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Due Considerations by John Updike
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Due Considerations

Essays and Criticism

Essays and Criticism

Essays and Criticism

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

Best Seller
Paperback $20.00

Sep 30, 2008 | ISBN 9780345499004

Hardcover $40.00

Oct 23, 2007 | ISBN 9780307266408

Ebook $14.99

Dec 30, 2008 | ISBN 9780307555809

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    Due Considerations by John Updike
    Paperback $20.00
    Sep 30, 2008 | ISBN 9780345499004

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      Sep 30, 2008 | ISBN 9780345499004

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    About Due Considerations

    A page-turning collection of essays and literary criticism on topics ranging from books, writers, poker, cars, faith, and the American libido—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. 

    “[Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century.”—The Los Angeles Times

    Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz.

    Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk.

    In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.

    Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.

    About Due Considerations

    A page-turning collection of essays and literary criticism on topics ranging from books, writers, poker, cars, faith, and the American libido—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. 

    “[Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century.”—The Los Angeles Times

    Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz.

    Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk.

    In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.

    Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.

    About Due Considerations

    A page-turning collection of essays and literary criticism on topics ranging from books, writers, poker, cars, faith, and the American libido—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. 

    “[Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century.”—The Los Angeles Times

    Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz.

    Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk.

    In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.

    Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.

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    See all books by John Updike

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    S.
    Buchanan Dying
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    See all books by John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    Product Details

    Category: Essays & Literary Collections | Literary Criticism

    Paperback | $20.00
    Published by Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Sep 30, 2008 | 736 Pages | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9780345499004

    Category: Essays & Literary Collections | Literary Criticism

    Hardcover | $40.00
    Published by Knopf
    Oct 23, 2007 | 736 Pages | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9780307266408

    Category: Essays & Literary Collections | Literary Criticism

    Ebook | $14.99
    Published by Random House
    Dec 30, 2008 | 736 Pages | ISBN 9780307555809

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    Praise

    “Updike’s scope is rather breathtaking. . . . When I do not know the subject well—as in his finely illustrated art reviews of Bruegel, Dürer and Goya—I learn much from what Updike has to impart. When he considers an author I love, like Proust or Czeslaw Milosz, I often find myself appreciating familiar things in a new way.”—Christopher Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review

    “The prose is clean, elegant, exquisitely calibrated…. [Updike is] one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century.”—The Los Angeles Times
     
    “If the printed word disappeared, a future race could reconstruct a significant body of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature from Updike’s work alone. . . . He writes to converse with us on a high plane but in simple language, often stately and sometimes dazzling.”—Chicago Sun-Times
     
    “Updike knows more about literature than almost anyone. . . . He’s beyond knowledgeable—he makes Google look wanting.”—Baltimore Sun

    Table Of Contents

    Preface

    Everything Considered

    ON LITERARY BIOGRAPHY

    FIVE ESSAYS
    Back from China
    A Sense of Change
    The Future of Faith
    Invisible Cathedral
    Late Works

    GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
    A Case for Books
    Looking Back to Now
    The Tried and the Treowe
    A Layman’s Scope
    Against Angelolatry
    Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido
    Five Great Novels About Loving
    Hydrophobia
    My Life in Poker
    My Life in Cars

    TRIBUTES AND SHORT TAKES
    West 155th Street
    The Academy As It Was and Is: A Talk, with Slides
    The New Yorker
    William Shawn
    William Maxwell
    Wright Morris
    Eudora Welty
    Ernest Hemingway
    Ted Williams
    November 22, 1963
    JFK, Jr.
    September 11, 2001

    Considering Books

    INTRODUCTIONS
    To the Everyman’s Library edition of The Mabinogion
    To The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    To Walden, by Henry David Thoreau: 150th Anniversary Edition
    To The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
    To The Diary of Adam and Eve and Other Adamic Stories, by Mark Twain
    To Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
    To The Rich Boy, three stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    To The Eighth Day, by Thornton Wilder
    To The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, by Daniel Fuchs
    To Karl Shapiro: Selected Poems
    To Elephant House, or, The Home of Edward Gorey, photographs and text by Kevin McDermott
    To Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art
    To the German catalogue of an exhibit of photographs by Ulrich Mack of the Ipswich marshes

