Taylor Brown is named 2026 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow

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In perhaps its most competitive year, with at least a third of the 138 applicants being highly accomplished writers and artists, a trio of judges from The John Updike Society selected Taylor Brown as the recipient of the 2026 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship. The award consists of a two-week residency at the Mission Hill Casitas within the Skyline Country Club in Tucson, Arizona—casitas that John Updike owned and where he wrote during a part of each spring between 2004-09. The casitas stay is made possible by a generous donation from Updike Society members Jan and Jim Emery, owners of the casitas. The fellowship includes a $1000 prize provided by the Society, which administers the fellowship.

While staying at the Casitas, Brown will work on Rise, River, Rise, a literary novel-in-progress set amid the continent’s largest blackwater wetland, the Okefenokee Swamp. The novel interweaves deeply researched swamp history and lore with a contemporary storyline of environmental activists (“tree sitters”) trying to halt mining activity in the area.

Fellowship coordinator Robert Luscher said that the judges were unanimous in their selection, impressed by Brown’s high level of meticulous research reminiscent of the research Updike did for many of his novels, and by a narrative construction and character development that was compelling on multiple levels. “We perceived echoes of Mark Twain and Richard Powers in the scene that was submitted, enjoyed the Southern Gothic atmosphere, and were impressed by the seamless introduction of significant cultural and environmental elements,” Luscher said.

Brown, who grew up on the Georgia coast, is the recipient of the Southern Book Prize, the Montana Prize in Fiction, the Ron Rash Award for Fiction, the Audie Award in Fiction, the Weatherford Award in Fiction, and was named Georgia Author of the Year for Literary Fiction. His work has also been a finalist for the John Steinbeck Award, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, and the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Like Updike, Brown is a prolific writer, best known for his novels: Fallen Land (2016), The River of Kings (2017), Gods of Howl Mountain (2018), Pride of Eden (2020), Wingwalkers (2022), and Rednecks (2024), with another novel, Wolvers (2026), forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. He is also the author of a short story collection (In the Season of Blood and Gold), and his reporting, essays, and short fiction have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, The Southwest Review, and numerous literary journals. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, where he is the founder and editor-in-chief of the custom motorcycle publication BikeBound. Besides old motorcycles, he says he likes thunderstorms and dogs with beards. You can find him at www.taylorbrownfiction.com or @taylorbrown82.

 

 

Festivaltopia lists 19 novels that detailed American suburbia’s rise

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When you see an article on “19 Novels That Captured the Rise of the American Suburb” in the Travel and Guides section of a website, you know you can gas up the car and head to either Shillington, Pennsylvania or Ipswich, Massachusetts, because one of Updike’s domestic novels likely will be included.

This time it’s Pennsylvania.

“John Updike’s 1960 novel introduced readers to Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, perhaps the most iconic character in suburban literature. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle-class man who feels there is something missing from his life. The novel follows Rabbit as he flees his suburban responsibilities—his pregnant wife, his job, his entire life—in a desperate attempt to recapture the vitality of his youth. Frank Wheeler, Piet Hanema, Frank Bascombe – these are a handful of the suburban men in the fiction of Richard Yates, John Updike, and Richard Ford. These writers all display certain characteristics of the suburban novel in the post-WWII era: the male experience placed at the forefront of narration, the importance of competition both socially and economically, contrasting feelings of desire and loathing for predictability, and the impact of an increasingly developed landscape upon the American psyche and the individual’s mind. Updike’s genius was in making Rabbit both sympathetic and infuriating—a man whose suburban malaise drives him to make increasingly destructive choices. The novel launched a series that would span four decades, chronicling the evolution of suburban America through one man’s journey.

See what other books made Fritz Von Burkersroda’s list

Blogger shares favorite Updike story

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OnJan. 3, 2026, Patrick Kurp posted comments on his favorite Updike story on Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life: “The Happiest I’ve Been.”

“Of all Updike’s stories, this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It’s the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. For most of us, happiness is a momentary state, not perpetual.”

Kurp added, “Of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Nabokov writes:

“‘The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

Read the whole post

New essay tackles the question of Updike and misogyny

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Teaching American Literature:  A Journal of Theory and Practice has published Sue Norton’s article “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus” in its Winter 2025 edition.  It is the product of Norton’s 2024 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship.  The article builds upon several decades of literary criticism in Updike studies and incorporates the work of JUS members Marshall Boswell and Biljana Dojčinović.

 

 

RSVP now for a zoom course on Updike and Roth

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The Library of America will offer a four-part zoom course on literary friends and rivals John Updike and Philip Roth, taught by Adam Gopnik, who delivered the opening keynote talk at the October 2025 joint Philip Roth and John Updike societies conference in New York City.

The sessions will be held weekly on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30-2:45, Jan. 14 through Feb. 4. The class will be recorded and shared with registrants so they can watch it any time.

“Inspired by the multivolume LOA editions of Roth and Updike, this course will delve into their complex relationship and many masterpieces, from early short-fiction triumphs, to the scandalous 1960s breakthroughs Portnoy’s Complaint and Couples, to brilliant late-career works like Roth’s American Trilogy and Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies that show these two literary lions confronting their legacies and making bold bids for artistic immortality.”

The course costs $200 and includes a coupon for 40 percent off all Roth and Updike volumes in the LOA series. Participation is limited, so RSVP now if interested.

Click here to RSVP (required) and learn more. 

Ipswich columnist asks if Updike would be published today

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Bob Waite, whose father was Updike’s dentist back when the author lived and worked in Ipswich, has been a columnist for North Shore media for decades. Recently he wrote an opinion piece that was published by The Local News, “Lite Waite: Could John Updike, a Straight White Male, Find a Home in Today’s Literary Scene?”

