The online Literary Encyclopedia is commissioning entries on the works of John Updike. Entries are usually between 1500 and 2500 words and deadlines can be negotiated according to the needs of the individual contributor. Please contact the editor of the Encyclopedia, Grace Moore (grace.moore@otago.ac.nz) if you are interested in writing one or more entries. Entries may be by academics at any career stage, including PhD candidates and early career scholars. Authors receive free access to the publication, which contains almost 10,000 peer-reviewed articles.
- Rabbit, Run
- Rabbit Redux
- Rabbit is Rich
- Rabbit at Rest
- Couples
- The Centaur
- Of the Farm
- The Witches of Eastwick
- The Widows of Eastwick
- Bech: A Book
- Bech is Back
- Bech at Bay
- Gertrude and Claudius
- My Father’s Tears, and Other Stories
- Too Far to Go
- Problems, and Other Stories
- Pigeon Feathers
- The Same Door
- The Music School
- Museums and Women
- The Afterlife, and Other Stories
- Toward the End of Time
- Seek My Face
- The Poorhouse Fair
- Marry Me
- The Coup
- Brazil
- Trust Me
- Villages
- Memories of the Ford Administration
- Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, ‘Rabbit Remembered’
- Self-Consciousness
- Endpoint, and Other Poems
- Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism
- More Matter: Essays and Criticism
- Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
- Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism
- Hugging the Shore
- Picked-Up Pieces
- Just Looking: Essays on Art
- Still Looking: Essays on American Art
- Facing Nature: Poems
- Americana and Other Poems
- Telephone Poles
- Tossing and Turning
- The Carpentered Hen, and Other Tamed Creatures
- Buchanan Dying
- The Early Stories: 1953-1975
- Collected Poems, 1953-1993
- Seventy Poems
- Golf Dreams
- Jester’s Dream
Myrtle was a 1941 graduate of Shillington High School, and after serving in the Navy WAVES during WWII she worked at the Reading Eagle-Times, Jacobs Aircraft Engineering Co., and Edelman’s Law Office in Reading.
The selection committee for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship has chosen Dr. Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Technological University Dublin, to serve as the first fellow in residence.
Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Clasroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Norton came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. Her first article on Updike (The John Updike Review, 2014) was on the “regulating daughter” in the Rabbit novels. She has maintained an interest in the treatment of girls and women in Updike’s writing and beyond. It is on this topic that she will focus during her residency as the 2024 Fellow at the Tucson Casitas.
James Plath, whose most recent published criticism—”Updike’s ‘Wife-Wooing’: The Seven Year Itch and the Soliloquy of Seduction”—appeared in The John Updike Review Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2023), recently spent two weeks researching an essay on Mark Twain and John Updike as a Quarry Farm Fellow.
ABSTRACT: This article provides an innovative perspective on John Updike’s visit to Eastern Europe in the 1960s, including Bulgaria, as reflected in his short story “The Bulgarian Poetess” first published in The New Yorker on March 13, 1965. The inspiration for this interpretation is as much academic as it is anthropological. It comes from Updike’s use of my own surname, Glavanakova, which is not a common Slavic one, for the fictional character of the real-life Bulgarian poetess he met, whom researchers have established to be Blaga Dimitrova. Many have delved into the text aiming at a detailed and, more significantly, an authentic reconstruction of events, places and people appearing in the story (Katsarova 2010; Kosturkov 2012; Briggs and Dojčinović 2015). A main preoccupation of these analyses has been to establish the degree of factual distortion in Updike’s representation of the people and places behind the Iron Curtain. The pervasive imagery of the mirror, implying both its reflecting and doubling function, and the repetitive use of cognates associated with truth and honesty in the story suggest the focus of this article, which falls on the dynamics between authenticity and artifice from the perspective of autofiction by way of illustrating how one culture translates into another “at the opposite side[s] of the world” (Updike, “The Bulgarian Poetess”). In my interpretation, autofiction opens ample spaces for representations and discussions of identity and self-/reflexivity in a transcultural context.
Not everyone who recognizes themselves in a writer’s fiction or poetry is pleased, but William Ecenbarger took delight in recalling his 1983 interview with John Updike that inspired Updike to write “One More Interview.” Then a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ecenbarger managed to score his interview with Updike through the writer’s mother, Linda. It was no ordinary interview.
Most lists are Top Ten or Top 100, but no one ever accused Art Garfunkel—the quieter half of the Simon & Garfunkel folk-rock duo—of being like “most.” The singer decided to log each book he read, beginning in 1968—the year that the duo’s “Mrs. Robinson,” written for The Graduate soundtrack, won Grammy Record of the Year.
