Category Archives: Books

First look: John Updike: Selected Poems

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UpdikepoemsWe received the uncorrected proof for John Updike: Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Carduff and with an introduction by Brad Leithauser, which will be published on October 16, 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf (320 pp., $30/SRP). Because it’s an uncorrected proof we can’t quote from it without comparing it to the finished book, but we can give you an idea of what’s here.

As an editor’s note summarizes, the poems span the years 1953-2008, from the time Updike was 21 until he was 76. Carduff confirmed the completion date for each poem by looking at manuscripts in the John Updike Papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the poems are arranged chronologically by those dates. As a further organizing principle—or rather, as a principle of exclusion—Carduff followed Updike’s lead in assembling his Collected Poems 1953-1993 and excluded light verse, children’s verse, and poems written for private occasions.

Almost all the poems in Selected Poems are from Collected Poems 1953-1993, Americana, and Endpoint, Carduff told us in an email. “Memories of Anguilla, 1960” is from Picked-Up Pieces; “Not Cancelled Yet” is from Higher Gossip; “Commuter Hop,” “Above What God Sees,” and “Big Bard” were published in magazines but are previously uncollected; and “Coming into New York” is an undergraduate poem and appears here for the first time (but is scheduled to appear in a large-circulation national magazine before publication). Selected Poems will be published simultaneously in hardcover and eBook formats. A Knopf paperback edition will follow, “probably in April 2017,” Carduff said.

According to Carduff, the volume is part of an ongoing series edited by Deborah Garrison for Knopf. “All share the same trim size, same Baskerville typography, same interior design and series look; most have notes; each has a critical introduction, a short chronology of the author, an index of titles. Some of the other volumes are Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Vladimir Nabokov, also Amy Clampitt, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill. . . .”

Leithauser’s 11-page introduction is pithy and insightful, with the award-winning poet calling Updike’s verse “naked poetry,” and not just because of the often frank topics and titles. He notes that the poems come to the readers “naked” without any narrative mediation, that they come from Updike himself. Leithauser includes a liberal amount of lines from the poems and extends his commentary to those specific excerpts.

Included are two appendices—detailed notes on the poems, and a short chronology of Updike’s life—and a title index.

What poems make the cut? You can probably guess. “Midpoint” and “Endpoint” are here, along with “Shillington” (which first appeared in the borough publication Fifty Years of Progress, 1908-1958), “My Mother at Her Desk,” “Outliving One’s Father,” “Elegy for a Real Golfer,” “Jesus and Elvis,” “Upon Becoming a Senior Citizen,” “In the Cemetery High Above Shillington,” “Elderly Sex,” “To a Dead Flame,” “The Beautiful Bowel Movement,” “Squirrels Mating,” “Two Hoppers,” “Poisoned in Nassau,” “Golfers,” “Above What God Sees,” “Tossing and Turning,” “Seven Stanzas atEaster,” “Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers,” “Ex-Basketball Player,” and “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked.” There are 132 in all, and pared down from the Collected Poems they reinforce just how good of a poet Updike really was.

Here’s a link to the Amazon.com pre-order page.

Updike inspired fine press publisher

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10801923_575518042584588_3734138739554104525_nJohn Updike Society members may know Andrew Moorhouse from the last two conferences he attended, at which he modestly suggested he was not an academic but “only” an Updike fan, a reader, and a lover of books.

But it turns out that his love of books has made him one of the most respected fine press publishers in the United Kingdom. And John Updike inspired him.

“The American author John Updike said: ‘A book is beautiful in its relation to the human eye, to the human hand, to the human brain and to the human spirit,’ and it is this quote which encouraged me to get involved in Fine Press publishing,” Moorhouse wrote in an article that appeared yesterday in The Irish Times: “Michael Longley’s Sea Asters: publishing as a work of art.”

In the article, Moorhouse talks about how he started Fine Press Poetry in 2013 and how his first three books—two featuring British poet Simon Armitage and this third release, Michael Longley’s Sea Asters, illustrated by the author’s artist daughter—came to be. The article also contains several poems by Longley, who was recently announced as winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Moorhouse’s forthcoming publication is Andrew Motion’s Ted Hughes Award-winning Coming Home poems. Fine Press Poetry, which specializes in creating letterpress editions of poems accompanied by illustrations by wood engravers and artists, is based in Rochdale, England.

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New Stephen King novel alludes to Updike et alia

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Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 7.04.25 AMStephen King, the master of horror who debuted with Carrie (1974), has turned to the newspaper headlines and a trio of literary masters for the subject of his new book. Finders Keepers is about a psychopath’s obsession with writer John Rothstein (a mash-up of John Updike, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger), whose “fame comes from his Runner books, a trilogy that tips its hat to Updike’s Rabbit novels,” says Guardian writer James Smythe.

“Finders Keepers by Stephen King—writers, beware your fans”

Random House announces John Updike: Selected Poems

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9781101875223Random House announced that John Updike: Selected Poems will go on sale October 13, 2015 in a 320-page hardcover edition edited by Christopher Carduff. The volume features five decades of Updike’s witty, intimate, and moving poems “with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse,” according to the publisher’s webpage.

