John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews

John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews PDF Author: James Plath
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611461065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Updike remains both a critical and popular success; however, because Updike asked that his personal letters not be published the only way that Updike scholars and fans can read more of the author’s candid and insightful remarks is to revisit some of the many interviews he granted—most of which are difficult to locate or obtain. Updike wrote about his home town of Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and all of his award-winning novels in his home state. In John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates and helps to explain the bond between one of America’s greatest literary talents and his beloved Pennsylvania. Included in this volume are interviews and articles by Mark Abrams, Leonard W. Boasberg, Carl W. Brown, Jr., David Cheshire, Marty Crisp, Sean Diviny, John Mark Eberhart, William Ecenbarger, Elizabeth Greenwood, Ruth Heimbuecher, Dorothy Lehman Hoerr, Jim Homan, Tom Knapp, Karen L. Miller, Steve Neal, Richard E. Nicholls, Sanford Pinsker, James Plath, Bruce Posten, Carole Reber, Pamela Rohland, Carlin Romano, Daniel Rubin, Stephan Salisbury, Charles R. Shaw, Ellen Sulkis, Heather Thomas, Stanley J. Watkins, Michael L. Wentzel, and Robert F. Zissa.

John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews

John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews PDF Author: James Plath
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611461065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
Updike remains both a critical and popular success; however, because Updike asked that his personal letters not be published the only way that Updike scholars and fans can read more of the author’s candid and insightful remarks is to revisit some of the many interviews he granted—most of which are difficult to locate or obtain. Updike wrote about his home town of Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and all of his award-winning novels in his home state. In John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates and helps to explain the bond between one of America’s greatest literary talents and his beloved Pennsylvania. Included in this volume are interviews and articles by Mark Abrams, Leonard W. Boasberg, Carl W. Brown, Jr., David Cheshire, Marty Crisp, Sean Diviny, John Mark Eberhart, William Ecenbarger, Elizabeth Greenwood, Ruth Heimbuecher, Dorothy Lehman Hoerr, Jim Homan, Tom Knapp, Karen L. Miller, Steve Neal, Richard E. Nicholls, Sanford Pinsker, James Plath, Bruce Posten, Carole Reber, Pamela Rohland, Carlin Romano, Daniel Rubin, Stephan Salisbury, Charles R. Shaw, Ellen Sulkis, Heather Thomas, Stanley J. Watkins, Michael L. Wentzel, and Robert F. Zissa.

Of the Farm

Of the Farm PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645756
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
“A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm, John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction.”—The New York Times In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where his aging mother now lives alone. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and the strategies they use to stand their ground.

The Widows of Eastwick

The Widows of Eastwick PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0345517512
Category : Rhode Island
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie -- now widowed but still witches -- return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, "the scene of their primes," site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a "haven of wholesomeness" populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike is as his very best - a legendary mster of literary magic up to his old delightful tricks.

The Art of Fiction

The Art of Fiction PDF Author: David Lodge
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448137799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

My Father's Tears

My Father's Tears PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307272028
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

Conversations with John Updike

Conversations with John Updike PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 0878057005
Category : 20th
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Collects thirty-two interviews with the writer between 1959 and 1993.

John Updike's Early Years

John Updike's Early Years PDF Author: Jack De Bellis
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
ISBN: 1611461316
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
John Updike’s Early Years reveals for the first time the young Updike’s developing personality and precocious creativity. Relying upon interviews with classmates and friends, and offering extensive connections to his mature work, De Bellis shows how his school years incubated his mature work.

Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983777
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

The Poorhouse Fair

The Poorhouse Fair PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
“Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book Review The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home for the aged and infirm—overseen by Stephen Conner, a righteous young man who considers it his duty to know what is best for others. The action of the novel unfolds over a single summer’s day, the day of the poorhouse’s annual fair, a day of escalating tensions between Conner and the rebellious Hook. Its climax is a contest between progress and tradition, benevolence and pride, reason and faith. Praise for The Poorhouse Fair “A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal

The Centaur

The Centaur PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 067964587X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”