Category Archives: Lists

Book clinic recommends romantic reads, like Updike’s Couples

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The Observer‘s Book critic, Kate Kellaway, was asked to recommend “some good romantic novels that are not cliched,” and she responded,

“Your question makes me think about what it is to be cliched—if only because you might argue that love is the greatest and most necessary of cliches, and if you steer too far from the heart’s core in literature, romance sometimes retreats. . . .

“I imagine you are not insisting that ‘romantic’ involves a happy ending? John Updike’s Couples is full of torment but an addictive read—as is D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Nabokov’s Lolita about the doomed love between an older man and a ‘nymphet’—is a sullied romance. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is erotic (are romance and eroticism permitted, momentarily, to be interchangeable?).

“Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is gorgeously sensual. For those seeking gay romance, André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell are winners (the last particularly elegaic and passionate). Also worth adding is Sally Rooney’s smash hit Conversations with Friends—balanced between sophistication and naivety; Colm Tóibín’s superb Brooklyn—exploring love when geography is not on its side; and Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday—a beautiful novel about a Jane who does not share Jane Eyre’s good luck.”

Writer-actress picks Rabbit for her desert island companion

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TV watchers know British actress Katy Brand for such series as Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, Nanny McPhee Returns, Psychobitches, and a very funny performance as Queen Elizabeth I on the U.K. version of Drunk History. Readers know her for her recently released I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me, described as “a warm, witty and accessible look at how Katy Brand’s life-long obsession with the film has influenced her own attitudes on sex, love, romance, rights, and responsibilities.” And she’s also at least somewhat obsessed with John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy.

Brand—who told The Daily Mail that she just finished reading The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (she prefers The Handmaid’s Tale), confessed that she finds Charles Dickens “too perfectly realized and described–it feels as if there’s no room for me,” and finds Virginia Woolf “difficult to get along with”—named the full Rabbit collection by Updike as the book she would take to a desert island. “The first one is Rabbit, Run, then there are several more. I love the way he creates that mood of the American Dream without fully endorsing it.

“If I were allowed a couple more, I’d take Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, which is funny and filthy and I love it, and also a couple by Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, to cheer me up.

“They are two authors who always improve my mood if I’m feeling a little bleak. And maybe I’d sneak in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, by the comic genius Sue Townsend.”

Read the full interview

Updike’s Rabbit named one of The 100 Greatest Literary Characters

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The characters aren’t ranked, but John Updike’s most famous fictional creation, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, made the cut to be included in The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, published July 2019 by Rowman & Littlefield.

The authors of the volume—James Plath, Gail Sinclair, and Kirk Curnutt—considered previous lists, plus recommendations from 100 writers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers they polled in order to come up with a list of “characters who have become larger than their lives on the page”—those that are “time-honored reader favorites, prototypes, and cultural influencers . . . who have somehow entered the collective public consciousness, ones who were influential models for others to follow, and ones who have been so popular with readers that they have become significant, memorable, or even cherished.”

Of Rabbit, Plath writes, “Literature is full of heroes and antiheroes, but Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is uniquely average—a flawed, irrepressible, and often unlikable human being who is still somehow so endearing to audiences worldwide that one novel couldn’t contain him.” He’s “unfaithful, impulse driven, prejudiced, and old-fashioned when it comes to women. But he is a seeker, a quester of truth. With a healthy libido and appetite for life, Rabbit, though in many ways a typical American male, nonetheless manages to see everyday objects and people in a more brilliant and illuminating light than the average person. He has never lost his childlike sense of wonder—a rare quality that draws people toward him.”

The author with the most characters in the book is Charles Dickens, whose Miss Havisham, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Oliver Twist were included. Among Updike’s contemporaries, Toni Morrison had two (Pilate Dead and Sethe), while Philip Roth and Saul Bellow had one each (Alexander Portnoy and Eugene Henderson, respectively).

The book is available from Amazon.

 

Updike recommended to readers coping with aging

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Novelist Deborah Moggach was asked by a Guardian reader to recommend books that could help her cope with the changes of body and mind that come from aging. And in response posted June 29, 2019, Moggach writes,

“Plenty of novelists have reflected on this as they themselves grow old. Philip Roth and John Updike spring to mind, and in fact I’d recommend Updike’s Rabbit series, taking us, as it does, through a man’s life into his last years (though it’s rather a shock to find the hero banging on about being ancient when he’s only 65).”

