Category Archives: Publications

New short story anthology includes Pigeon Feathers

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9780547485850On October 6, 2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. And, of course, Updike was included.

This is the best of the best, really, as it’s culled from The Best American Short Stories Series. This is the centennial celebration of the series.

The editors were careful to distribute their picks so that a wide range of American authors could be represented, and no author got more than one story in this collection—though, of course, many writers deserved more than one.

Their are some surprises, but for the classic American authors the classic stories seem to have been chosen. Ernest Hemingway’s “My Old Man” was included, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers” made the cut, as did Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” along with frequent anthology standards like John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Raymond Carver fans might be surprised that “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” was selected over “Cathedral” or “So Much Water So Close to Home,” as might Donald Barthelme fans that “The School” (a great short story) was chosen over some of his more popular ones. The editors clearly put some thought into this, and the fact that a Pennsylvania story was chosen from Updike reinforces how much his home state meant to his fiction . . . and poetry, and creative non-fiction and criticism.

 

New Yorker runs previously unpublished Updike poem

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Screen Shot 2015-09-28 at 5.00.49 PMJohn Updike’s previously unpublished early poem “Coming into New York” appears on page 38 of the October 5 issue of The New Yorker, on sale at newsstands today.

The poem is also available online, here: “Coming into New York.” Both a printed version of the poem appears, as well as a recording of Brad Leithauser reading Updike’s poem.

Leithauser provided the introduction to John Updike: Selected Poems (Knopf), edited by Christopher Carduff. That volume hits bookstores on October 13, 2015 (Amazon link).

Brad Leithauser reading “Coming into New York.”

Beattie’s new collection an occasion to remember the Updike connection

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1-the-state-were-in-ann-beattieWriter Ann Beattie agreed to share the keynote speaker duties at the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University with her painter-husband Lincoln Perry because she was an Updike supporter and Updike was a supporter of hers.

A Vogue article about her new collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, reminds us of that connection. Journalist Megan O’Grady writes, “As John Updike told her when they first met, ‘You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.”

He was talking about what O’Grady described as her stories’ “open-ended capaciousness, so unlike the deterministic, epiphany-shaped prose that has defined the short form.”

Just as Updike’s characters aged, so have Beattie’s. They’re “mostly older and less cool these days: They order crackers from Amazon; they’ve been through divorces or estrangements and are on second or third attempts at life. They have a sense not of the ending but of an ending. The result is a newfound ephemerality—a fledgling bird found in a recycling bin, and unexpected pregnancy, an attempted suicide,” O’Grady writes.

Here’s the entire article:  “Wandering Beyond the Page: Ann Beattie on Her New Collection, The State We’re In.”

Amazon link

Winter 2015 issue of JUR is published

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JUR3-2small2Watch your mailboxes, John Updike Society members. Volume 3, Number 2 (Winter 2015) of The John Updike Review has been published and mailed. The issue features a stunning cover photo by Ara Guler and two plenary talks from the Third Biennial Conference: “The Bulgarian Poetess: John and Blaga,” by Ward Briggs and Biljana Dojčinović, and “Starting Out at Chatterbox: The Apprenticeship of John Updike,” by Donald J. Greiner. Also in this issue is the winning essay from the JUR’s Second Emerging Writers Prize—”The Long Goodbye: The Role of Memory in John Updike’s Late Short Fiction,” by Matthew Shipe—and “Engendering Pleasure: Sringara Rasa in John Updike’s S.,” by Pradipta Sengupta.

Editor James Schiff has done another fantastic job, and his innovative Three Writers feature, in which three invited writers are asked to contribute an essay on the same Updike story, novel, poem or essay, this issue spotlights the short story “Gesturing”: Robert M. Luscher’s “Motions of Meaning: John Updike’s ‘Gesturing,'” Dario Sulzman’s “‘I Feel I’ve Given Birth to a Black Hole’: Existential Motifs of Bachelorhood in John Updike’s ‘Gesturing,'” and Kathleen Verduin’s “Gestures of Reflection.”

Rounding out the issue is Matthew Shipe’s review of Bob Batchelor’s John Updike: A Critical Biography.

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. To subscribe to The John Updike Review, simply join The John Updike Society (https://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/). Membership ($25 regular, $20 grad students/retirees) includes a subscription to the journal. Institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO.

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.

British comedian picks Updike for his one book on a desert island

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Screen Shot 2015-02-07 at 7.51.33 PMThe Daily Mail asked British comedian David Baddiel (The Mary Whitehouse Experience) which book he’d take to a desert island, and he chose John Updike. Or more specifically,

“The Rabbit omnibus by John Updike. This is actually five books all about the same character:  Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit, Remembered. All human life is there.”

The occasion for the interview was the publication of Baddiel’s first children’s book, The Parent Agency (HarperCollins). It’s available from Amazon.

Olinger Stories republished, reviewed

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Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 7.25.06 AMApart from the poem “Ex-Basketball Player” and short stories like “A&P,” Updike isn’t taught much in American high schools because of the language and sexual content that’s sprinkled liberally throughout his Rabbit series and other classics. But that may change with the republication of Olinger Stories by Everyman’s Pocket Classics, which will be released on October 7, 2014.

Ironically, we received a review copy smack in in the middle of Banned Books Week, and the handsome, bargain-priced ($16 SRP) hardcover with Updike’s hand-picked stories gives high school teachers a classroom-worthy book—one that Updike himself considered “his signature collection, the volume of short stories that communicated his freshest impressions of life as it came to him in hardscrabble Berks County, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s and ‘40s,” as a publisher’s note reminds us. Updike once told an interviewer, “If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories.”

There’s a delightful world of language, of place, and of finding one’s place in the world to discover for readers new to Updike. But this new volume may work for scholars as well, because, as the publisher’s note continues, the “text of the stories reprinted here are those that Updike published in The Early Stories, which he deemed definitive,” along with a foreword to the original 1964 Vintage paperback “altered only to incorporate a few small changes made by the author after its initial publication.”

Included, in order, are the stories “You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You,” “The Alligators” (which is already being taught in some high schools), “Pigeon Feathers” (also being taught), “Friends from Philadelphia,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “Flight,” “The Happiest I’ve Been,” “The Persistence of Desire,” “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” and “In Football Season.” Right now, Amazon.com is selling the collection for $10.12.   Continue reading →

NY Times Magazine essayist invokes Updike

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Screen Shot 2014-07-06 at 9.50.10 AMIn an essay titled “794 Ways in Which BuzzFeed Reminds Us of Impending Death” (NY Times Magazine, July 3, 2014), Heather Havrilesky invoked John Updike:

“The next summer, after a long year spent adjusting to life without my dad in the house, I happened to pick up John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich.’ Perhaps given the timing, it was the first novel that felt real and relatable to me, like a ticket straight into the bloodstream of another human being. And no wonder — Updike knew exactly how the intrusions of pop-culture minutiae had the power to evoke the cheery dread of Middle America.   Continue reading →

Journal features an article on Updike and second-wave feminism

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Screen Shot 2014-05-25 at 10.23.49 AMFeatured in Volume 5, Issue No. 4 [2014] of the International Research Journal of Management Sociology & Humanity, is an article by Anshu Chaudhary titled “Analysis of the Select Novels of John Updike from the Perspective of the Second Wave Feminism,” which appears on pages 84-91.

In it, Chaudhary writes, “It can’t be ignored that Updike was reflecting the point of view of male characters of a particular age and class, and in that context they demonstrated psychological insight. But if we analyze Couples and Marry Me the two most interesting and sympathetic novels in which the women characters are most keenly drawn we see that he has presented the mystery of man’s sexuality from the perspective of the female characters. In both these novels he entered the mystery of woman’s sexuality as well.

“Updike’s views and depiction of female characters may be prejudiced but are not misogynistic. His works don’t show him to be against the growth and liberalization of domestic women. He just reflects the ‘other’ side of things.”

She concludes her essay, “Thus, female characters exist and develop and survive in his fiction. They also help the male characters to find their own identity and ‘Search for the Self.’ Although he fails to give them their own identity but as he himself says,

“‘American fiction is notoriously thin on women, and I have attempted a number of portraits of women, and we may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I’m not sure Mark Twain was able to.'”