John Updike made the list of favorite short stories picked by the culture writers of The Sunday Times. In “The 100 best stories, from Charles Dickins to Cat Person: As The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award winner is announced, Culture writers pick their favourite tales,” Updike’s “A&P” (1961) was included:

“Updike wrote 186 short stories, and almost all of them could be included here. Written in the voice of a checkout boy at an A&P supermarket, this tells what happens when ‘in walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.’ It has Updike’s trademark sensual detail, sexual tension and mastery of work-life technicalities, and sees a minor moment become a major life incident.”

“A&P” first appeared in The New Yorker on July 22, 1961, and was reprinted in Pigeon Feathers, later appearing as a limited edition published by Redpath Press (1986). It remains Updike’s most frequently anthologized short story, along with “Separating” and “Friends from Philadelphia.”

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One Grand Books asked celebs to name the 10 books they’d take with them to a desert island, and legendary designer Chip Kidd, who spoke at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa., unsurprisingly listed Updike’s Rabbit, Run as one of his titles. His comments are incredibly insightful, starting with Updike:

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
Whenever anyone asks me where I’m from, I ask them if they’re familiar with Updike’s Rabbit books. If they are, then they know exactly what it was like where I grew up. Updike’s father was my father’s high-school math teacher in tiny Shillington, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Reading. That the author returned to this completely unremarkable place for inspiration throughout his lifelong career is a source of endless fascination for me. I used to joke that it was like a great painter being inspired by the color beige.

But how about his take on Salinger?

Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
I know this is more than a little obvious, but it’s also the only book of his that I enjoy rereading. There, I said it. In both “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé With Love and Squalor” are two very different and devastating depictions of PTSD, a full seven decades before it was a thing.

Or Nabokov?

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
As a brilliantly merciless portrait of mid-20th-century middle America alone, this book is a masterpiece. But we all know it is much more than that. I tend to see it as an intriguingly fiendish parody of Moby-Dick.

Read the full article on Vulture.

When you see an article titled “The Best Books Based in Every State” at Travel + Leisure magazine, you expect John Updike to turn up as the choice for Pennsylvania. After all, two of the “Rabbit” novels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But this new article from Lydia Mansel names Jerry Spinell’s Maniac Magee as the best book from the Keystone State: “Jeffrey Lionel ‘Maniac’ Magee is now an orphan and looking for a home in a town in Pennsylvania, a town based on the author’s childhood home in Norristown. He’s also a local legend, thanks to his athleticism and courage.”

Updike still turns up on the list, though, as author of the best book set in Rhode Island:  The Witches of Eastwick. “In a quaint coastal town in Rhode Island there are three witches—Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie—who developed powers after losing their husbands to death or divorce. Soon, Darryl Van Horne moves in, and all kinds of chaos ensue. Seduction, humor, and revenge reign in John Updike’s magical little town of Eastwick.”

The Express today ran a story about British Comedy Award winner Katy Brand (Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show), who shared her six favorite books. Topping the list:  Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike.

“My favorite of the Rabbit books because it’s the most fun,” she says. “For some reason I find stories about ordinary American life romantic. In this he has taken over a car dealership and is making good money. I like the sense of living alongside a character through a series of books and it’s perfectly written.”

Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint also made her list, as did Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jill Cooper’s Polo, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4.

Here’s the whole article:  “Katy Brand: My six best books – Polo, Alias Grace and more” 

Sean Wilson, writing for Den of Geek!, recently considered “The 15 greatest John Williams scores you’ve forgotten about,” and ranked Williams’ score of the 1970 screen adaptation of Jane Eyre as the composer’s most underrated score . . . with his 1987 score to the film version of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick coming in a close second.

“Another aspect of Williams’ musical personality that’s easy to underrate is his wicked sense of humor,” Wilson writes. “His folk-inspired, flighty and darkly comic score for George Miller’s outrageous John Updike adaptation so perfectly captures the whimsical menace of Jack Nicholson’s Satan that it’s hard to imagine the movie without it. It’s Danny Elfman before the latter even became famous.”

The folks at RealSimple.com have put together a reading list of “17 Great Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down,” and though John Updike’s Villages has been put down by a number of critics, the novel nonetheless made their list.

In choosing it, the editors called Villages an “intriguing commentary on sexuality in 1970s suburbia.”

As Amazon summarizes, “John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, and early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. . . . “

Only 247 people voted for “The Best Books About Adultery” thus far, but those folks don’t seem to be familiar with John Updike’s Rabbit novels, none of which made the top 100. That includes two Pulitzer Prize winners—Rabbit Is Rich, in which Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom engages in wife-swapping (but is maneuvered into getting a different woman from the one he was lusting after), and Rabbit at Rest, in which he famously has sex with his daughter-in-law.

But Updike’s 1968 novel Couples made the list, clocking in at #8, no doubt helped by the notoriety the book initially generated when it put Updike on the cover of Time magazine as the spokesperson for the “post-pill society.”

Topping the list? Tama Janowitz’s Peyton Amberg, followed by The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), A Child’s Book of True Crime (Chloe Hooper), and The Quickie (James Patterson). Rounding out the Top 10 are The Little Women (Katharine Weber) and Lying (Wendy Perriam).

Here’s the full Ranker list, where you too can vote a book up or down.

Updike lovers might be hard pressed to cite their favorite “funny” Updike book.

Is it A Month of Sundays, with its comedic premise of a clergyman sent to a curative retreat for wayward ministers because he was getting a little too intimate with his flock . . . and then can’t help himself from trying to seduce his overseer through journal entries he knows she’s reading? Or S., another book in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy in which he pokes fun of the notion of suburban housewives needing to “find” themselves in a commune, only to discover another form of male dominated servitude?

Is it The Coup, with its hilarious satire of a Third World dictator and American consumerism?

Is it one of the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek books on Updike’s Jewish alter ego, Henry Bech (Bech: A Book, Bech Is Back, Bech at Bay)?

PureWow went with The Witches of Eastwick.

In a list-story on “The 50 Funniest Books We’ve Ever Read,”  they picked Updike’s tale of female vs. male power as their #6 funniest book: “The movie version is fabulous, but Updike’s original source material about three spurned women is even more satirical and wonderful.”

The bottom line is that there are a number of funny Updike books to choose from—enough for him to be considered not just one of America’s great writers, but one of America’s great comic writers as well.