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Summary
A collection of the eloquent, insightful, and beautifully written prose works that Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009, this book opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter--a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every... Full description
Table of Contents:
- Real Conversation
- The Writer in Winter
- A Desert Encounter
- Nessus at Noon
- The Football Factory
- The Beloved
- The Lens Factory
- Five Poems : Basium XVI ; Head of a Girl, at the Met ; Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital ; An Hour Without Color ; Not Cancelled Yet
- Book Chat
- Humor in Fiction
- Lives and Laurels : Soren Kierkegaard ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Ernest Hemingway ; Kurt Vonnegut ; L. E. Sissman ; Raymond Carver
- Forewords and afterwords : The Haunted Major, by Robert Marshall ; The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball ; The Luzhin Defense, by Vladimir Nabokov ; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison
- Works and Days : The Changeling ; Back-Chat, Funny Cracks ; Imperishable Maxwell ; Basically Decent
- Fiction Now : Hugger-Mugger ; Classics Galore ; A Boston Fable ; Nan, American Man ; An Upstate Saga ; Relative Strangers ; Dreamy Wilderness
- Americana: Famous Aimee ; Laissez-faire is More ; Makeup and Make-Believe ; Sparky from St. Paul
- Gallery Tours
- Old Masters : A Wistful Wurzburger ; Singular in Everything ; More Light on Delft ; Plain and Simplified
- Romantics and Realists : "Therefore I Print" ; Innerlichkeit and Eigentumlichkeit ; Splendid Lies ; A Lean and Optical Dane ; Lear Far and Near ; The Artist as Trailblazer
- Van Gogh and Seurat : Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit ; The Purest of Styles ; Pointillism in Black and White
- Secessionists and Surrealists : Can Genitals Be Beautiful? ; New Kind on the Block ; Beyond Real ; The Enduring Magritte ; Jean Ipousteguy
- Photographers : Visual Trophies ; Aftermaths
- Pet Topics
- The Universe : The Valiant Swabian ; Visions of Mars ; Extreme Dinosaurs
- The Commonwealth : Harvard Square in the Fifties ; Ipswich in the Seventies ; Three Texts from Early Ipswich ; Lovell Thompson ; Open Spaces ; Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer
- The Game : In Love with a Wanton ; Playing with Better Players ; Walking Insomnia ; Lost Balls ; Being Senior
- Table Talk
- The End of Authorship
- In Defense of the Amateur Reader
- A Poetics of Book Reviewing
- An American View of English Fiction
- Comment on "Poetry's Failure in the Marketplace"
- Foreword to the 1982 Edition of The Carpentered Hen
- Introduction to the 1977 Edition of The Poorhouse Fair
- From the Afterword to Buchanan Dying
- Reply to Paul Boyer's Appraisal of Memories of the Ford Administration
- Letter to Rosemary Herbert, Book Review Editor of the Boston Herald, Anent Gertrude and Claudius
- Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
- Foreword to The Early Stories: 1953-1975
- Foreword to Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories
- Note on "The Indian"
- Note on Bech: His Oeuvre
- Replies to Three Questions About Licks of Love
- The Original Ending of Self-Consciousness
- On One's Own Style
- Letter Included as an Afterword to the introduction of Updike in Cincinnati
- The Courage of Ballplayers
- Post-Hubble Astronomy
- On "The American Idea"
- Commencement Address, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1993
- Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.