned Rabbit saga and two wickedly funny satires set in the charged realms of sex, politics, and family.The third volume in our five-volume selected edition of the novels of John Updike includes three books: The Coup, one of Updike's most outlandish satires, set in a fictional African nation; Rabbit Is Rich, the third, and many say best, novel starring his most famous protagonist; and the wildly popular The Witches of Eastwick, which was memorably adapted in the film starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson. In The Coup, a surprising departure from his prior novels, Updike stages a withering take down of an array of targets, from American materialism and its baleful effects on the developing world to the follies of Cold War geopolitics and the fevered megalomania of the dictatorial mind. In Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment of the Rabbit tetralogy, we meet up with Harry Angstrom, now 46, dealing as best he can with the challenges and cares of midlife, a time when "you are carrying the world in a sense and yet it seems more out of control than ever." In The Witches of Eastwick, Updike imagines a small New England town possessed by magic-at least as practiced by the female trio at its center who, freed from the burdens of their marriages, make common cause and unleash their whimsical witchcraft on Eastwick's narrow-minded townspeople.

Value: these three novels in paperback ($51) costlier than our hardcover edition; e-books would be $37, not so much cheaper than our hardcovers. Rabbit Is Rich: The Rabbit books are Updike's most acclaimed and lasting works, and for many readers Rabbit Is Rich is the best book in the tetralogy. The Witches of Eastwick: This remains one of Updike's best-known novels, due to the film version and to a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick Annotation: This is the first annotated edition of Updike's novels Bonus material: Appendix contains three pieces by Updike with his remarks on two of the three novels collected here.