Monthly Archives: January 2019

Interviewed memoirist mentions Updike

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John Updike was mentioned in ​The Forward​’s article, “On The Books: 5 Questions For Stephen Shepard, Author Of ​A Literary Journey To Jewish Identity: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers,” in which Shepard discussed his upcoming memoir about self-discovery within Jewish-American literature.

Shepard said the addition of Updike “was the wild card” in the canon, but one he felt a personal connection to: “I was a big Updike fan, so I just started going back to reread them and wrote about the so-called ‘Jewish Updike.’”

Shepard explained his preference for earlier Jewish writers over conemporary ones: “The Jewish writers back then meant something to me,” he said. “I wasn’t grappling now with the same issues that I was then about my Jewish identity and what it meant to be a Jew in post-war America.”

Read the full article here.

Popsugar thinks Updike’s Eastwick witches sweet

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Popsugar​ had a few recommendations for readers who love books with witches in them. Not surprisingly, included in “These 11 Books About Witches Will Put a Spell on You,” by Hannah Abrams, is John Updike’s​ T​he Witches of Eastwick.​

Updike’s novel follows three Rhode Island divorcees in the 1960s who suddenly find themselves bestowed with magical powers. All is fun and games for the women until “​things take a harrowing turn.”

Updike’s book-lovers can also be spellbound by the big-screen adaptation, which features Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer​, and Susan Sarandon, Abrams reminds us.

Read the full article here.


Updike is one of 10 important late 20th-century authors

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John Updike continues to find recognition and relevance, recently included in ​ThoughtCo’s “10 Important Contemporary and Late-20th-Century Authors,” written by Mark Flanagan.

Decades after his time, Updike’s legacy continues to hold relevance in the 21st century after he was recognized as “​one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.”

Updike’s renowned ​Rabbit Angstrom novels, Of the Farm (1965) and Olinger Stories: A Selection (1964) had been “named in 2006 among the best novels of the past 25 years in a ​New York Times​ Book Review survey,” Flanagan reminds us.

Read the full article here.

Updike’s advice to young writers

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John Updike’s writing tips appear in a nearly two-minute video published by ​Melville House​: “John Updike’s Writing Advice is Something All Writers Should Try,” by Stephanie Valente.

Updike offers young writers insight and advice for the writing process: “Develop actual work habits. Reserve an hour or more a day to write,” Updike says.

Updike advises writers to simply “read what excites you. Even if you don’t imitate it, you will learn from it.” He also points out the bitter-sweet reality: “Don’t try to be rich,” Updike says. “Writers work to entertain and instruct a reader.”

Watch the full video here.

Published: “Black Activism: John Updike”

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It has come to our attention that the critical essay “Black Activism: John Updike” by Suchitra Vashisth, an assistant professor at DIT University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, was published last year in the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (Vol. 3, Issue 1; Jan.-Feb. 2018).

“As a a literary artist, he has given us most powerful expression of the American racist society,” Vashisth writes, adding that “Rabbit Redux contains the story of the black revolution in America in the nineteen sixties. Updike reveals, through the speeches of Skeeter, black revolutionary, social injustices with the blacks in American society” and paraphrasing Richard Locke’s assessment that “the wide range of tones and rhythms in black speech has never been so well produced in contemporary white writing.”

Vashisth concludes, “The remarkable thing which is depicted here in this novel is a white failure of nerves or at least a flagging sense of white identity in the face of black assertiveness.”

Here is the link to the entire essay.


New Updike publication in Portuguese

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Member Carla Ferreira, who is an associate professor in the Literature and Language Department at Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil, reports that her dissertation has been published in book form.

The title is North and South Readings: Perception of Oneself and the Other in Updike’s Fiction. “The book is written in Portuguese,” Ferreira says, “and it is about The Coup and Brazil.”

“The next book I am writing in English so JUS members can read it,” Ferreira writes. She is finishing up her postdoctoral research on Updike’s New Yorker essays at the University of South Carolina, under the direction of Donald J. Greiner.

Rabbit, Run is tops among Amazon readers . . . for Updike books

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Richard Rabicoff commented on The John Updike Society Facebook page that he went to the Gaithersburg (Md.) Barnes & Noble and was shocked to see that, for the first time in his life, there wasn’t a single John Updike book on the shelf. Yet, he says, there were seven Roth novels and also lots of Steinbeck and Vonnegut.

That begs the question, Are people still reading Updike?

Amazon ranks their books in terms of sales, for all the world to see. Not surprisingly, the paperback Rabbit, Run is ranked the highest in terms of sales:  ranked #69,140, as of Jan. 26, 2019. But numbers two and three might surprise. Have a look, bearing in mind that these are not the number of copies sold, but the sales ranking, with the lowest selling the most. Not all Updike books are listed—just those that came up in the first pages as the most frequently searched.

Here are the best-selling Updike books at Amazon:

Rabbit, Run (paper)–#69,140
Gertrude and Claudius (paper)–#136,143
A Child’s Calendar (hardcover)–#163,055
Of the Farm (paper)–#227,124
Rabbit at Rest (paper)–#236,366
In the Beauty of the Lilies–#266,664
The Maples Stories (Everyman hardcover)–#315,707
Rabbit Angstrom (Everyman hardcover)–#317,683
The Witches of Eastwick (paper)–#332,639
The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman hardcover)–#333,161
Collected Stories (LOA hardcover)–#334,615
Rabbit Redux (paper)–#359,135
A Month of Sundays (paper)–#383,758
Rabbit Is Rich (paper)–#406,829
Conversations with John Updike (paper)–#455,792
Poorhouse Fair/Rabbit, Run/Centaur/Of the Farm (LOA hardcover)–#465,872
Couples (paper)–#508,942
Still Looking (hardcover)–#599,499
Just Looking (hardcover)–#607,069
Toward the End of Time (paper)—#622,255
Pigeon Feathers (paper)–#630,258
The Early Stories (paper)–#632,537
My Father’s Tears (paper)–#715,674
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (LOA hardcover)–#807,007
Endpoint (hardcover)–#910,608
Olinger Stories (Everyman hardcover)–#969,496
Terrorist (paper)–#971,637
The Widows of Eastwick (paper)–#1,037,139
Licks of Love (paper)–#1,075,513
Updike (Begley bio, paper)–#1,316,562
Selected Poems (hardcover)–#1,335,412
Collected Poems (paper)–#1,448,111
Brazil (paper)–#1,461,206
Trust Me (paper)–#1,509,122
S. (paper)–#1,612,851
The Poorhouse Fair (paper)–#1,659,739
Marry Me: A Romance (paper)–#1,824,514
More Matter (paper)–#1,943,398
Seek My Face  (paper)–#2,137,216
Higher Gossip (paper)–#2,526,515
Picked-Up Pieces (paper)–#2,631,106
Assorted Prose (paper)–#3,124,858
Too Far to Go/The Maples Stories (paper)–#5,055,286

How does that compare with Steinbeck, Vonnegut, and Roth? The first book to come up in a search is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, which ranks #28,605 in sales. But the paperback edition of Of Mice and Men is ranked #494 in sales, the East of Eden paperback ranks #3,187, Travels with Charley is #9,329, Cannery Row is #17,029, The Pearl is #6,484, and The Grapes of Wrath is #1,598. As for Vonnegut, the LOA Complete Novels is #65,130, while the Cat’s Cradle paperback is #4,115, the Modern Library paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five is #1,397, his Complete Stories is ranked #36,745, and the paperback of Breakfast of Champions is ranked #13,851. Roth? American Pastoral (paper) is ranked #11,790, The Plot Against America (paper) is ranked #7,858, The Human Stain is #16,209, Sabbath’s Theater (paper) is #53,078, and Portnoy’s Complaint (paper) is ranked #31,682.

Updike children’s book considered a classic

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EatReadSleep blogger Cheryl Teal, a collection development librarian, yesterday posted an entry on “A Child’s Calendar, by John Updike and Trina Schart Hyman,” in which she shares her rediscovery of the book and her affirmation that it’s worthy of being considered a classic.

“Our library system runs a report to find titles that are getting low on copies, and we selectors review it to find the gems that need to be re-ordered. Some titles and series are deservedly going out of print, but others are beloved classics that every library should keep forever. I was intrigued to find A Child’s Calendar—which I had never read—on that report, so not only did I order more copies, I also checked out a copy for myself.”

“Perhaps the best part of this discovery was that Updike chose one of my favorite illustrators for the updated edition. Trina Schart Hyman uses rich colors and black outlines to create busy, charming family scenes. Her diverse children and adults live in mostly rural and small-town settings, displaying both the labor and laughter of everyday life. . . . Surprisingly, Updike and Hyman were both born in Pennsylvania and later moved to New England.”

“Originally published in 1965, Updike made many changes and reprinted the volume in 1999. There is a poem for each month of the year, sweet and nostalgic, with traditional families and realistic humor. Here is the last stanza of the March poem:

“‘The mud smells happy
On our shoes.
We still wear mittens,
Which we lose.'”

The result? “This is a book to treasure for generations,” Teal concludes. “A lovely way to feed little souls.”


Updike isn’t the only celeb with Berks County roots

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Famously before him came poet Wallace Stevens, but John Updike and his fellow writer aren’t the only celebrities to come from Berks County. Susan Miers Smith wrote about Updike and four others in a Jan. 2 Reading Eagle story titled “5 celebrities with Berks County connections”—though the lower-case “is” in one book title and “Poorhouse” written as two words would have made Updike cringe. Also included in this batch are singer Taylor Swift, Hall of Fame football player Lenny Moore, actor Michael Constantine, and artist Keith Haring.

Updike’s “claim to fame,” according to Smith: “Internationally known author and poet. Twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: in 1982 for Rabbit Is Rich and in 1990 for Rabbit at Rest. He published more than 30 fiction books from 1959-2008.”

To that we might add that Updike was one of only a handful of Americans to receive both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal in White House ceremonies from two different presidents. And he was one of only three literary writers to appear more than once on the cover of Time magazine—the others being Nobel laureates Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Updike published more than 60 books in all genres: fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, criticism, drama, and children’s books.