Category Archives: Books

Release date announced for Selected Letters of John Updike

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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 (800 pages) is roughly 6×9″ and slated for October 28, 2025 release. But since the society is holding a joint conference with the Philip Roth Society in New York City the previous week, if there’s any wiggle room whatsoever in the production schedule it wouldn’t be a surprise to have it released earlier.

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.’

Society member to teach Updike stories in travel course

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John Updike Society member Christopher Love, who directs American Writers in France study-abroad for The University of Alabama, said that he will teach Updike as one of the mid-20th century writers who resided in or traveled in France—a course he said will include James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac.

Two stories that Love plans on teaching are “Museums and Women” and “Avec La Bebe-Sitter,” but he is asking members who have advice on additional stories or have useful knowledge about connections between Updike and France, French writers, French art, etc., to email him (cslove@ua.edu). Since many society members tend to like Hemingway as well, Love added that his new non-fiction book, Crimson Code: The Price of Success, will launch at an April 27 event at a Tuscaloosa, Ala. bookstore named Ernest and Hadley.

New book on Karl Barth and crisis-reorientation includes Updike chapter

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Crisis and Reorientation: Karl Barth’s Römerbrief in the Cultural and Intellectual Context of Post WWI Europe, edited by Christine Svinth-Værge Põder and Sigurd Baark, features a chapter by Bent Flemming Nielsen on “A Literary Reception of Karl Barth’s Römerbrief: On Barthianism in John Updike’s Roger’s Version.”

Like the editors, Nielsen teaches in the Section of Systematic Theology, Faculty of Theology, at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Abstract

American author John Hoyer Updike (1932–2009) once said, “Karl Barth was my hero among theologians.” Updike found Barth’s early writings from Der Römerbrief (1922) until Fides Quaerens Intellectum (1931) especially interesting. Moreover, Barthian motives also played a role in Updike’s novels. This becomes most obvious in Roger’s Version (1986), a novel about a theological professor, Roger Lambert. The novel addresses Barthian topics such as revelation and knowledge of God in modernity, narrated through vivid examples of human arrogance, guilt, and infidelity. In addition to presenting a body of Updike’s conscious stylistic writing, this chapter delves into Barthian theological perspectives in Roger’s Version and Updike’s personal convictions. The chapter emphasizes mainly the dialectic “wisdom of death” as a key to interpreting the book. (The orality of the presentation has been retained to some extent.)

Ann Beattie speaks to Updike’s descriptive powers

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In a March 2023 interview with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, Ann Beattie talked about her new collection of essays, More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, which contains an essat on “John Updike’s Sense of Wonder.” Beattie was the keynote speaker at the 1st Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, Pa., back in 2010, and a version of her talk—and this chapter—was published by The John Updike Review in 2011.

The Lit Hub-hosted interview series noted that in the interview Beattie discussed “her recent LitHub essay about Donald Barthelme’s short story ‘The Balloon’ and the Chinese spy balloon. She also talks about her recently published first collection of essays, More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, in which she writes about the work of authors, photographers, and artists she admires, including Elmore Leonard, Sally Mann, John Loengard, and her own husband, visual artist Lincoln Perry.

“Beattie explains why as a nonfiction writer, she prefers close looking and reading; considers defamiliarization in the hands of Barthelme and Alice Munro; analyzes former visual artist John Updike’s depiction of the natural world; and reflects on developing increased comfort with writing about visual art. She also reads excerpts from both her Lit Hub piece and the essay collection.”

Here’s the link to the Lit Hub interview.

Adam Gopnik recommends six books

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Longtime New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik‘s most recent book, The Real Work, explores how artists and exalted others reach an unsurpassed level of mastery. He considers the process and what it might mean for those mere mortals who seek inspiration or who would follow in the masters’ footsteps.

The Week used the occasion to quote Gopnik’s recommended six books:

Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell (1791)

The Most of Liebling, by A.J. Liebling (1963)

The Early Stories, by John Updike (2003)

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger (1955)

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust (1913)

Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford (1957)

Of Updike, he writes, “Miracles of observation, evocation, and poignant emotion. Though Updike is not a writer of happy subjects—the pains of marriage, the loss of time—he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world. He sings, and we harmonize.”

New writers-on-writers collection features Oates on Updike

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Aimed as a resource for creative writers and teachers of creative writing, Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories (David R. Godine, hardcover, 320 pages) will be published on April 25, 2023. The collection, edited by Andre Dubus III, features successful writers invited to talk about a pair of unforgettable stories in a brief essay. Joyce Carol Oates chose Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royale” and John Updike’s “A & P.”

“John Updike’s brilliantly condensed, intensely lyric homage to the voice of another contemporary, J.D. Salinger, has long been the Updike story most anthologized, as it is likely the Updike story that is the most readily accessible to young readers,” Oates wrote.

“Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, in its very brevity and colloquial lyricism, ‘A & P’ isn’t characteristic of Updike’s short stories, which tend to be much longer, richer in detail and background information, slower moving and analytical; this is a story told exclusively from the perspective of a teenaged boy, in the boy’s mildly sardonic voice—’In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.'”

Oates was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Suffolk University in Boston. Her novel, Blonde, was recently made into a movie.

Library of America Updike volume now available ahead of distribution date

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Library of America has just published the fifth and final volume in the John Updike: Novels series: John Updike Novels 1996-2000, containing In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, and Rabbit Remembered. Not available in bookstores until March 13, the volume is now on sale through the LOA webstore for $32 plus free shipping—29 percent off the $45 retail price.

In addition, the complete LOA five-volume set, John Updike: Fifteen Novels (five individual volumes, not a boxed set) is on sale now at the webstore for $145 plus free shipping—34 percent off the $225 retail price.

