Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

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.

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

About the Author :
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 2009.

Review :
“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