Odd Jobs: Essays and CriticismRandom House Publishing Group, 2012 M12 4 - 1024 pages To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work. |
Contents
3 | |
14 | |
20 | |
29 | |
50 | |
ESSAYS ONASSIGNED TOPICS | 69 |
TRIBUITES | 109 |
SPEECHES | 130 |
FRENCHMEN | 416 |
IRIS MURDOCH PAIRED WITH OTHERS | 451 |
BRITISHERS | 483 |
THE OTHER AMERICANS | 521 |
THE EVIL EMPIRE | 560 |
ODD COUIPLES | 690 |
HYPERREALITY | 737 |
LANDSCAPES AND CHARACTERS | 798 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
American Appointment in Samarra artist beautiful become Boston called century characters Cheever Counterlife criticism dark death Dora Dymant E. B. White Emerson English essays eyes face father feel felt female fiction Finland Franklin Gabriel García Márquez Garden of Eden girl hair happy Hayesville Hemingway Henry James hero Howells Howells's human imagination Jewish Jews JoAN John Cheever journals Kafka lecture less letters literary lives look married ment mind Moby-Dick monument moral mother movie Nathan Zuckerman nature ness never night novel novelist passion perhaps Philip Roth play prose published reader seems sense sexual Shaw short stories social Street style tells things thought tion Tolstoy town truth turned voice walking wife Winesburg woman women words writer wrote York Yorker young Zuckerman Zuckerman Unbound