Volume 10, Number 2 (Spring 2024) of The John Updike Review was recently published, and Updike society members have been quick to comment on the stunning cover: a photograph of the Tucson casitas that John and Martha Updike owned and lived in each spring between 2004-2008. The photo was taken by the journal’s editor, James Schiff, when attendees at the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson had the opportunity to tour the casitas.

Inside this most recent issue is a special section on Updike and the West, featuring an introduction by Schiff and an essay on “Discovering the Updike Casitas” by conference co-director Jan Emery, who, along with husband Jim, owns the casitas.

Also included in the special section is a reprint of Updike’s “A Desert Encounter,” in which he describes the loss of a beloved hat in the parking lot as a result of his attempt to prune the ocotillo off their back decks. That hat was on display at the casitas for the conference tour, but will be returned to The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, where it is usually displayed. Rounding out the special section are three papers expanded from presentations at the conference: Sue Norton’s “Pruning the Self: Authorial Presence in ‘A Desert Encounter,'”; Christopher Love’s “Contracted Space: John Updike and the American West”; and Matthew Shipe’s “Way Out West: Revisiting A Month of Sundays.”

The issue’s lead essay is a reminiscence on “Capote and Updike” by filmmaker Jan Schütte, with additional essays by Peter J. Bailey (“Bowing Out: Retirement Rue in Ford and Updike”), Louis Gordon (“Updike’s Rabbit and Roth”), Donald J. Greiner (“Updike’s Pilgrimage Toward Divorce”), and Presleigh-Anne Johnson (“Mainstream or Multicultural? Greek Food and American Identity in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux“).

The John Updike Review is published twice annually by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature, with Nicola Mason serving as managing editor.

Members of the society living in the U.S. receive print copies as part of their membership, while members living elsewhere receive digital copies.

All submissions are welcome, and can be sent directly to James Schiff via email: james.schiff@uc.edu.

The fall 2023 (Vol. 10, No. 1) issue of The John Updike Review has been mailed to members and institutional subscribers in the U.S., and members in good standing have also been sent a digital version. The journal, published twice yearly by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society, is based at the University of Cincinnati’s Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Arts & Sciences, with James Schiff serving as editor and Nicola Mason managing editor.

The new issue features expanded versions of remarks by a 2022 American Literature Association conference panel on “Women and Sex in the Works of John Updike and Other Male Authors” that was organized by the John Updike Society. Featured on the panel and in this issue were James Plath, Sue Norton, Marshall Boswell, Biljana Dojčinović, Olga Karasik-Updike, and Matthew Koch.

Also included in the fall 2023 issue: a tribute to Christopher Carduff by editor Schiff, an essay on “The Enduring Religious Relevance of John Updike” by JUR Emerging Writer Prize-winner Domenic Cregan, and additional essays on “More Distorted Mirrors: Ironic Self-Portraits in Updike’s My Father’s Tears” (Peter J. Bailey), “John Updike’s Review-Essays: Educating Himself and Others on Brazil” (Carla Alexandra Ferreira), and “Updike’s ‘Wife-Wooing’: The Seven-Year Itch and the Soliloquy of Seducton” (James Plath).

Institutions wishing to subscribe and society members who haven’t received the electronic version yet should email jplath@iwu.edu.

The John Updike Review Vol. 9: 2 (Winter 2023) is completed and will be distributed soon.

The issue features Victor Strandberg on “Updike’s Epitaph”; Sylvie Mathé, D. Quentin Miller, Peter J. Bailey, Robert Morace, and James Schiff on Self-Consciousness; plus essays from Bailey (“‘More Ironic Windows’: The Limits of Nostalgia in Updike’s My Father’s Tears), Donald J. Greiner (“U and I and Me: Rereading Nicholson Baker Reading Updike”), Haruki Takebe (“‘I’ll Get Urinary Impotence’: Updike’s Double Reference to Nabokov’s ‘Bluebeard in Ireland’.” Also included is a review by Greiner, “Edting Updike’s Revisions: Christopher Carduff and the Library of America.”

Editor Schiff reported that this issue of The John Updike Review is completed but delayed because of a printer paper shortage. Look for it in the hopefully near future.

The John Updike Review is published twice a year by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature. The cover photo is of Updike at his office in Haven Hill (photographer unknown). The Review is included with membership in The John Updike Society. To join: https://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/join.