It’s a fair question, but readers probably already know the answer. In fact, John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was watching the new BBC miniseries Down Cemetery Road when she saw this allusion to Updike that perfectly captures the current situation (and provided these screenshots):

After Updike published his scandalous wife-swapping novel Couples in 1968, the attention the book brought elevated him to the role of spokesperson for America’s changing morality that deviated sharply from the staid 1950s. It’s no surprise then, that Updike would also become a lightning rod for criticism of male novelists during the era of “#Me Too.”

“There is no shortage of millennial white males who believe themselves shut out of a contemporary literary scene that seems curated by, and targeted at, women,” Waite wrote. “By implication, Updike would suffer a similar fate. To elaborate, Waite cites Ross Barkan (“From Misogyny to No Man’s Land”): “If men still sit at the top of publishing houses, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note.” Barkan argues that straight white males have all but disappeared as authors and literary characters. Waite wrote, “He tells us that ‘between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations).'” Continue reading →

Editor Schiff and Updike siblings interviewed about the Selected Letters

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In his introduction to an interview he conducted with James Schiff, Joe Donahue wrote, “John Updike remains one of the most admired and prolific voices in American Literature. Over five decades he produced novels, short stories, poems, criticism, and essays that examine faith and art, desire, and the American experience in all its complexity. . . . Now in the new book ‘Selected Letters of John Updike’ editor James Schiff offers readers a window into that private world drawing from decades of correspondence. Schiff presents a portrait of Updike as both craftsman and confidante, generous, witty, and endlessly reflective about writing and life.”

Here’s the link to the WAMC Northeast Public Radio podcast.

More conversation about John Updike and the letters comes from a Radio Open Source interview with Michael Updike and Miranda Updike conducted by Christopher Lydon, a Boston-area fixture who interviewed John Updike on numerous occasions. In sending the link to the Updike siblings, Lydon wrote, “We want you to take a bow… and enjoy this piece as we do! You and Michael are heroic here, and funny and deep… And we all fall in love with your marvelous dad, all over again.”

Here’s the link to “John Updike’s Vocation.”

If you haven’t gotten a copy of the book yet, here’s a link to order from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports local independent bookstores.

JUS Facebook Redux: Roth-Updike conference photos posted

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John Updike Society members may recall that Facebook’s not terribly intelligent Meta AI shut down The John Updike Society and The John Updike Childhood Home pages for alleged  “impersonation.” Other single author societies, Roth included, were also shut down. The Updike Society lost more than 10 years of posts and photos as a result. To share photos from last week’s Roth-Updike Conference in Greenwich Village, NYC, James Plath decided to slip a fastball under the chin and open another Updike Society account. Call it a Pop-up.

Here’s the link to the new Updike Society Facebook page for you to bookmark:  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61582524401777

And here’s the link to the conference photo album (which you can find in the future by selecting the photos tab, then albums tab):  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61582524401777&sk=photos_albums

Below is the planning committee, posing at the very last scheduled event . . . when there was nothing more to plan: (L to r) JUS veep James Schiff, JUS prez James Plath, co-director Adam Sexton, RS past prez Matthew Shipe, co-director Aimee Pozorski, and RS prez Andy Connolly.

Volume of Updike’s selected letters draws praise

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James Schiff’s long-awaited Selected Letters of John Updike will be released on Oct. 21, 2025, with a reading-booksigning-publication party scheduled that evening at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, where Schiff is in town to convene with other members of The John Updike Society for a joint Roth-Updike Conference with the Philip Roth Society.

The volume of Updike’s selected letters, decades in the making and years in the gathering, runs a whopping 912 pages and is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Updike’s publisher.

Early reviews were positive . . . and insightful, while later reviews continue to positive to glowing.

Kirkus Reviews
“Missives from the mountain. Updike . . . wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. ‘I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’ he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. . . . In 1960, he wrote to publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought to present an image of an averagely physical young American.’ He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be ‘to funk my job.’ At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: ‘I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.”
Read the entire review 

WSJ – The Wall Street Journal, reviewed by Thomas Mallon
“In ‘Selected Letters of John Updike,’ a new and predictably enormous collection of Updike’s correspondence, we see all his lovers, spouses, neighbors and children as persons, and we experience Updike himself with even more candor than he displayed in his first-person essays. . . . The letters illuminate the consistency of Updike’s fiction aesthetic. Remarkably, at 19, he wrote of the need for ‘an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.’ He would maintain, decade after decade, that style ‘is nothing less than the writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing.”
Read the entire review (subscription required)

The New York Times, reviewed by Dwight Garner
“Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. . . . Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.”
Read the entire review (subscription required)

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Fall 2025 John Updike Review is published

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Editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason have done it again, assembling another fine issue of The John Updike Review. Volume 11: 2 (Fall 2025) that was published this week.

The new issue spotlights works that are written about less often than the titles Updike is best known for, featuring essays on Marry Me: A Romance (Nadia Szold); Marry Me, Couples and The Witches of Eastwick (Sylvie Mathé), Licks of Love (Peter J. Bailey); and “My Father’s Tears” and “The Laughter of the Gods” (Robert Milder).

The focus of “Three Writers On” this issue is “My Father’s Tears,” from Updike’s final short story collection by the same name, with the story reprinted by permission and short essays from D. Quentin Miller, Sue Norton, and James Schiff.

As always, members of The John Updike Society who reside in the U.S. will receive a print copy by mail, while those outside the U.S. will receive a digital copy. To receive the journal, simply become a member of the society. For an institutional membership, please contact James Schiff: james.schiff@uc.edu. Schiff said that since members are convening in New York City this coming weekend for The Roth-Updike Conference, he will try to bring copies so that our international members can have a print copy of the new issue. 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, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature.