Due Considerations
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Due Considerations by John Updike
John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading General Considerations, books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords, comments on the author's own recent works, responses to probing questions. In between, many books are considered, 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 Garc a M rquez, Haruki Murakami, G nter 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 S ren 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.
JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009. CHRISTOPHER CARDUFF is a member of the staff of The Library of America and the editor of John Updike's posthumous volumes Higher Gossip, Always Looking, and The Collected Stories. He lives in Melrose, Massachusetts. BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author of sixteen books, the most recent of which is The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Iceland's Order of the Falcon, he is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Amherst, Massachusetts.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780307266408 |
| ISBN 10 | 0307266400 |
| Title | Due Considerations |
| Author | John Updike |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2007-10-23 |
| Number of pages | 736 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |