ماده بیشتر: مقالات و نقدها

Celebrated as one of America's great prose stylists, John Updike astonishes us here with the range of subjects he considers. Shrewdly admiring essays on American past masters such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edmund Wilson, and Dawn Powell take their place beside penetrating assessments of contemporary peers and rivals--John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Martin Amis. Here too are brilliantly original essays on religion and literature, lust and dancing, as well as a revealing selection of pieces about himself and his work. Whether he's writing about photography or film, golf or adultery, Bill Clinton's hair or the sinking of the Titanic, Updike never fails to dazzle or surprise. Generous, learned, and wickedly funny, More Matter is a triumph of style and substance. Freedom And Equality: Two American Bluebirds -- The State Of The Union, As Of March 1992 -- Letter To A Baby Boomer -- The Fifties -- The Disposable Rocket -- Women Dancing -- Get Thee Behind Me, Suntan -- V -- Lust -- The Song Of Solomon -- Religion And Literature -- Fiction: A Dialogue -- Print: A Dialogue -- A Different Ending -- On The Edge -- People Wrapped To Go -- One Big Bauble -- The Twelve Terrors Of Christmas -- That Syncing Feeling -- Paranoid Packaging -- Hostile Haircuts -- Glad Rags -- Addressing The Scandal Glut -- Manifesto -- Car Talk -- The Gentlemen Of Summer -- Bodies Beautiful -- Golf In The Land Of The Free -- The Vineyard Remembered -- The Sun The Other Way Around -- The Cold -- Introduction To The Seducer's Diary, A Chapter Of Either/or -- Introduction To The Complete Shorter Fiction Of Herman Melville -- Introduction To The Age Of Innocence, By Edith Wharton -- Introduction To Surviving: The Uncollected Writings Of Henry Green -- Introduction To The Best American Short Stories 1984 -- Introduction To Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Edited By George Plimpton -- Introduction To Writers On Writers, Compiled By Graham Tarrant -- Introduction To Heroes And Anti-heroes, Photographs By The Magnum Coöperative -- Introduction To The Art Of Mickey Mouse, Edited By Craig Yoe And Janet Morra-yoe -- Introduction To My Well-balanced Life On A Wooden Leg, By Al Capp -- Reworking Wharton -- The Key-people -- Laughter From The Yokels -- Stevens As Dutchman -- Wilson As Cape Codder -- The Critic In Winter -- An Ohio Runaway -- Happiness, How Sad -- Cheever On The Rocks -- Sirin's Sixty-five Shimmering Short Stories -- Recruiting Raw Nerves -- Doctorpoe -- Excellent Humbug -- The Good Book As Cookbook -- Him And Who? -- Mayhem At The Hospital -- Tummy Trouble In Tinseltown -- Soap And Death In America -- Awriiiighhhhhhhht! -- Stones Into Bread -- Barney Looks Back -- People Fits -- Mandarins -- Proust Died For You -- Camus Made New -- Omniumgatherum -- Man Is An Island -- Muriel Goes To The Movies -- God Save Ingushetia -- Live Spelled Backwards -- On The Edge Of The Post-human -- Nightmares And Daymares -- Undelivered Remarks Upon Awarding The 1992 Gpa Book Award In Dublin -- Idle Thoughts Of A Toiling Tiler -- Dark Walker -- Angels In Holland -- Vagueness On Wheels, Dust On A Skirt -- Life Was Elsewhere -- Of Sickened Times -- Gender Benders -- A Woman's Continent -- A Heavy World -- Between Montparnasse And Mt. Pelée -- Nobody Gets Away With Everything -- Shadows And Gardens -- Mountain Miseries -- Two Anglo-indians Novels -- A Note On Narayan -- Glasnost, Honne, And Conquistadores -- Posthumous Output -- Novel Thoughts -- Elusive Evil -- The Properties Of Things -- Such A Sucker As Me -- Man Of Secrets -- Not Quite Adult -- Large For Her Years -- Cubism's Marketeer -- Smiling Bob -- This Side Of Coherence -- The Man Within -- Shirley Temple Regina -- An Undeciphered Residue -- At The Hairy Edge Of The Possible -- Things, Things -- Box Me, Daddy, Eight To The Bar Code -- The Flamingo-pink Decade -- The Liberation Of The Legs -- She's Got Personality -- Among Canines -- Fine Points -- Oh, It Was Sad -- 2000, Here We Come -- The Old Movie Houses -- Samson And Delilah And Me -- Legendary Lana -- M.m. In Brief -- The Vargas Girl -- Genial, Kinetic Gene Kelly -- The Domestic Camera -- A Bookish Boy -- An Ecstatic State -- A Woman's Burden -- Descent Of An Image -- Introduction To The Writer's Desk, By Jill Kermentz -- Introduction To The First Picture Book: Everyday Things For Babies, By Mary Steichen Calderone And Edward Steichen -- Facing Death -- Nadar's Swift Tact -- Fast Art -- The Revealed And The Concealed -- Fun Furniture -- Acts Of Seeing -- Big, Bright, And Bendayed -- A Case Of Monumentality -- Verminous Pedestrians And Car-tormented Streets -- Funny Faces -- The Sistine Chapel Ceiling -- The Frick -- Updike And I -- Me And My Books -- The Short Story And I -- Introduction To Self-selected Stories -- Foreword To Love Factories -- Foreword To Brother Grasshopper -- Note On A Sandstone Farmhouse -- Note On Playing With Dynamite -- Foreword To The Women Who Got Away -- Note On My Father On The Verge Of Disgrace -- Karl Shapiro -- Three New Yorker Stalwarts (william Shawn, William Maxwell, Brendan Gill) -- Note For An Exhibit Of New Yorker Cartoons -- My Cartooning-- Cartoon Magic -- Christmas Cards -- A Childhood Transgression -- Remembering Pearl Harbor -- Reflections On Radio -- Remembering Reading, Pa. -- An Hour Of The Day -- Home In New England -- Introduction To Concerts At Castle Hill -- Accepting The Bobst Award -- Foreword To John Updike: A Bibliography -- Accepting The National Book Critics Circle Award -- Accepting The Howells Medal -- Introduction To The Easton Press Edition Of The Rabbit Novels -- Henry Bech Interviews Updike -- Special Message For The Franklin Library Edition Of Memories Of The Ford Administration -- Special Message For The Franklin Library Edition Of Brazil -- Special Message For The Franklin Library Edition Of In The Beauty Of The Lilies -- Special Message For The Franklin Library Edition Of Toward The End Of Time -- Two Belated Talk Of The Town Stories (tv In Nyc, Amazon.com) -- Foreword To The French Translation Of Facing Nature -- Humor These Days -- An Answer To A Usual Question -- Books That Changed My Life -- Five Remembered Moments Of Reading Bliss -- Remembering Reading Don Quixote -- The Ten Greatest Works Of Literature, 1001-2000 -- Accepting The Campion Medal -- Remarks On Religion And Contemporary Literature -- Accepting The National Book Foundation Medal. John Updike. Originally Published: New York : Knopf : Distributed By Random House, 1999. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and-in a concluding section, "Personal Matters"--Paragraphs on himself and his work. More matter, indeed, in an age which, his introduction states, wants "real stuff-the dirt, the poop, the nitty gritty-and not-the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction." Still, the fiction writer's affectionate, shaping hand can be detected in many of these considerations. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Biographies of Isaac Newton and Queen Elizabeth II, Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Benchley and Helen Keller, are reviewed, always with a lively empathy. Two especially scholarly disquisitions array twentieth-century writing about New York City and sketch the ancient linkage between religion and literature. An illustrated section contains sharp-eyed impressions of movies, photographs, and art. Even the slightest of these pieces can twinkle. Updike is a writer for whom print is a mode of happiness: he says of his younger self, "The magazine rack at the corner drugstore beguiled me with its tough gloss," and goes on to claim, "An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried." In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.” In his fiftieth book and fifth collection of prose, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist presents a rich range of essays, criticism, humorous observations, and introductions, as he shares his thoughts on religion and literature, twentieth-century New York writing, and his own life and work. Reprint. ON THIS SUNDAY MORNING, all over Chicago, churchgoers are settling to hear a sermon and to sing the praises of the Lord; let us, then, in synchrony sing the praises of freedom and equality, those two bluebirds of hope and aspiration swooping in our American skies. "Presents more than 180 essays, critical pieces, book introductions, personal reflections, and other prose on a wide variety of subjects by twentieth-century American writer John Updike."