“Though John Updike is widely known as one of America’s greatest writers of prose, he began and ended his career with books of poems, and between them published six other accomplished collections. Now, six years after Updike’s death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his life’s work in poetry: 132 of his most significant and accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to well-known anthology classics to the late-life mastery of the blank-verse sonnet sequence “Endpoint.” Art, nature, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and personal history—these recurring topics provided the poet ever-surprising occasions for metaphysical wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as fellow-poet Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century, and no one but Updike ‘captured upon the page, in prose and in poetry, so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is yet another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant.'”

Suggested list price is $30.00; Amazon is selling the hardcover for $22.80, with a Kindle Edition available for pre-order at $15.99.

Review of COSMIC DEFIANCE: UPDIKE’S KIERKEGAARD AND THE MAPLES STORIES

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CosmicDefianceThere’s been talk among Updike scholars that there isn’t enough critical attention paid to the poems, short stories, and minor novels, and that there’s perhaps too much of an emphasis on autobiographical criticism. For them, David Crowe’s 352-page study, Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories, should provide a welcome change.

Crowe, a full professor at Augustana College and a graduate of Luther College, includes Updike’s oft-quoted excerpt from Midpoint—“Praise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel’s creed / Upon the rock of Existential need; / Praise Barth, who told ho saving faith can flow from Terror’s oscillating Yes and No . . . . ”—but concentrates his study on the Danish philosopher and theologian.

At first reading, it seemed slow going in the first chapter, which is really a compressed summary of all that Crowe covers in the rest of the book, peppered with language like “as we will later see.” But a rereading of it yields a number of to-the-point summary statements that frame Updike in numerous ways that haven’t hitherto been proposed.  Chapter 1 may pose a similar first-read obstacle if one breezes past the concepts and assumptions and conclusions that can feel too general, without enough quotation to anchor them. But again, a rereading of the text proves fruitful. After that the intro and first chapter, though, Cosmic Defiance becomes practically indispensable.

Crowe treats the Maples stories as a whole in his first three chapters, including a useful timeline of the Maples’ relationship. Chapters 2 and 3—“The Neighbor-Love Problem for the Rather Antinomian Believer” and “Kierkegaard’s Marital Ideality and Updike’s Reality”—also offer discussions that center on broad thematic concepts but with more detail. And with Chapter 4: “Identity transformation and the Maples Marriage,” Crowe really hits his stride, integrating basic discussions of Kierkegaard’s philosophies with  specific discussions of Updike’s stories that make you see those stories differently. Continue reading →

New Yorker copy editor talks about work . . . and Updike

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UnknownIn an essay titled “Holy Writ: Learning to love the house style,” Mary Norris writes a “personal history” that covers her first job and how she came to be a copy editor for The New Yorker. She also talks about some of the writers she admired, among them, John Updike:

“And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. . . .

“I was on the copydesk when John McPhee’s pieces on geology were set up. I tried to keep my head. There was not much to do. McPhee was like John Updike, in that he turned in immaculate copy. Really, all I had to do was read,” she writes.

Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and has been a query proofreader at the magazine since 1993. Her book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. on April 6, 2015.

Updike and Kierkegaard spotlighted in a new book

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Screen Shot 2015-02-08 at 9.10.55 AMDavid Crowe, Professor of English at Augustana College, recently saw his book on Cosmic Defiance:  Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories published by Mercer Press.

According to an article in the Aledo Times Record, Crowe tells the “story of Updike’s life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career” and traces “the subsequent evolution of Updike’s complex and coherent theology.”

Crowe told the Times Record, “I wrote the book so that even people who haven’t read Kierkegaard can get up to speed on his central claims. Unlike most literary critics, I also avoid jargon and believe that if you can’t state a theory plainly and clearly you’re probably hiding something.”

George Hunt devoted a great deal of time and space to a discussion of Kierkegaard in his seminal work on Updike’s “three great secret things,” but this is the first book-length study on Updike and Kierkegaard.

We’ll post a review of the book on this site within the next week.

Entertainment Monthly shares Top Five Anti-Holiday Reads

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UpdiketerrorsThere haven’t been many Grinches or Scrooges or shouts of “Bah Humbug” this holiday season, but Entertainment Weekly has offered the next best thing:

“‘Tis (Not) The Season: Top Five Anti-Holiday Reads.”

Updike has been making a lot of “best” lists this season, and he makes this one as well, coming in at #2 right behind Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with a book that may be unfamiliar to many Updike fans: The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, featuring illustrations by fellow Harvard alum Edward Gorey. The hardcover book was published in 2006 by Pomegranate Communications and released in a revised edition a year later. You can find a copy, as with almost all out-of-print books, at Abebooks.com.

In making the selection, Entertainment Monthly‘s Madeline Poage writes, “An old one, but a good one, Updike’s wry voice and natural sense of humor flows organically through this compact work. A deconstruction of every facet of Christmas, the book unpacks every ritual and tradition down to the bare bones. Mercilessly witty and disturbingly accurate, every aspect of Christmas if put to the test against logic—what are Santa’s true motives? How do reindeer landing of roofs not destroy them by accident? Do the elves need a union? And of this wouldn’t be complete without Edward Gorey’s illustrations, haunting and stark on every page. For anyone tired of the Christmas hype, this is an absolute must.”