In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”: “Better to praise and share,” he says in his Foreword, “than to blame and ban.” And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early “golf dreams,” and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life, books, wit—and John Updike.
- ISBN10 0812983807
- ISBN13 9780812983807
- Publish Date 15 January 2013 (first published 12 November 1975)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Random House USA Inc
- Imprint Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 544
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780812983807