John Updike’s Selected Poems made the list of “10 Books We Loved in 2015” by PBS NewsHour.

“John Updike: Selected Poems,” edited by Christopher Carduff
Mike Melia, senior broadcast producer

“He’s one of the most prolific American writers, but John Updike was not known as a poet. His novels, stories and essays fill volumes. Now, there is a new collection of his verse. A highlight, for me, is ‘Endpoint,’ a series of poems written in the last years of his life. They may be my favorite things he ever wrote. Here’s a stanza from ‘Spirit of 76’:

Be with me, words, a little longer; you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.

Publishers Weekly asked Christopher Carduff, “who was handpicked by John Updike to edit the Library of America edition of his work” and  “also edits the posthumous Updike publications for Knopf, the later of which, John Updike: Selected Poems, will be published this month,” to choose 10 of “his favorite books by Updike in a variety of genres.”

The Centaur, which won the National Book Award, didn’t make Carduff’s list, nor did any of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy novels or the Bech books. Neither did Midpoint, Updike’s mid-life poetic crisis, nor Couples, the steamy novel that vaulted Updike into national prominence.

Click here to see Carduff’s “10 Best John Updike Books.”

The September 4, 2015 print version of Entertainment Weekly has an interesting feature by Keith Staskiewicz and Isabella Biedenharn on “The United States of Books.”

“Which novel captures the true spirit of Iowa? How about Texas? Or Rhode Island? Here, EW picks the one work of fiction that best defines each state in the union.”

Is it any surprise that John Updike was chosen as the author whose novel best represents the spirit and character of Pennsylvania?

In choosing Rabbit, Run as the book that captures the spirit of Pennsylvania, the authors write, “Updike’s most famous work, the first of his Rabbit Angstrom novels, follows a former high school basketball star after he abandons his pregnant wife and child, taking suburban Pennsylvania ennui to a terrifying precipice.”

Since there’s no online link yet, here are all the state selections:

Alabama—To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Alaska—Julie of the Wolves, Jean Craighead George
Arizona—Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
Arkansas—True Grit, Charles Portis
California—Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
Colorado—Plainsong, Kent Haruf
Connecticut—The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
Delaware—The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez
Florida—The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Georgia—Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Hawaii—The Descendants, Kaui Hart Hemmings
Idaho—Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Illinois—Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
Indiana—The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
Iowa—Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella
Kansas—Doc, Mary Doria Russell
Kentucky—In Country, Bobbie Ann Mason
Louisiana—The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Maine—Empire Falls, Richard Russo
Maryland—The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
Massachusetts—The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
Michigan—Once Upon a River, Bonnie Jo Campbell
Minnesota—The Betsy-Tacy Series, Maud Hart Lovelace
Mississippi—The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Missouri—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Montana—A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean
Nebraska—My Antonia, Willa Cather
Nevada—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
New Hampshire—A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
New Jersey—Independence Day, Richard Ford
New Mexico—House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
New York—Drown, Junot Diaz
North Carolina—Jim the Boy, Tony Earley
North Dakota—Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
Ohio—Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Oklahoma—The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Oregon—Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Pennsylvania—Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Rhode Island—Spartina, John Casey
South Carolina—The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
South Dakota—Black Hills, Dan Simmons
Tennessee—A Death in the Family, James Agee
Texas—Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Utah—The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
Vermont—Songs in Ordinary Time, Mary McGarry Morris
Virginia—The Known World, Edward P. Jones
Washington—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
West Virginia—Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
Wisconsin—A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton
Wyoming—Close Range, Annie Proulx

Writer-editor-reviewer Robert McCrum has spent two years considering the 100 greatest novels written in English, and The Guardian recently published his final choices. Updike’s Rabbit Redux comes in at #88.

“Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, Updike’s lovably mediocre alter ego, is one of America’s great literary protagonists, up there with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby.”

That’s pretty good company, and probably an interesting conversation to eavesdrop on if the three of them ever had to share a raft. However, Huck and Jay made McCrum’s “All Time Top 10” list—Emma, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, The Rainbow, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, The Great Gatsby—while Rabbit did not.

“The 100 best novels written in English: the full list”

In writing about his process, McCrum said that he selected, “where possible, the title most central to the author’s voice and vision, which is not necessarily the most famous.”

They’re in no particular order, but there are 80 books Esquire magazine thinks every man should read, and Rabbit, Run is among them:

“Because it’s one of the few not about Updike. It’s about that guy you idolized in high school. And kitchen gadgets. And you.”

“The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”

Yes, Esquire is a man’s magazine, but it’s a little surprising that the authors listed are all male except for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Updike, who’s been accused of being sexist, would probably be among those to protest, Where’s Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Eudora Welty? Ann Beattie? Jane Smiley? Louise Erdrich? Lorrie Moore?

June is soon upon us and it’s come to our attention that a year ago Rachel Grate of Arts.Mic shared “14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch.”

Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” comes in at #1, followed by John Updike’s “Pygmalion.”

“Inspired by the story of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story follows a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he carves. Updike transforms the narrative’s message to reveal the narcissism we all bring to love.

“Updike makes every sentence of this brief piece count, nonchalantly surprising his readers with a new twist in every paragraph. Soon, we begin to wonder how much of a relationship is based on who the other person really is and how much is based on how we transform them.

“Read it for free here,” courtesy of The Atlantic online. The story appeared in the July 1981 issue.

Only one of the American Nobel laureates made the Arts.Mic list:  Ernest Hemingway (“Hills Like White Elephants”).

Rabbit, Run gets all the attention, and Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest earned Pulitzer Prizes. But Guardian writer Robert McCrum says Rabbit Redux is his favorite—which is why he included it at #88 on his list of “The 100 Best Novels.”

“Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the account of whose life and times adds up to more than half a million words, is often placed with honor, and a measure of irony, next to America’s great literary protagonists such as Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby and even Captain Ahab,” McCrum writes. “Rabbit Redux was published in the US by Alfred A Knopf, a great literary house and a natural home for a novel that, from the title down, nodded to the Anglo-American literary tradition. Anthony Trollope (see No 22 in this series) published Phineas Redux in 1873, and Updike, who was steeped in English literature, would have enjoyed the allusion. Other critics have noted its ‘Dickensian’ ambitions.

“The Angstrom series had many inspirations, including Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Updike, who also venerated Lewis, always spoke warmly about his admiration for Marcel Proust, though ‘Rabbit’ has little to do, explicitly, with A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Ian McEwan [who, summarising Updike’s achievement on his untimely death in 2009, compared him to Saul Bellow (see No 73 in this series) as ‘a master of effortless motion—between first and third person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic’] described Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels as his ‘masterpiece.’ Philip Roth, a sometime writer, declared Updike to be America’s ‘greatest man of letters, a national treasure,’ while, for Lorrie Moore, Updike is ‘our greatest writer,’ though she prefers his short stories.”