New De Bellis book on Updike slated for summer release

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John Updike Remembered:  Friends, Family and Colleagues Reflect on the Writer and the Man, edited by Jack De Bellis, will be published this summer by McFarland Books and is now available to pre-order. The softcover volume features 53 remembrances that “present a prismatic view of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and his work through anecdote and insight” as “interviews and essays from family, friends and associates reveal sides of the novelist perhaps unfamiliar to the public—Updike the high school prankster, the golfer, the creator of bedtime stories, the charming ironist, the faithful correspondent with scholars, the devoted friend and the dedicated practitioner of his craft,” as described on the McFarland website. List price is $29.95.

“Contributors include: his first wife, Mary Pennington, and three of their children; high school and college friends; authors John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates and Nicholson Baker; journalists Terri Gross and Ann Goldstein; and scholars Jay Parini, William Pritchard, James Plath, and Adam Begley, Updike’s biographer.”

De Bellis, who is Professor Emeritus of English at Lehigh University, was a founder of The John Updike Society and served on the board of directors from 2009-14. A member of the editorial board of The John Updike Review, he is best known among scholars for the books he has edited or written on Updike:

—John Updike, 1967-1993: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994)
—The John Updike Encyclopedia (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000)
—John Updike: The Critical Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga (Oak Knoll Press, 2003)
—John Updike: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1948-2007, co-authored by Michael Broomfield (Oak Knoll Press, 2008)
—John Updike’s Early Years (Lehigh University Press, 2013)

Have you seen this child . . . John Updike?

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If not and you’re a member of The John Updike Society, it ought to be arriving soon. Volume 5: Number 1 (Winter 2017) of The John Updike Review is out now, featuring:

“A Word from the Editor”—James Schiff
“Summer 1974, in Fiction and Memory”—David Updike
“A Conversation with John Updike in Moscow”—Ward Briggs & J. Alexander Ogden
“Updike in Venice”—John Philip Drury
“John Updike’s Broadsides: The Blackness of Death and Bath after Sailing“—Donald J. Greiner

plus “Three Writers on Villages“:
“Programmed Delirium: Villages and the God of Multilevel Selection”—Marshall Boswell
“Dreams, Conflated Wives, Lingering Guilt, and Coitus Recalled in Updike’s Villages”—James Schiff
“Seduction in John Updike’s Villages“—Aristi Trendel

and reviews by Sue Norton (The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, by Katie Roiphe) and Laurence W. Mazzeno (Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike, by John McTavish).

The refereed journal, which publishes the very best of current Updike criticism and articles, is free with membership in The John Updike Society. It’s published twice annually by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and based at the University of Cincinnati Department of English and Comparative Literature. For institutional subscriptions contact James Schiff, james.schiff@uc.edu.

Shurbanov added as keynote for JUS Conference in Serbia

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Distinguished poet, writer, translator, and Shakespearian scholar Alexander Shurbanov, who translated John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius into Bulgarian, will be featured as a keynote speaker at the Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Serbia. The conference, 1-4 June 2018, will be sponsored and hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade.

Not only did Shurbanov, now Professor Emeritus at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria, correspond with Updike while translating Gertrude and Claudius, but he was also a longtime friend of Blaga Dimitrova, the prototype of Vera Glavanakova from Updike’s O. Henry Award-winning story “The Bulgarian Poetess.”

Shurbanov, who has also taught at the University of London, UCLA, and SUNY-Albany, has translated 14 texts ranging from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Magna Carta to Tales by Beatrix Potter and poetry by Milton, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore. As a poet and essayist he is also the author of 18 collections, including three bilingual Bulgarian-English titles:  Frost-Flowers (Princeton, 2001), Beware: Cats (Sofia, 2001), and most recently Foresun: Selected Poems in Bulgarian and English (Sofia, 2016).

From 1972-2009, Shurbanov taught at the University of Sofia, where he received The Honorary Medal of Sofia University in 2001. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including The Danov National Award for Overall Contribution to Culture (2007), The Geo Miley National Literary Award (2015), and The Portal Kultura Special Prize for Notable Achievements in Poetry and Translation (2016).

Along with celebrated writer Ian McEwan, who was announced earlier as a keynote speaker, the addition of Professor Shurbanov gives the conference two top-flight presenters that should appeal to both society members and devotees of literature. Like Updike, whom he knew, McEwan worked in multiple genres, the author of 14 novels, three short story collections, two plays, two children’s books, five screenplays—even a libretto. Among his numerous awards are the Booker Prize for his eighth novel, Amsterdam (1998); the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (2011); and the 50th Anniversary Gold Medal from the University of Sussex. Long an advocate for Updike’s legacy and an admitted beneficiary of Updike’s influence, McEwan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent novel is Nutshell (2016)—which retells the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the point of view of an unborn child.

Though membership in the society is required to attend the conference, The John Updike Society is an inclusive organization whose members are teachers, professors, writers, theologians, independent scholars, Updike family and friends, collectors, and the kind of just-plain-readers that Updike always appreciated. The society previously held conferences in Columbia, S.C., Boston, and Reading, Pa. (twice). This will be the first time members will meet outside the U.S.

