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Higher gossip : essays and criticism /

A collection of the eloquent, insightful, and beautifully written prose works that Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009, this book opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter--a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Updike, John
Other Authors: Carduff, Christopher
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Subjects:
Updike, John.
Table of Contents:
  • Real Conversation
  • The Writer in Winter
  • A Desert Encounter
  • Nessus at Noon
  • The Football Factory
  • The Beloved
  • The Lens Factory
  • Five Poems : Basium XVI ; Head of a Girl, at the Met ; Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital ; An Hour Without Color ; Not Cancelled Yet
  • Book Chat
  • Humor in Fiction
  • Lives and Laurels : Soren Kierkegaard ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Ernest Hemingway ; Kurt Vonnegut ; L. E. Sissman ; Raymond Carver
  • Forewords and afterwords : The Haunted Major, by Robert Marshall ; The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball ; The Luzhin Defense, by Vladimir Nabokov ; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison
  • Works and Days : The Changeling ; Back-Chat, Funny Cracks ; Imperishable Maxwell ; Basically Decent
  • Fiction Now : Hugger-Mugger ; Classics Galore ; A Boston Fable ; Nan, American Man ; An Upstate Saga ; Relative Strangers ; Dreamy Wilderness
  • Americana: Famous Aimee ; Laissez-faire is More ; Makeup and Make-Believe ; Sparky from St. Paul
  • Gallery Tours
  • Old Masters : A Wistful Wurzburger ; Singular in Everything ; More Light on Delft ; Plain and Simplified
  • Romantics and Realists : "Therefore I Print" ; Innerlichkeit and Eigentumlichkeit ; Splendid Lies ; A Lean and Optical Dane ; Lear Far and Near ; The Artist as Trailblazer
  • Van Gogh and Seurat : Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit ; The Purest of Styles ; Pointillism in Black and White
  • Secessionists and Surrealists : Can Genitals Be Beautiful? ; New Kind on the Block ; Beyond Real ; The Enduring Magritte ; Jean Ipousteguy
  • Photographers : Visual Trophies ; Aftermaths
  • Pet Topics
  • The Universe : The Valiant Swabian ; Visions of Mars ; Extreme Dinosaurs
  • The Commonwealth : Harvard Square in the Fifties ; Ipswich in the Seventies ; Three Texts from Early Ipswich ; Lovell Thompson ; Open Spaces ; Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer
  • The Game : In Love with a Wanton ; Playing with Better Players ; Walking Insomnia ; Lost Balls ; Being Senior
  • Table Talk
  • The End of Authorship
  • In Defense of the Amateur Reader
  • A Poetics of Book Reviewing
  • An American View of English Fiction
  • Comment on "Poetry's Failure in the Marketplace"
  • Foreword to the 1982 Edition of The Carpentered Hen
  • Introduction to the 1977 Edition of The Poorhouse Fair
  • From the Afterword to Buchanan Dying
  • Reply to Paul Boyer's Appraisal of Memories of the Ford Administration
  • Letter to Rosemary Herbert, Book Review Editor of the Boston Herald, Anent Gertrude and Claudius
  • Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
  • Foreword to The Early Stories: 1953-1975
  • Foreword to Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories
  • Note on "The Indian"
  • Note on Bech: His Oeuvre
  • Replies to Three Questions About Licks of Love
  • The Original Ending of Self-Consciousness
  • On One's Own Style
  • Letter Included as an Afterword to the introduction of Updike in Cincinnati
  • The Courage of Ballplayers
  • Post-Hubble Astronomy
  • On "The American Idea"
  • Commencement Address, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1993
  • Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.