Read more of her recommendations

Read Rabbit, Run when you’re 41?

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That’s what The Washington Post Book World staff concluded. At age 41, “You may feel like fleeing sometimes, but remember: Selfishness is not a victimless crime.” So read John Updike’s best-known novel, Rabbit, Run at that age, they say.

“Books for the Ages” is a fun new addition to the recommended books lists that pop up with the frequency of yard dandelions. At age 1, the Book World staff suggests you try The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. At Sweet Sixteen, turn to Jane Eyre because “Nobody understands you and your terribly unfair life. Reader, you are not alone.” At 18, it’s Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs that they recommend, because “There are many important lessons to learn in college, not all of them from books.” At 21? What else besides Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “You’re old enough to drink and carouse with your friends. Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Not all the recommended books are fiction. When you turn 65, the authors recommend reading 65 Things to Do When You Retire, edited by Mark Evan Chimsky. “If you need ideas, Jimmy Carter, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem have suggestions.” And if you make it to age 100? Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author by Herman Wouk. “Life is a wonderful adventure. Books make it even better.”

Literary Hub lists Which Writers Have Won the Most Prizes?

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Emily Temple compiled a “Ranking by the Most Absurd Metric” that she says was limited because she “couldn’t track every single prize available to writers” and therefore “stuck to the biggest and most prestigious prizes in fiction.”

The “absurd” part of this metric comes from trying to define what’s major. Isn’t the O. Henry Award pretty major? Or the Rea Award for the Short Story? Or the PEN/Malamud Award? Updike won several major short story prizes. Then too, while Temple lists the MacArthur Genius Grant, she doesn’t list the Guggenheim, which, though not as much money, still seems pretty major. Updike received one to help him finish Rabbit, Run. The American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal is listed for Updike, but not the two medals he received from two different presidents in White House ceremonies: The National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal.

Nonetheless, Temple’s metric puts Philip Roth on top with nine prizes, with John Updike at eight, with Updike’s prizes listed as:

National Book Award for The Centaur (1964); National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit Is Rich (1981); Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich (1982); National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich (1982); National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest (1990);

Rounding out Temple’s list, E.L. Doctorow and Colson Whitehead have seven major awards; Saul Bellow, Lois McMaster Bujold, William Faulkner, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marilynne Robinson have six; Jim Crace, Joe Haldeman, Edward P. Jones, and Connie Willis have five; and Orson Scott Card, John Cheever, Arthur C. Clarke, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Ben Fountain, Robert A. Heinlein, N.K. Jemisin, Ha Jin, Bernard Malamud, Hilary Mantel, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, China Miéville, Viet Thanh Nguyen, E. Annie Proulx, Kim Stanley Robinson, and John Edgar Wideman have four prizes.

Fans of genre fiction may wonder why only sci-fi/fantasy awards are “major,” and that’s a legitimate question to ask. Meanwhile, Hemingway aficionados will cry, “Where’s Ernest???” But the fact is, many of these prizes were created after he had already killed himself. And for that matter, where’s fellow Nobel laureate Toni Morrison? Are all “major” prizes equal? Maybe that’s the most absurd assumption underlying this metric.

“Which Writers Have Won the Most Major Prizes?”


Writer Jill McCorkle picks Updike story for Why I Like This Story

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Jackson R. Bryer has edited a fun collection of essays by contemporary short story writers who pick a favorite story and explain why. Jill McCorkle chose John Updike’s short story “Flight.”

Here is the Boydell and Brewer catalog description for the volume, which will be published in June 2019:

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read – or re-read – the stories selected.

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that “Nobody can read like a writer,” Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values.

Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected.

Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa.

Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.


Popsugar thinks Updike’s Eastwick witches sweet

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Popsugar​ had a few recommendations for readers who love books with witches in them. Not surprisingly, included in “These 11 Books About Witches Will Put a Spell on You,” by Hannah Abrams, is John Updike’s​ T​he Witches of Eastwick.​

Updike’s novel follows three Rhode Island divorcees in the 1960s who suddenly find themselves bestowed with magical powers. All is fun and games for the women until “​things take a harrowing turn.”

Updike’s book-lovers can also be spellbound by the big-screen adaptation, which features Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer​, and Susan Sarandon, Abrams reminds us.

Read the full article here.