Call for papers

 

Terrorist and Jihadi fiction: a scholarly paper

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Jago Morrison’s paper, “Jihadi fiction: radicalisation narratives in the contemporary novel” is available online, published 6 March 2017 by the Taylor & Francis Group. Here’s the abstract (link to full text also available):

“As Ulrich Beck suggests in World at Risk, fear of Islamist extremism has become a dominant strand in contemporary perceptions of risk. In the media, a set of ‘stock’ radicalisation narratives have emerged in which, typically, a misguided loner is brainwashed into embracing a violent perversion of Islam. In the background, the wider Muslim community is accused of a dangerous complicity and complacency. This essay explores some notable attempts in fiction to unpick such popular radicalisation narratives. In novels by John Updike and Sunjeev Sahota, the psychological and faith dimensions of suicide bombing are a key focus, attempting to explore from the inside, how an educated young Muslim might be impelled along the path to martyrdom. In texts by Mohsin Hamid and J.M. Coetzee, the ideological staging of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘fundamentalism’ themselves is brought into question. Current counterterrorist measures include indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, while in the UK, over two million public sector workers have been recruited to the largest surveillance exercise ever codified in British law. In this context, the essay shows how recent fiction has attempted to trouble the frames of representation through which a perpetual state-of-emergency is passed off as our ‘new normal.'”

“In John Updike’s Terrorist,” Morrison writes, “both radicalisation and its contexts are portrayed rather differently. Again, the focus of the novel is to explore the risk of a devastating suicide attack, but to do so through an individual, human story. This, however, is very much an American tale, in which the impulse towards extremism is seen as rising, at least in part, out of the bleakness and inanity of contemporary suburban life. Like Sahota, Updike begins by drawing a protagonist who is damaged and ripe for influence. No visit to Afghanistan is required for Ahmad: between the machinations of a local imam and those of a CIA agent, the manipulations all happen close to home, in an ordinary city modelled on Paterson, New Jersey. In Updike’s portrayal, Ahmad is an impressionable and (somewhat cartoonishly) zealous American teenager, product of a broken home and in search of self-esteem. Raised non-religious after his Egyptian father abandoned him as a young child, he is described by his mother as ‘trusting’ and ‘easily led.’”

Continue reading →

Literary Hub includes Updike in birth control “history”

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Ellen Feldman offers “A Brief Literary History of Birth Control from George Orwell and John Updike to Grace Metalious and Alice Munro” in an article posted 23 March 2017 at Literary Hub. The entry on Updike credits Rabbit, Run as a touchstone:

“Rabbit Angstrom of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, has an aversion to contraception, but unlike Orwell’s character, he objects to it on physical and aesthetic rather than political grounds. When Ruth Leonard, the ‘hooer’ to whom he’s giving fifteen dollars ‘toward [her] rent,’ is about to slip into the bathroom to insert what he calls a ‘flying saucer,’ he stops her with the argument that he’s ‘very sensitive.’ ‘Do you have the answer then?’ she asks. ‘No, I hate them even worse…If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this,’ Rabbit, who has abandoned his pregnant wife and child, goes on, ‘give me the fifteen back.’

Couples is also cited:  “Eight years after the publication of Rabbit, Run, Updike not only espoused birth control but also identified it by brand name. The first time Piet and Georgene, married to other people, have sex, he worries about ‘making a little baby,” and she’s surprised he doesn’t know about Enovid. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ she tells him, and the ‘light-hearted blasphemy . . . immensely relieved him.'”

With only nine entries you’d have to call it a very brief history, but it’s still a fascinating round-up.

Prospect’s Edward Pearce on John Updike

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Prospect: The leading magazine of ideas, published an essay in their March 2000 issue (posted online 20 March 2000) by Edward Pearce titled, “You’re not so vain: In praise of John Updike.” In it, Pearce considers Updike-as-reviewer.

“Notoriously, the author of the Rabbit tetralogy, the delectable Bech stories and a compendium of superlative writing, is a kind reviewer. He shares the view of Anthony Burgess (also a victim of loftiness from below) that writing a book is a great toil underground and that to be smashed on the head afterwards—even with a cardboard shovel—is a rotten experience. Decent fellow writers should withhold such smashing.”

Later, Pearce writes, “Updike as a critic has the gift of interest. His scope is continental . . . . Updike is intelligently nostalgic. He is sufficiently independent of the arts community’s requirements to be able to field the latest buzz topic—then turn back to a film star of his childhood, or indeed a mediocre novel of 30 years ago, and write about it with affection.”

“There is also,” Pearce maintains, citing a review of Camille Paglia, “a delightful cross-over from Updike the moviegoer and 1950s nostalgist” in Updike the reviewer.

Read the full essay

Updike one of three to comment on Pamuk novel

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“Back in 2004,” Literary Hub writes, “three literary heavyweights reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s novel of Modern Turkey,” and in the article “Atwood, Updike and Hitchens on Snow“ the site compiles remarks from three individual book reviews.

