Picked-Up Pieces - Essays

Zusatztext “[Updike’s] interests are wide . . . his prose is clear and straight! and his powers of organization and explication are formidable. . . . There is an immensely attractive! nonacademic attentiveness to his reviews. At his best he goes right to the human center! the heart of a writer expressed in his art.”— The New York Times Book Review   “Updike is a strong reviewer. . . . He describes precisely! praises judiciously! criticizes fearlessly! and ponders seriously.” —The New Republic   “Updike possesses that intuitive sense of other writers’ temperaments that raises literary criticism to the level of art. . . . If he wished! Updike could become one of our finest literary critics as well as novelists! an heir to that imposing predecessor in the pages of The New Yorker! Edmund Wilson.”—James Atlas! The New York Times Magazine Informationen zum Autor John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker . His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Klappentext In John Updike's second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early '70s. If one word could sum up the young critic's approach to books and their authors it would be "generosity": "Better to praise and share!" he says in his Foreword! "than to blame and ban." And so he follows his enthusiasms! which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard! Proust! Joyce! Dostoevsky! and Hamsun among the classics; Borges! Nabokov! Grass! Bellow! Cheever! and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries! travel essays on London and Anguilla! three very early "golf dreams!" and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life! books! wit-and John Updike. the literary life On Meeting Writers The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. The county where I and my literary ambitions were conceived held only one writer, whose pen name, Mildred Jordan, masked her true identity as an unmeetably rich industrialist’s wife. At Harvard I stood with crowds of other students to hear, and to glimpse in the mysterious flesh, anthology presences like Eliot, Sandburg, Frost, and Wilder. After his lecture in Sanders Theater, Eliot, a gem of composure within a crater of applause, inserted his feet into his rubbers, first the right, then the left, as we poured down upon him a grateful tumult that had less to do with his rather sleepy-making discourse on poetic drama than with the fabulous descent of his vast name into an actual, visible, and mortal body. Whereas Sandburg, playing ballads in New Lecture Hall, rambled on into our dinner hour; as the audience noisily diminished he told us, his white bangs glowing in the gloom, that it was all right, that often in his life he had sat in hotel rooms with only his guitar for company. The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. It was in England’s Oxford. Someone kindly had us to tea, and into the stiff little party bounced a well-knit sandy man with light quick eyes and an intensely handsome chin; unhesitatingly he assumed his right to dominate the conversation. He was full of a tender excitement, the excitement of those certain they are loved, and anxious to share, before it spills over and is wasted, the bubbli...

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.01.2013
• EAN: 9780812983807
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-8380-7
• No. of pages: 544
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 233 mm x 30 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies