The Borzoi Reader Poem-a-Day today featured Updike’s homage to Piet Mondrian, “Piet.” Here’s the link. And if you’d like to sign up for The Borzoi Reader feature, click here.

Society member Bob Batchelor, who recently accepted the volunteer position of Marketing and Media Director for The John Updike Childhood Home, had an essay published in The Mailer Review 6:1 (2012): 129-44, titled “Mailer and Updike: Probing American Culture as Writers and Celebrities.”

Updike’s short story “A Mild Complaint” appeared in Ian Frazier’s Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff, Too) (Ecco Press, 2010) with this footnote, which appears in the author’s introduction:

“Also, unconnected to anything, here’s a note, just FYI: The John Updike piece, “A Mild Complaint,” which concludes Part I, was famous at the New Yorker as the piece that the magazine held on to the longest before it was published. Updike wrote the piece, and the magazine bought it, in the mid-1950s, when he was a young man. For inscrutable reasons the New Yorker then kept the piece for twenty-some years and finally ran it in the 1970s [sic, actually April 19, 1982], when Updike was in his middle years. The piece is included here as a testament to the resilience of literature, and as a wave to Mr. Updike, wherever in the afterlife he may be” (xi-xii).

Frazier’s remarks can be found in context at this link. Thanks to member Larry Randen for passing it along.

The online magazine Obit—whose tagline in “Death is only half the story. Obit is about life . . .”—featured John Updike on January 28, 2009. In “Updike’s Dark Certainty,” Robert Roper visits “Updike country—the region where suburban platting meets knicker-dropping” and offers an lyrical-interpretive summary of Updike’s literary life, along with a bottom-story link to several obits and appraisals of Updike.

The item comes to us belatedly from Dave Lull, via Larry Randen.

The current issue (July 12-August 15) of The New York Review of Books is devoted to fiction, and one article prominently features Updike, member Brian Duffy writes:

For those who missed it, Philip Roth Studies Vol. 7, No. 2 features the transcript of an ALA session in which Updike Society board member and treasurer Marshall Boswell participated: “Contemporary American Fiction and the Confluence of Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and John Updike: A Roundtable Discussion.”

Marshall says that a “grainy photo” of the participants accompanies the roundtable transcript, and that he was proud to carry the Updike banner.

Here’s the transcript of the roundtable discussion, shared by permission of editor and current Updike Society board member Derek Parker Royal, who adds that members can buy a hard copy through  The Philip Roth Society Website. Derek’s email is on the Meet the Board page on the left menu, if you wish to order a copy directly through him.

Radical History Review Volume 2011, Number 111, Fall 2011 features essays on the theme of “Historicizing 9/11,” and member Bob Batchelor has an essay in it titled “Literary Lions Tackle 9/11: Updike and DeLillo Depicting History through the Novel.” You can access it and get a free full-text download here. In his essay, Batchelor considers how Updike’s “on-the-scene reporting gave his words added consequence,” with his “description of the horror and of his personal response” providing readers with “an additional tool to process the events.”

Takashi Nakatani, an associate professor at Yokohama City University who attended the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference, wrote an essay/report on “Updike Gakkai Soritsu-Taikai Shusseki-no Ki” (“Report on the Updike Society Inaugural Conference”) which was published in Web Eigo-Seinen (The Web Rising Generation) 156:9 (2010): 49-52. Web. 1 December 2010. Below is the first page. For the rest, see Web Eigo-Seinen.