Updike is one of 10 important late 20th-century authors

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John Updike continues to find recognition and relevance, recently included in ​ThoughtCo’s “10 Important Contemporary and Late-20th-Century Authors,” written by Mark Flanagan.

Decades after his time, Updike’s legacy continues to hold relevance in the 21st century after he was recognized as “​one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.”

Updike’s renowned ​Rabbit Angstrom novels, Of the Farm (1965) and Olinger Stories: A Selection (1964) had been “named in 2006 among the best novels of the past 25 years in a ​New York Times​ Book Review survey,” Flanagan reminds us.

Read the full article here.

Rabbit, Run is tops among Amazon readers . . . for Updike books

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Richard Rabicoff commented on The John Updike Society Facebook page that he went to the Gaithersburg (Md.) Barnes & Noble and was shocked to see that, for the first time in his life, there wasn’t a single John Updike book on the shelf. Yet, he says, there were seven Roth novels and also lots of Steinbeck and Vonnegut.

That begs the question, Are people still reading Updike?

Amazon ranks their books in terms of sales, for all the world to see. Not surprisingly, the paperback Rabbit, Run is ranked the highest in terms of sales:  ranked #69,140, as of Jan. 26, 2019. But numbers two and three might surprise. Have a look, bearing in mind that these are not the number of copies sold, but the sales ranking, with the lowest selling the most. Not all Updike books are listed—just those that came up in the first pages as the most frequently searched.

Here are the best-selling Updike books at Amazon:

Rabbit, Run (paper)–#69,140
Gertrude and Claudius (paper)–#136,143
A Child’s Calendar (hardcover)–#163,055
Of the Farm (paper)–#227,124
Rabbit at Rest (paper)–#236,366
In the Beauty of the Lilies–#266,664
The Maples Stories (Everyman hardcover)–#315,707
Rabbit Angstrom (Everyman hardcover)–#317,683
The Witches of Eastwick (paper)–#332,639
The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman hardcover)–#333,161
Collected Stories (LOA hardcover)–#334,615
Rabbit Redux (paper)–#359,135
A Month of Sundays (paper)–#383,758
Rabbit Is Rich (paper)–#406,829
Conversations with John Updike (paper)–#455,792
Poorhouse Fair/Rabbit, Run/Centaur/Of the Farm (LOA hardcover)–#465,872
Couples (paper)–#508,942
Still Looking (hardcover)–#599,499
Just Looking (hardcover)–#607,069
Toward the End of Time (paper)—#622,255
Pigeon Feathers (paper)–#630,258
The Early Stories (paper)–#632,537
My Father’s Tears (paper)–#715,674
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (LOA hardcover)–#807,007
Endpoint (hardcover)–#910,608
Olinger Stories (Everyman hardcover)–#969,496
Terrorist (paper)–#971,637
The Widows of Eastwick (paper)–#1,037,139
Licks of Love (paper)–#1,075,513
Updike (Begley bio, paper)–#1,316,562
Selected Poems (hardcover)–#1,335,412
Collected Poems (paper)–#1,448,111
Brazil (paper)–#1,461,206
Trust Me (paper)–#1,509,122
S. (paper)–#1,612,851
The Poorhouse Fair (paper)–#1,659,739
Marry Me: A Romance (paper)–#1,824,514
More Matter (paper)–#1,943,398
Seek My Face  (paper)–#2,137,216
Higher Gossip (paper)–#2,526,515
Picked-Up Pieces (paper)–#2,631,106
Assorted Prose (paper)–#3,124,858
Too Far to Go/The Maples Stories (paper)–#5,055,286

How does that compare with Steinbeck, Vonnegut, and Roth? The first book to come up in a search is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, which ranks #28,605 in sales. But the paperback edition of Of Mice and Men is ranked #494 in sales, the East of Eden paperback ranks #3,187, Travels with Charley is #9,329, Cannery Row is #17,029, The Pearl is #6,484, and The Grapes of Wrath is #1,598. As for Vonnegut, the LOA Complete Novels is #65,130, while the Cat’s Cradle paperback is #4,115, the Modern Library paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five is #1,397, his Complete Stories is ranked #36,745, and the paperback of Breakfast of Champions is ranked #13,851. Roth? American Pastoral (paper) is ranked #11,790, The Plot Against America (paper) is ranked #7,858, The Human Stain is #16,209, Sabbath’s Theater (paper) is #53,078, and Portnoy’s Complaint (paper) is ranked #31,682.