Lehigh University Press will re-release John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, edited by James Plath, in paperback on March 15, 2018. That’s good news for individuals who didn’t want to put out $105.00 for the hardcover version that was published in 2016. The paperback price at Amazon.com is $49.99.

As James Schiff, editor of The John Updike Review, writes in a descriptive blurb, “Once again, Jim Plath delivers a deeply engaging and important collection of Updike interviews. Stitching together 44 profiles and interviews conducted by a range of figures–-Terry Gross, local journalists from the Reading Eagle, a high school student–-Plath, who adds his own introductory and concluding observations, proves a knowledgeable and emotionally invested guide. John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews will appeal not only to general readers, academics, and students, but to those interested in listening to a writer who could string together sentences as beautifully as any figure from American literature. In taking its author back to the state he left in 1950, John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews is a homecoming story that casts a spell and radiates with Updike’s life-long affection for Pennsylvania. Plath has been a major player in Updike studies, and his latest effort should be required reading for those wishing to know more about the wunderkind from Shillington.”

The cover photo of Updike at the Plowville farmhouse is by David Updike.

Amazon link

Members who attended the 4th Biennial John Updike Society Conference at the University of South Carolina know that the university is home to the Don and Ellen Greiner Collection of John Updike and the Jack De Bellis Collection of John Updike (1976-2008), as well as the Matthew J. Bruccoli Collection. Bruccoli, the preeminent F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar who died in 2008, also founded the “Understanding Literature” series of introductory critical works that is now being edited by Linda Wagner-Martin. And this April, the series gets a new volume on John Updike: Understanding John Updike, by Frederic Svoboda.

From the University of South Carolina Press:

“The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932–2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation’s life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author’s deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended, close readings of Updike’s most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.

“A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis’s earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called “the adulterous society” in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation’s fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike’s professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation—not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

“Frederic Svoboda is a professor and former chair of the English Department and director of the Graduate Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan–Flint. He served two terms as a director and treasurer of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and is the author or editor of several books. His most recent publication, co-edited with Suzanne del Gizzo, is Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Twenty-five Years of Criticism.”

Contents: Ch. 1 – Understanding John Updike; Ch. 2 – The Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy: Updike’s Masterpiece and Template for Understanding His Works; Ch. 3 – The Maples Stories, Olinger Stories, and Other Short Fiction; Ch. 4 – Couples (1968); Ch. 5 – The Shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne and New England Puritanism: The Eastwick and Scarlet Letter novels; Ch. 6 – Guide to Major Works: The Henry Bech Novellas; Ch. 7- A Brief Summing Up. A bibliography and index are also included.

Specs: 152 pages, 6×9″ trim size, hardcover SRP $39.99, ebook $21.99. According to Amazon.com, Understanding John Updike is scheduled for April 1, 2018 release. No fooling.

If you haven’t already pre-ordered a copy, you can go to Amazon right now and get a copy of John Updike Remembered: Friends, Family and Colleagues Reflect on the Writer and the Man, edited by Jack A. De Bellis.

The Amazon “Look inside” link gives a full rundown on the contents. The book features 19 interviews with Updike’s classmates (from kindergarten through high school), four essays on Updike’s time at Harvard and his early years as a writer, two essays on Updike in Ipswich, 25 personal reminiscences from “writers, fans, friends,” three reminiscences from Updike’s children, and a reprinted transcript of the Updike Family Panel from The John Updike Society’s first conference at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa.

De Bellis (pictured) is best known in Updike studies for writing The John Updike Encyclopedia and for compiling, with Michael Broomfield, the definitive Updike bibliography.

On Tuesday, October 24, Penguin Random House Audio Publishing will release downloadable three-hour audio books of John Updike’s short story collection Trust Me and his writings on golf, Golf Dreams—both volumes digitalized versions of analog cassette packages first issued by Random House Audiobooks in 1987 and 1996, respectively.

Both Trust Me and Golf Dreams are abridged, adapted, and narrated by John Updike.

Trust Me track list

1. Trust Me
2. Deaths of Distant Friends
3. Pygmalion
4. The Lovely Troubled Daughters
5. Still of Some Use
6. Poker Night
7. The City
8. Getting into the Set
9. Learn a Trade

Golf Dreams track list

1. Preface
2. Golf Dreams
3. Tips on a Trip
4. The Pro (short story)
5. Swing Thoughts
6. Intercession (short story)
7. Golf as a Game of the People
8. Golfers (poem)
9. Upon Winning One’s Flight in the Senior Four-Ball (poem)
10. The Trouble with a Caddie
11. The Big Bad Boom
12. The Camaraderie of Golf (I)
13. The Camaraderie of Golf (II)
14. The Bliss of Golf
15. Moral Exercise
16. Television Golf
17. Is Life Too Short for Golf?
18. December Golf

Here is the link.

Other audiobooks currently available from Penguin Random House Audio Publishing are The Afterlife and Other Stories and Selected Stories—both of them also abridged, adapted, and narrated by John Updike.