Higher gossip
Subtitle: essays and criticism
By: John Updike ; edited by Christopher Carduff
Contributors: Carduff, Christopher
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 501
ISBN-13: 9780307957153
Subjects: American essays; American prose literature; History and criticism; Modern Literature
Work titles: Prose works
Description: 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 sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic.
Notes: Includes index.

"This is a Borzoi Book"--t.p. verso.
Table of contents: title: Real Conversation; title: The Writer in Winter; title: A Desert Encounter; title: Nessus at Noon; title: The Football Factory; title: The Beloved; title: The Lens Factory; title: Five Poems : Basium XVI ; Head of a Girl, at the Met ; Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital ; An Hour Without Color ; Not Cancelled Yet; title: Book Chat; title: Humor in Fiction; title: Lives and Laurels : Soren Kierkegaard ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Ernest Hemingway ; Kurt Vonnegut ; L. E. Sissman ; Raymond Carver; title: 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; title: Works and Days : The Changeling ; Back-Chat, Funny Cracks ; Imperishable Maxwell ; Basically Decent; title: Fiction Now : Hugger-Mugger ; Classics Galore ; A Boston Fable ; Nan, American Man ; An Upstate Saga ; Relative Strangers ; Dreamy Wilderness; title: Americana: Famous Aimee ; Laissez-faire is More ; Makeup and Make-Believe ; Sparky from St. Paul; title: Gallery Tours; title: Old Masters : A Wistful Wurzburger ; Singular in Everything ; More Light on Delft ; Plain and Simplified; title: Romantics and Realists : "Therefore I Print" ; Innerlichkeit and Eigentumlichkeit ; Splendid Lies ; A Lean and Optical Dane ; Lear Far and Near ; The Artist as Trailblazer; title: Van Gogh and Seurat : Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit ; The Purest of Styles ; Pointillism in Black and White; title: Secessionists and Surrealists : Can Genitals Be Beautiful? ; New Kind on the Block ; Beyond Real ; The Enduring Magritte ; Jean Ipousteguy; title: Photographers : Visual Trophies ; Aftermaths; title: Pet Topics; title: The Universe : The Valiant Swabian ; Visions of Mars ; Extreme Dinosaurs; title: 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; title: The Game : In Love with a Wanton ; Playing with Better Players ; Walking Insomnia ; Lost Balls ; Being Senior; title: Table Talk; title: The End of Authorship; title: In Defense of the Amateur Reader; title: A Poetics of Book Reviewing; title: An American View of English Fiction; title: Comment on "Poetry's Failure in the Marketplace"; title: Foreword to the 1982 Edition of The Carpentered Hen; title: Introduction to the 1977 Edition of The Poorhouse Fair; title: From the Afterword to Buchanan Dying; title: Reply to Paul Boyer's Appraisal of Memories of the Ford Administration; title: Letter to Rosemary Herbert, Book Review Editor of the Boston Herald, Anent Gertrude and Claudius; title: Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels; title: Foreword to The Early Stories: 1953-1975; title: Foreword to Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories; title: Note on "The Indian"; title: Note on Bech: His Oeuvre; title: Replies to Three Questions About Licks of Love; title: The Original Ending of Self-Consciousness; title: On One's Own Style; title: Letter Included as an Afterword to the introduction of Updike in Cincinnati; title: The Courage of Ballplayers; title: Post-Hubble Astronomy; title: On "The American Idea"; title: Commencement Address, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1993; title: Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.