Recently published, The John Updike Review 9:1 (Winter 2022) features four new essays, three writers on Toward the End of Time, and one review:

“John Updike, Robert Frost, and the Momentary Stay against Confusion” by Donald J. Greiner

“Persisting through Changing Ideologies: Translations and Receptions of John Updike in Russia” by Olga Karasik-Updike

“Digging Deep and the Value of the Superficial: Antinomies of My Father’s Tears” by Peter J. Bailey

“The Placidity of Aging in Updike’s ‘The Road Home’ and ‘The Full Glass'” by Pradipta Sengupta

“Updike’s Toward the End of Time: A Meditation on Aging, Imagining Other Worlds, and the Landscape of Haven Hill” by James Schiff

“Branching Fictions in Updike’s Toward the End of Time” by Marshall Boswell

“A Year of Perfect Eyesight Revisited: Rereading Toward the End of Time” by Biljana Dojčinović

“Body, Mind, and Soul in the Student-Teacher Dyad (Rev. of Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel after the 1980s, Aristi Trendel) by Sue Norton

The journal, edited by James Schiff and Nicola Mason, is published twice annually by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature. Copies of the issue are included with membership in the society, with members living the U.S. receiving physical copies and those abroad receiving digital copies. Institutional subscriptions are also available. Contact James Schiff (james.schiff@uc.edu) for further information.

John Updike Society members who attended the second biennial conference in Boston got to tour Updike’s Labor-in-Vain house and see the tennis court that John and Mary Updike used for recreation. The recently published John Updike Review (Vol. 8, No. 2) features an essay on that court—”A Short History of a Tennis Court”—and photos (including the cover) by David Updike.

Also in this issue is an essay by Cornelius Dieckmann, “Too Old to Be Educated: John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy as Post-Bildungsroman,” which won the Fifth Emerging Writers Prize from the John Updike Review.

Other essays are from James Plath and Thushara Perera (“A Scientific Explanation: The Physics of Marriage and Divorce in Updike’s ‘Here Come the Maples'”), Peter J. Bailey (“Suzie Creamcheese, Alma DeMott, and the Untranscendent Stardom of In the Beauty of the Lilies“), and Donald J. Greiner (“John Updike’s Blurbs: The Art of Promoting a Writer”). Perera is a physicist now working for NASA in Washington.

This issue, “Harv Is Plowing Now” is the subject of the “three writers on” feature that’s unique to the review, with Updike’s reprinted short story followed by contributions from James Schiff, David Lerner Schwartz, and Jason Namey.”

The John Updike Review is published twice yearly by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and is included with membership in the society (print copy for U.S. members, digital copy for international members). It is also available electronically and, for institutional subscriptions, through EBSCO. The journal is produced by editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason at the University of Cincinnati.

Volume 8: Number 1 of The John Updike Review was published earlier this month, with editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason devoting the running “Three Writers on” feature to The Coup. Updike’s 1978 novel is a black comedy narrated by the former leader of a fictional Islamic country in Africa who both embodies and hates all things American in what amounts to a wicked satire of American consumerism. Weighing in are D. Quentin Miller (“The Coup and the Pursuit of Happiness”), Matthew Shipe (“Guilt, American Style, in The Coup“), and Schiff (“Updike’s The Coup as Allegorical Autobiography”).

The articles in this issue of the peer-reviewed journal cover a wide range of topics:

“The ‘Magnificent Meanwhile’: Updike and Scorsese on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence“—Peter J. Bailey

“Home to Oneself: John Updike and Alice Munro”—Robert Milder

“Olinger Revisited: John Updike Revisiting His Early Stories”—Haruki Takebe

“John Updike, Wallace Stevens, and the Gaiety of Language”—Donald J. Greiner

Rounding out the issue is Laurence W. Mazzeno’s review of The Moderate Imagination: The Political Thought of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism, by Yoav Fromer.

The striking cover photo of Updike in Killarney, Ireland is by Richard Purinton.

The John Updike Review is published twice yearly by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and is included with membership in the society. It is also available electronically and, for institutional subscriptions, through EBSCO.

The John Updike Review Vol. 7 No. 2 (Spring 2020) was recently published, and in it editor James Schiff turned the spotlight on The Maples Stories, Updike’s 18-story sequence chronicling the marriage—and divorce—of Richard and Joan Maple, characters based on the author and his first wife, Mary Pennington Updike.

In the “Three Writers on . . .” section—an innovative feature that distinguishes the journal from all others—Schiff (“Updike’s Maples Stories among Literary Depictions of Marriage”) joined Marshall Boswell (“The Maples Stories and the ‘Twilight of the Old Morality'”), Gail Sinclair (“How Far to Have Come: Updike’s Stories of a Marriage”), and Biljana Dojčinović (“‘A Beautiful Disaster’: Marriage in Updike’s Maples Stories“), who reprised comments made on a Maples Stories panel at the May 2019 American Literature Association conference moderated by society president James Plath.

The essays section features contributions from Donald J. Greiner (“Will John Updike ‘Sink’?: Posthumous Reputation and the Fickleness of Literary Fame”), Peter J. Bailey (“Updike’s David Kern Stories”), Sue Norton (“Writing and Well Being: Story as Salve in the Work of (More than) Two Updikes”) and Adel Nouar (“From Irony to Empathy and Back in John Updike’s Terrorist“).

Also included is “The Political Dimension of Updike’s Writing” by Laurence W. Mazzeno, a review of Updike & Politics: New Considerations, edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill.

