It’s not just Updike scholars who seem excited to see what Adam Begley has to say in his unauthorized biography Updike, which is due in bookstores on April 8. The book was also included by a contributing editor of The Millions in a feature on “Most Anticipated: The Great 2014 Book Preview.” 

“What’s left to say about John Updike that Updike didn’t already say exhaustively, and say better than anyone else could have?” Garth Risk Hallberg asks, sounding eerily like Updike himself.

“Yet Adam Begley has apparently found enough fresh material, or a fresh enough angle on the well-trod, to fill 576 pages. For a primer on Updike, there’s no way this book can surpass Nicholson Baker’s U & I, but it’s always a good sign when a literary biographer is a novelist himself.”

Begley’s Updike biography is also one of the books singled out in USA Today‘s “Winter Books preview: From Nancy Horan to Robin Roberts.”