Series editor Christopher Carduff said “there are indeed more LOA Updike volumes to come. None are as yet scheduled, but stay tuned.”

We will.

Pennsylvania History considers The Pennsylvania Updike

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In retrospect, maybe it was a perfect storm of sorts, with Jack De Bellis’s John Updike’s Early Years coming out in 2013, Adam Begley covering some Berks County ground in his biography Updike in 2014, and James Plath collecting and commenting on John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews in 2016. But it took Richard Androne to see the connections and to take a page from Updike’s book reviews and treat them in a single article.

“The Pennsylvania Updike” was published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 85:1 (Winter 2018), though it first came to our attention recently.

“The centrality of Pennsylvania, and especially of his native Berks County, in author John Updike’s life, literary achievement, and ultimate vision comes through vividly in Adam Begley’s biography Updike, Jack Debellis’s more specialized study John Updike’s Early Years, and James Plath’s collection of Updike’s Pennsylvania interviews, many of which were done in Updike’s home county,” Androne wrote.

“Until he was eighteen and left for Harvard, Updike said, ‘there were hardly twenty days that I didn’t spend in Pennsylvania,’ and while after that departure he no longer lived in Berks County for an extended period, he said, ‘though I left Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania has never left me. It figures in much of my work, and not just the earlier.'”

Androne wrote, “just as James Joyce had to leave Ireland to write about it in many of his finest works, Updike had to leave Berks County. Updike told one interviewer, ‘There comes a time when you must test yourself against the world,’ and to another he said, ‘I think I couldn’t have had my writing career if I had stayed in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, I couldn’t have had my writing career if I hadn’t had all that Pennsylvania experience.”

“De Bellis argues even more strongly than Begley for the influence of the physical and cultural Shillington—and especially for that of Updike’s high school classmates—on his work, uncovering numerous parallels between persons and places in life and art. Especially useful in this regard is material in the chapter, ‘Inspirations and Models,'” Androne wrote. Plath, meanwhile, “supplies a perceptive and useful introduction and conclusion in which he synthesizes some of the material in this anthology of interviews. He is particularly good at identifying common denominators in Updike’s comments on Berks County and Pennsylvania in a larger sense.”

Androne wrote that the three Updike books “complement each other and can profitably be read together both by scholars and general readers seriously interested in Updike. Among the many instances of this is Plath’s inclusion of William Ecenbarger’s June 12, 1983 article, ‘Updike Is Home,’ a Shillington interview Begley also uses in his first chapter as illustrative of Updike’s artistic method of turning his own experience into art, in this case a July 4, 1983, New Yorker story called ‘One More Interview’ published less than a month after Ecenbarger’s article, and both the interview and Begley’s treatment of Updike’s story are enhanced by the Shillington detail in De Bellis’s book.”

New Yorker Cartoonists blogger spills the contents of their Summer Library

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For his August 16, 2022 post at Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin began,

“For the past twenty-seven summers, my wife, Liza Donnelly, and I have gone to the same Downeast home, and over those years, have built a small library of books, some New Yorker-centric (but many having nothing to do with the magazine).” Depicted in the photo are “most of the books either brought here or bought here at library book sales.”

“Occasionally,” Maslin confessed, “I take a book back to New York,” depriving their growing summer library of the volume—such as James Thurber’s The Seal in the Bedroom, which flippered back with them last year at summer’s end.

“The titles by Liebling, Benchley, Capote, Beattie are like good friends,” Maslin wrote. “I enjoy seeing them, being around them. Adam Begley’s Updike biography came up with us this year. I’m on my third read through, visiting parts I just had to experience again (last night I re-read the part about Updike driving into Manhattan to meet William Shawn for the very first time, but having to delay the meeting by a day because he (Updike) got lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey). Someone should do a collection of pieces about Updike driving. About a decade ago, at a library sale up near the Canadian border, I found a first edition of Updike’s Rabbit, Run (still dust-jacketed) for about 75 cents. That too went back to New York to sit on the Updike shelf.”

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John Updike had strong opinions about book design

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Carol Devine Carson, a designer at Alfred A. Knopf, summarized what it was like designing a book cover for John Updike: “He was very hands on,” she told Eye on Design writer Rachel Berger. “You had to learn what he liked in order to get anything approved.” Carson and designer Chip Kidd said Updike’s “likes” were consistent, Berger wrote. “For body copy, Janson of course. For jackets, Updike favored Albertus, a craggy Depression-era display face with tapering serifs resembling letters carved in metal, centered and in all caps. He loved certain shades of blue. He preferred 18-point type. Original art, yes. Contemporary photography, no. ‘He didn’t want to see too much letter spacing or type used in any kind of bizarre way,’ recalled Carson. ‘It was very straightforward,'” whereas Kidd and Carson’s design tastes were varied.

Chip Kidd’s design with Updike’s sticky note requested changes.

Updike’s first ambition was to become an artist, and all of his dust jackets proudly list the year he spent at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. Visitors to The John Updike Childhood Home can see numerous examples of his work.

What did Kidd, a Reading native who was a keynote speaker at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference, think of Updike’s design sensibilities? Consider the famous dust jacket for Rabbit, Run, which Updike designed. “What about that cover suggests middle class suburbia?” Kidd wondered. “Unless I’m missing something, conceptually it doesn’t mean anything”—those patterned thin yellow, green and blue stripes with a large circle in the center.

“I would call Updike’s design taste very conservative,” Kidd told Berger, contrasting it with his own aesthetic, which was “just completely all over the place.” Berger wrote that Kidd and Updike occasionally “butted heads,” with one letter to editor Judith Jones “requesting ‘no Kiddian theatrics, please’ for an upcoming title.”

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