PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
The Early Stories: 1953-1975
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 2003-10-21
- Pages
- 864 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.36 x 4.62 x 24.08 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781400040728
- ISBN-10
- 1400040728
- Price
- 6267 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Short Stories/Single Author
“He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.” —William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972) A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, “Olinger Stories,” already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled “Out in the World,” “Married Life,” and “Family Life,” tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of “The Two Iseults,” a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. “Tarbox Tales” are followed by “Far Out,” a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and “The Single Life,” whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review . All show Mr. Updike’s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.
Reviews
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大変に綺麗でしっかりしています
大変に綺麗でしっかりしています。
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American author
No, gave up on this stuff. I know he is "famous" but the prose is tedious and stories unrealistic. Deleted it.
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Five Stars
Great book
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Classic Updike
There are over a hundred stories in this collection, and they show Updike's development over a significant period. Many of these stories were written for and published by The New Yorker, and they show the bias in that direction. But if you are looking both for classic short story techniques as well as interesting tales, you can can't beat this group. Updike is justly famous for his outstanding use of language, and you can see his full range here. Some of the stories are frankly experimental/allegorical and others are Mark Twain-homespun. But all are interesting and reward careful reading (and if you are an aspiring writer, close study). Highly recommended.
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the christian consciousness and the short story
If we want to take in the majesty of these short stories to give them due recognition we must understand Updike the social critic. He was an avid reader of henry james , Nathaniel hawthorne(the scarlet letter)and herman Melville(moby dick, billy budd) as well as being immersed in the religiosity of g.k.chesterton, hilaire belloc and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and karl barth. Although he was an inveterate protestant he brings a tinge of criticism to the short story and to society to those who want to leave religion out of modern life. The short stories serve to complement these writers who updike grew up on and can be glimpsed in the early story pigeon feathers where the protagonist must dream of a heaven what it will be like our ultimate dreams and rebukes the atheism of h.g.wells and others who updike comes in contact with. The short stories also draw largely especially the early ones on Updike's home life his father and mother, their social and work backgrounds and also his grandparents. In short what strikes the reader is the JAMESEAN Christian consciousness of these short stories which can also be glimpsed in the short story the DEACON where the hero is a sojourner of many Christian churches as a deacon a travelling helper or evangelist more or less but who moves across the country but reluctantly joins another church finally as deacon despite the people he finds in these churches their lukewarm faith but he wins the final battle for at the end for keeping the faith. Updike matured as a short story writer there is a change in motion in these short stories and they are not at the end what they were at the beginnining but he gave up on the wellsian crabs at the end of the time machine a motif in one of the stories to travel in the land of james and the scarlet letter and g.k.chesterton and teilhard to chardin and the protestant imagination and that's where these stories lie and are at their best thought of.They complement the essayist Updike.
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Great Stuff
John Updike is an amazing author who has written too many classics to count, this brings you right back to his roots of short story writing. Perfect for any fan of Updikes or the english language in General.