Print copies and access to online back issues are included with membership in The John Updike Society. The John Updike Review is published by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society, with James Schiff serving as editor and Nicola Mason managing editor.

Members of The John Updike Society should be receiving a copy of the latest issue of The John Updike Review in their mailboxes. And it will be hard to miss. Mr. Updike appears shirtless on the cover of Vol. 6 No. 2 (Fall 2018) in a color family photo taken by either David Updike or Mary Updike Weatherall circa 1966-67.

The contents are striking too. In the innovative ongoing feature “Three Writers on . . .,” this issue’s topic is “At War with My Skin,” with Updike’s essay reprinted, accompanied by essays from David Hicks (“It pains me to write these pages”: Updike and the Art of Self-Scrutiny”), James Seitz (“An Intimate Rankness: Updike and the High Art of Description”), and Elizabeth Hornsey (“Genetic Terrors”: Updike’s ‘At War with My Skin’ and the Difficulties of Inheritable Illnesses”).

Also included are essays by James Plath (“In the Manner of Michelangelo: John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair“), Peter J. Bailey (“‘Richard Had Forgotten Why’: Deflection and Sublimation in Updike’s Problems and Other Stories), Robert M. Luscher (“Changing Names and the Keys to Memory in Updike’s ‘Walter Briggs'”), and Donald J. Greiner (“John Updike, Ted Williams, and the Complexity of ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu'”).

In the issue Judie Newman reviews John Updike Remembered by Jack De Bellis, Sue Norton reviews Writers and Their Mothers by Dale Salwak, and Michial Farmer reviews Understanding John Updike by Frederic Svoboda.

The John Updike Review is published twice yearly by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society, edited by James Schiff with help from managing editor Nicola Mason. Members of The John Updike Society automatically receive copies. Here is the membership link. For institutional subscriptions and single copies, email james.schiff@uc.edu.

Editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason have much to be proud of after publishing 10 strong issues of The John Updike Review, but Schiff has outdone himself with the Winter 2018 issue. The “Three Writers on” section focuses on Updike’s “Bech Noir,” and four new cartoons by the legendary Arnold Roth accompany that short story. As Schiff writes in an introduction,

“Our special guest is Arnold Roth, whose work has enriched American culture for more than a half century. His drawings have appeared on New Yorker covers and in the pages of the New York Times, Punch, Time, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated, and he was Updike’s choice to design the dust jackets of his three Bech books. I initially invited Arnie, as he is called by his wife Caroline, to draw an image of Bech for our front cover. When he accepted, I grew greedy and asked if he would consider creating additional images. About a month later, the four drawings that you see here arrived via email, along with a personal note from Arnie, indicating how ‘it had been a pleasure spending time with the old gang’. He went on to say that he looked forward to seeing what we would do with the drawings, adding, ‘I’m sure you’ll be more gentle than our hero.’

“Updike, who harbored early ambitions of becoming a cartoonist, once said, ‘All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth especially so’. We agree. These new drawings reflect Arnold’s skill, energy, and improvisational genius. Even more remarkable, Arnold Roth was born in 1929, when Calvin Coolidge was President, and he began drawing album covers for Dave Brubeck in 1950. Nearly seven decades later, at the age of eighty-eight, he continues to draw magnificently. As Updike wrote, ‘A superabundant creative spirit surges through a Roth drawing like electricity; the lines sizzle’. We are delighted to feature his images along with Updike’s ‘Bech Noir’.”

Also included in the issue are essays from Julialicia Case, Gary Weissman, D. Quentin Miller, Peter J. Bailey, Donald J. Greiner, Alex Pitofsky, Sean Madden, Gideon Nachman, and Schiff, with a review by Sue Norton. Pictured above is a 2016 photo of Roth at ComicCon.

If not and you’re a member of The John Updike Society, it ought to be arriving soon. Volume 5: Number 1 (Winter 2017) of The John Updike Review is out now, featuring:

“A Word from the Editor”—James Schiff
“Summer 1974, in Fiction and Memory”—David Updike
“A Conversation with John Updike in Moscow”—Ward Briggs & J. Alexander Ogden
“Updike in Venice”—John Philip Drury
“John Updike’s Broadsides: The Blackness of Death and Bath after Sailing“—Donald J. Greiner

plus “Three Writers on Villages“:
“Programmed Delirium: Villages and the God of Multilevel Selection”—Marshall Boswell
“Dreams, Conflated Wives, Lingering Guilt, and Coitus Recalled in Updike’s Villages”—James Schiff
“Seduction in John Updike’s Villages“—Aristi Trendel

and reviews by Sue Norton (The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, by Katie Roiphe) and Laurence W. Mazzeno (Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike, by John McTavish).

The refereed journal, which publishes the very best of current Updike criticism and articles, is free with membership in The John Updike Society. It’s published twice annually by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and based at the University of Cincinnati Department of English and Comparative Literature. For institutional subscriptions contact James Schiff, james.schiff@uc.edu.