Becoming John Updike


Becoming John Updike
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Becoming John Updike


Becoming John Updike
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Author : Laurence W. Mazzeno
language : en
Publisher: Camden House
Release Date : 2013

Becoming John Updike written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and has been published by Camden House this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013 with Literary Criticism categories.


When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that Becoming John Updike pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.



Conversations With John Updike


Conversations With John Updike
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Release Date : 1994

Conversations With John Updike written by John Updike and has been published by Univ. Press of Mississippi this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1994 with 20th categories.


Collects thirty-two interviews with the writer between 1959 and 1993.



Self Consciousness


Self Consciousness
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Random House
Release Date : 2012-03-13

Self Consciousness written by John Updike and has been published by Random House this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-03-13 with Biography & Autobiography categories.


John Updike’s memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his Foreword states, “to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.” In the service of this metaphysical effort, he has been hair-raisingly honest, matchlessly precise, and self-effacingly humorous. He takes the reader beyond self-consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into sheer wonder at the miracle of existence.



Picked Up Pieces


Picked Up Pieces
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Random House
Release Date : 2013-01-15

Picked Up Pieces written by John Updike and has been published by Random House this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-01-15 with Literary Collections categories.


In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”: “Better to praise and share,” he says in his Foreword, “than to blame and ban.” And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early “golf dreams,” and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life, books, wit—and John Updike.



Odd Jobs


Odd Jobs
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Random House
Release Date : 2012-12-04

Odd Jobs written by John Updike and has been published by Random House this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-12-04 with Literary Collections categories.


To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.



My Father S Tears And Other Stories


My Father S Tears And Other Stories
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Penguin UK
Release Date : 2009-07-02

My Father S Tears And Other Stories written by John Updike and has been published by Penguin UK this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-07-02 with Fiction categories.


A beautiful, moving collection of short stories, in many of which Updike revisits the haunts of his childhood from the vantage point of old age. In 'Fiftieth' old friends reconnect at a class reunion, and one of them is left wondering, 'What does it mean: the enormity of having been children and now being old, living next to death.' In the story 'The Full Glass' the protagonist describes somewhat ruefully the rituals of old age. Before going to bed, he raises his nightly water glass 'drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.' In 'Varieties of Religious Experiences' a grandfather, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights, watches the tower of the World Trade Centre fall, and his view of a God is forever altered. Again and again in these memorable stories, Updike strikes to the heart, giving words to what is so often left unsaid. He is at once witty, devastatingly observant, touching - and, of course, a consummate storyteller. This is a collection that will be admired and cherished.



Of The Farm


Of The Farm
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Penguin UK
Release Date : 2007-08-30

Of The Farm written by John Updike and has been published by Penguin UK this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-08-30 with Fiction categories.


Of the Farm recounts Joey Robinson's visit to the farm where he grew up and where his mother now lives alone. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife, Peggy, and an eleven-year-old stepson, Joey spends three days reassessing and evaluating the course his life has run. But for Joey and Peggy, the delicate balance of love and sex is threatened by a dangerous new awareness.



Seek My Face


Seek My Face
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Penguin UK
Release Date : 2004-01-29

Seek My Face written by John Updike and has been published by Penguin UK this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2004-01-29 with Fiction categories.


On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes ...



Higher Gossip


Higher Gossip
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Penguin UK
Release Date : 2012-05-03

Higher Gossip written by John Updike and has been published by Penguin UK this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-05-03 with Literary Collections categories.


Higher Gossip is a last collection of essays, poems, short stories and criticism from the late John Updike. 'Gossip of a higher sort' was how the incomparable John Updike described the art of the review. Here then is the last collection of his best, most dazzling gossip. Influential reviews of Toni Morrison, John le Carré and Ann Patchett and expert critique on exhibitions of El Greco, Van Gogh and Schiele are included alongside previously uncollected short stories, poems and essays on his 'pet topics'. Following earlier prose collections More Matter and Due Considerations, Updike began compiling Higher Gossip shortly before his death in 2009. Displaying his characteristic humour and insight on subjects as varied as ageing, golf, dinosaurs, make-up and his own fiction, the delightful Higher Gossip bookends a legacy of over fifty celebrated titles. Praise for Higher Gossip: 'All illuminating cross-section of his whole career. It will be required reading for Updike's many fans, but it also serves as an excellent pick'n'mix introduction to his omnivorous intellectual range' Daily Telegraph 'Measured, erudite, and humorous writings' Boston Globe 'Updike was that rare creature: an all-around man of letters, a literary decathlete who brought to his criticism an insider's understanding of craft and technique; a first-class appreciator of talent . . . an ebullient observer [with] a contagious, boyish sense of wonder' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009. Christopher Carduff, the editor of this volume, is a member of the staff of The Library of America.



Villages


Villages
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Author : John Updike
language : en
Publisher: Random House
Release Date : 2007-12-18

Villages written by John Updike and has been published by Random House this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-12-18 with Fiction categories.


A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows Owen Mackenzie from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, “How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!” His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: “A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.” This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.