In a review published in the August 30, 2004 New Yorker, Updike concluded, “If at times Snow seems attenuated and opaque, we should not forget that in Turkey, insofar as it partakes of the Islamic world’s present murderous war of censorious fanaticism versus free speech and truth-seeking, to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage. Pamuk, relatively young as he is, at the age of fifty-two, qualifies as that country’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the near-assassination of Islam’s last winner must cross his mind. To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused and, against the grain of the author’s usual antiquarian bent, entirely contemporary in its setting and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.”

Read the entire article.

On Rabbit’s alter ego and new LOA editions

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On Feb. 21 in New York City at a Library of America event, writer Kevin Morris and Cornell professor Glenn Altschuler took the stage to discuss Updike’s legacy.

Morris, who had “adopted” John Updike: The Collected Stories through the Guardian of American Letters Fund, is the author of All Joe Knight, a novel in which he “engages in a dialogue with Updike’s famous quartet of Rabbit novels,” as a March 9, 2017 LOA website story summarizes.

“Like Rabbit Angstrom, Morris’s protagonist Joe Knight is from Pennsylvania, is unhappily married to a woman named Janice, and is haunted by the sense that his entire life has been a falling-off since the days when he was a high-school basketball star. Perhaps appropriately for America in the early twenty-first century, however, Joe is even angrier and more profane than his predecessor ever was.

“The resonances between these two characters, along with Updike’s ability to capture the passions, doubts, and longings of America’s post-World War II generation—to ‘give the mundane its beautiful due,’ to use his oft-quoted phrase—were the grist for Morris’s talk with Altschuler.

“Updike fans will be excited to learn that Library of America inaugurates a planned five-volume edition of his novels in 2018; the lead-off volume will include the first book in the Rabbit Angstrom sage, 1960’s Rabbit, Run.”

All Joe Knight Amazon link 

Liberty Conservative takeaways from The Coup

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On March 17, 2017, Larsen Halleck shared his thoughts about John Updike’s satirical novel, The Coup, for The Liberty Conservative—another political consideration of an author who, in his lifetime, was often criticized for not being political enough.

“In his life,” Halleck begins, “John Updike was considered to be one of, if not the, premier American novelists of the 20th century—his Rabbit Angstrom books are still considered to be one of the best satires of the archetypal downtrodden American husband and father (the genre arguably started by Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit), full of broken dreams and mediocrity as he struggles against the changes of the world around him.

“But that’s not what I’ve come here to discuss:

“My favorite of his works is the 1978 best seller The Coup, an excellent read in its own right, but so much more than that: For The Coup is quite possibly the only satire of post-colonial Africa (or at least, the only one I’m aware of). More to the point, in satirizing latter 20th-century Marxist states, The Coup shines a light on some aspects of modern leftist ideology that confuse and infuriate us today, and shows that even back then there were competing camps in the leftist ‘big tent.’ And of course, there is an implicit message of ‘Imperialism will hurt the empire in the long run,’ which is most relevant to America in its current decline.”

Read the full article.

New book analyzes writers’ tendencies

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Scholars and would-be writers just got a resource that’s so fascinating they might not be able to get past the data to formulate a thesis of their own. In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt combines statistical analysis and literature to produce a study that quantifies writers’ tendencies. As an article from Publisher’s Weekly notes, “Using a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, Blatt answers everything from what are our favorite authors’ favorite words to which contemporary writer uses the most clichés to the controversial topic of adverb usage.”

The article “Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers” shares some of his findings, and of course Updike turns up on the lists.

Which three writers use the least amount of exclamation points per 100,000 words? That would be Elmore Leonard with 49 in 45 novels, followed by Ernest Hemingway with 59 in 10 novels and John Updike with 88 in 26 novels. Who uses the most exclamation points? James Joyce with 1105 in 3 novels, followed by Tom Wolfe (929 in 4 novels) and Sinclair Lewis (844 in 19 novels).

Which three writers use the least number of clichés per 100,000 words? Jane Austen (45 in 6 novels), Edith Wharton (62 in 22 novels) and Virginia Woolf (62 in 9 novels). Purveyors of the most clichés in their writing? James Patterson (160 in 22 Alex Cross books), Tom Wolfe (143 in 4 novels), and Kurt Vonnegut (140 in 14 novels). Updike was rated as producing 96 per 100,000 words over the course of 26 novels, which was one better than Toni Morrison did over 10 novels and six better than Twain did over the course of 13 novels.

What about the weather? Danielle Steel mentioned the weather in the first sentence of her 92 novels a whopping 46 percent of the time, followed by John Steinbeck (26 percent), Nicholas Sparks (22 percent), Willa Cather (21 percent), Stephen King (17 percent), Nora Roberts (16 percent), Tom Clancy (15 percent), Edith Wharton (14 percent), Janet Evanovich (10 percent), Charles Dickens (10 percent), D.H. Lawrence (8 percent), John Updike (8 percent), and Mark Twain (8 percent).

Amazon link-hardcover

Amazon link-paparback