Knopf, now a division of Penguin-Random House, just released cover art for Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by Updike scholar and John Updike Society vice-president James Schiff. The hefty hardcover (900 pages) is roughly 6×9″ and slated for October 21, 2025 release. A book release event and signing will be scheduled as part of the joint Roth-Updike societies’ conference in New York City, Oct. 19-22. Those who plan on attending should count on getting a copy in NYC.

From the Penguin-Random House website, which offers purchase links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, Powell’s, Target, and Walmart:

“The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days

“As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer before him, ‘Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.’ With his stunning rhetorical gifts—allowing him to thrive in both fiction and nonfiction, in criticism as well as poetry—he was also a consummate letter writer. From his early writing attempts (he began submitting work to magazines as a teenager) to the 150 eye-opening letters home when he left the farm and family to go to Harvard, to the young adult correspondence with The New Yorker and other publications where his work began to appear, and on into the fullness of a long literary life, his correspondence, Schiff notes,’figures not as an adjunct to but rather an integral part of his astonishing literary output.’