From the Iran Book News Agency comes the announcement that “‘Blue House’ House to Stories of Noted Writers” was recently published in Persian, a five-story collection featuring authors Alice Munro, John Updike, Alistair Morgan, and Kate Walbert.
Titles of the stories included in the 164-page collection are not mentioned.
Those with bibliographical information on this item, please contact Jack De Bellis, who is working on a supplement to the 2008 bibliography: bjd1@lehigh.edu.
In a November 8, 2012 essay on “John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ and White Working-Class Angst” published under the shortened name “Man in the Middle”—an essay that many may have missed—New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus reports,
“John Updike visited The New York Times a week before Election Day in 2008. Whom, I asked him, would Rabbit Angstrom most likely vote for? ‘I’m so for Obama,’ Updike replied, that I can’t imagine creating a character who wouldn’t vote for him.’
“And yet in ‘Rabbit at Rest’—the last novel in the cycle, which concludes with the hero’s death—we discover he cast his final vote for George H.W. Bush.
“When I reminded Updike of this, he looked startled. But he was right about 2008. Obama carried Reading that year, and he did it again on November 6 [2012].”
John Updike often remarked that he wished he was taken more seriously as a poet, but he has at least one booster: humorist Garrison Keillor, who frequently features an Updike poem on The Writer’s Almanac. Yesterday, December 27, 2013, he put the spotlight on “The Rockettes.”
‘Twas six nights before Christmas and all through the Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse there were signs from Updike’s “Rabbit” novels.
Blogger Peter Quinones takes note of the “Signs and Signage in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels” and offers a count and speculation for their frequent inclusion . . . and variation. Some of his conclusions seem like leaps—”Similarly, how do we go from 8 signs in one novel to 19 in the next? I would suggest that Angstrom’s reticular activating system has begun to be lit up to pay attention to signs, signage, and printed messages because he now works as a typesetter—it’s unavoidable”—but it’s fascinating to see what catches people’s attention from the “Rabbit” series.
The John Updike Society has received a $20,000 donation from the PECO Foundation, a charitable trust based in New York City, “to help support the John Updike Society’s project to preserve the Updike family house.”
H. Roemer McPhee, who is on the board, is a huge Updike fan—not just familiar with all the novels and short stories, but able to quote from them. This past summer he toured the house and Shillington-Plowville sites with his mother, Updike Society president James Plath, and John Updike Childhood Home curator Maria Mogford. And he saw firsthand the work that needed to be done.
Last year the PECO Foundation contributed $3000 but upped their donation this year to help with much-needed house repairs and restoration, which are expected to cost some $300,000.
The contribution looms even larger than that, because it’s the first major donation other than ones received from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, whose generosity enabled the society to buy the house and begin the restoration. “It paves the way for other major donors to climb onboard and together create a literary landmark that can be appreciated for many generations to come,” Mogford said.
Mogford said that the exterior of the house has been painted this fall, and that work inside will begin again in the spring and continue throughout summer of 2014, in anticipation of being at least “presentable” for the Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference to be held the first week in October of 2014. That conference, like the first, will be hosted by Alvernia University.
Yesterday PBS Digital Studios posted a five-minute animated short titled “John Updike on Family Affairs,” part of their Blank on Blank series.
It’s animated from a previously unheard spring 2002 interview by John Freeman, in which Updike talks about his decision to live away from New York City and the impact of family on his writing life. Blankonblank.org is a nonprofit digital studio in Brooklyn, founded by David Gerlach, that transforms lost audio interviews with cultural icons into a new animated series for PBS.
Here’s the link, with thanks to David Lull for calling it to our attention.
On November 22, a special broadcast of Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts titled “Updike Redux” featured two of the readings that were a part of the Library of America / Symphony Space event last October 16. Now, those who missed it can access the show online. It’s available as a podcast. To hear it, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Listen to the Show” button.
The show opens with Tony Kushner reading from the introduction to Updike’s 2003 Knopf volume The Early Stories. Then, in the story “Unstuck,” a minor mishap strengthens a young couple’s marriage. That story is read by the show’s guest host, Jane Kaczmarek. Two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, making her Selected Shorts debut, concludes the program by reading Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite,” in which an aging man looks back on his life and loves.
Paul Moran, who runs “The Other John Updike Archive,” recently posted an entry on “Wiki Leaks 2029: Why The Secrecy?”
He writes, “Literary conspiracy theory: the Updike book on the origins of Christianity being held up for 20 years? The 1,635 books in the Updike archive are already available to scholars. Manuscripts will be ready as early as August, and correspondence will be open to researchers by the end of the year. The novel on which he was working at the time of his death, which involved St. Paul and early Christianity, will not be available until 2029.”
Rather than fuel the speculation we asked Houghton Library’s Leslie Morris. “It is true that the novel he was working on at his death is sealed until 2029 (20 years after his death),” she writes. “This restriction was suggested by the Estate as part of the purchase agreement, and the Library agreed to it. It will be open for research in 2029, but I’m not privy to whether or not there are publication plans for it—that’s a question for the Literary Trust, who administers the copyrights.”
According to Andrew Wylie, who represents the Literary Trust, “It is not another novel at all. It was the merest idea. And as for the twenty year embargo, it is simply the Updike Estate’s established policy.”
So there you have it.
James Yerkes, who for many years published online news pertaining to John Updike in The Centaurian, and who received The John Updike Society’s first Distinguished Service Award in 2010, has donated the collection of Updike books, letters, galleys, and Updike-related materials he amassed with his wife, Ruth, to Gustavus Adolphus College.
Here’s the announcement from Gustavus Adolphus:
The John Updike Collection of James and Ruth Yerkes has been generously donated to the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. James Yerkes, retired professor of religion and philosophy at Moravian College and editor of a scholarly collection of essays, John Updike and Religion (Eerdmans, 1999), amassed a collection of works by and about the prolific American novelist and critic. Yerkes posted news and commentary about Updike at a website, The Centaurian, which he founded in 1996. He continued to update it for 14 years, until his web host suffered a server malfunction and ceased providing web services. (Remnants of the site, previously found at http://userpages.prexar.com/joyerkes/, are available in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.)
The collection includes signed first editions, paperback editions, galley proofs and advanced reader copies of Updike’s novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, and children’s books. It also includes stories and essays by Updike published in magazines, as well as limited editions, broadsides, audio and video recordings, materials from public appearances, and works about Updike.
In addition to these materials, the collection includes hand-typed postcards from the author to Yerkes, many of them conveying his bemused feelings about the Internet, as well as correspondence from website visitors, fascinating documentation of the cultural role a popular website devoted to an American author played during the early days of the World Wide Web.
For further information about this collection, which is still being processed, contact Barbara Fister (foster@gustavus.edu).
Gustavus Adolphus College is a private, four-year, liberal arts college that was founded in 1862 by Swedish Americans. Located in St. Peter, Minnesota (near Mankato), the college has a student population of 2600, on average. The library will undergo a renovation in 2014.
In case you haven’t happened upon it yet, above is the cover art that HarperCollins Publishers posted on their website, along with additional information on the upcoming biography by Adam Begley. The publication date is April 8, 2014, and the HarperCollins website provides a detailed description:
Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.
The 560-page biography has a suggested retail price of $29.99.