    MONUMENTS
    The Great I Am
    Big Dead White Male
    Down the River
    Oz Is Us
    Hide and Seek

    THURBER AND WHITE
    Introduction to the Perennial Edition of Is Sex Necessary?
    Thurber’s Art
    Magnum Opus
    Introduction to a New Edition of The Letters of E. B. White

    AMERICAN FICTION
    These Trashy Years
    Coming Home
    Tote that Ephemera
    Dog’s Tears
    One-Way Street
    Red Loves Rex, Alas
    Angel-Tits and Hellmouth
    Mind/Body Problems—I
    Mixed Messages
    The Great Game Gone
    A Cloud of Dust

    ENGLISH FICTION
    Property and Presumption
    A Same-Sex Idyll
    Fairy Tales and Paradigms
    Stonewalling Toffs
    Flesh on Flesh
    Absent Presences
    Mind/Body Problems—II
    Flashy to the Rescue

    IN ENGLISH BUT NOT ENGLISH
    Home Care
    Love and Loss on Zycron
    Dangerous into Beautiful
    Both Rough and Tender
    Papery Passions
    Blood and Paint
    A Case of Deutschfeindlichkeit; or, All About Abish
    The Story of Himself
    Pre-“Gay” Gray
    Paradises Lost

    IN OTHER TONGUES
    Dying for Love
    The Lone Sailor
    Two’s a Crowd
    Mind/Body Problems—III
    Suppressed Atrocities
    Murder Among the Miniaturists
    Arabesques of Ambivalence
    Extended Performance
    Subconscious Tunnels
    Bitter Bamboo

    NON-FICTION
    Groaning Shelves
    Can Eve Be Reprieved?
    Was Sex Necessary?
    Chanel No. 1
    The Poor Babies
    Drawn to Gypsies
    Survivor/Believer
    Twice Collected

    LITERARY BIOGRAPHY
    Mud and Flames
    Incommensurability
    The Man in Bed
    Poet on the Fault Line
    No Brakes
    A Natural Writer
    Young Iris

    ART
    One Obstinate Survivor on Another
    Metropolitan Art
    Deceptively Conceptual
    Dürer’s Passions
    The Thing Itself
    The Imaginary Builder

    Personal Considerations

    A Tribute to Saul Steinberg
    Introduction to The World of William Steig
    Introduction to a Section of The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker
    The Would-Be Animator
    Introduction to Poor Arnold’s Almanac
    Introduction to Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986–2006
    Foreword to the Catalogue of My Father’s House (Will Barnet)
    A Reminiscence of Hyman Bloom
    Introduction to Wolf Kahn’s America
    Saint Nick: Essay for the Catalogue of George Nick: A Retrospective
    Foreword to the MFA Publications Reprint of Just Looking
    Foreword to the Stackpole Books Edition of Buchanan Dying
    A “Special Message” for the Franklin Library Edition of Gertrude and Claudius
    Prefacio to Poemas 1953–1999
    Foreword to Humor in Fiction
    Foreword to the Easton Press Edition of Licks of Love
    Note on “Bech Noir” for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999
    Note on “Personal Archeology” for The Best American Short Stories 2001
    Note on “The Walk with Elizanne” for The Best American Short Stories 2004
    Comment on “Your Lover Just Called,” in the anthology This Is My Best
    Recurrent Characters
    An Interview Conducted by Henry Bech
    Foreword to My Own Bibliography
    Three Brits (Tina Brown, Frank Kermode, André Deutsch)
    An Account of my Childhood Reading
    A Response to a Question from The Yale Literary Magazine
    A Response to a Request from Michael Dirda
    A Response to GQ’s Request for My Favorite Year of the Century
    Summer Love
    The Beautiful
    A Response to a Request from a Miss Gordon
    Early Employments and Inklings
    My Philadelphia
    A Response to the Question “Why Do I Live in New England?”
    A Response to a Request for a Memory of Harvard Dorm Life
    Statement for There Is No Other Story: Ethics, Literature, and Theory
    My Contribution to the NPR Series This I Believe

    Index

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