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The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (Hardcover)

by John Updike (Author) "THIS IS a collection. A selection, surely, is best left to others, when the writer is no longer alive to obstruct the process ..." (more)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 864 pages
  • Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (29 Jan 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0241142644
  • ISBN-13: 978-0241142646
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 6.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 684,141 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #88 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Updike, John

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Product Description

Product Description

A grand collection of John Updike's inimitable early stories. Gathering together almost all the short fiction that John Updike published between 1953 and 1975, this collection opens with Updike’s autobiographical stories about a young boy growing up during the Depression in a small Pennsylvania town. There follows tales of life away from home, student days, early marriage and young families, and finally Updike’s experimental stories on ‘The Single Life’. Here, then, is a rich and satisfying feast of Updike – his wit, his easy mastery of language, his genius for recalling the subtleties of ordinary life and the excitements, and perils, of the pursuit of happiness.


About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal.
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THIS IS a collection. A selection, surely, is best left to others, when the writer is no longer alive to obstruct the process. Read the first page
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars To sieve or not to sieve, 19 Oct 2009
This review is from: The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (Hardcover)
I am a long-standing fan of Updike's short stories (though less so of his novels), and my three-star rating of this book is not a reflection of my general opinion of him as a writer. Nevertheless, I do have some issues with this particular volume.

I think that it was a mistake to collect over 100 short stories under one cover with virtually no sieving. Updike made his living from writing and, and as far as I understand, he never held a regular job after he resigned from the New Yorker at the age of 25 - so I would be the last person to blame him for having published some short stories that were not quite to his general standard. When a small collection contains a couple of such works, this is usually not a problem. The situation inevitably becomes different on a scale of 100+ samples: the gap in quality between the best 10 and the weakest 10 of them is massive, and it is impossible not to notice this. I do not think that exposing his lesser works against the background of so many great stories found in this volume has done Updike's standing any good. I own virtually all collections of short stories ever published by him, and in my opinion he emerges a better author from each of his individual early collections than from this volume that combines their content.

I did not like the fact that while putting together this book Updike decided to change a few things here and there. In particular, the last sentence of the wonderful 'Dentistry and Doubt' is way too subtle in its revised version, and I suspect that some readers may now miss the whole point of the ending: I probably would, had I not read the story the way it was originally published.

Giving the hardback a deckle edge was a bad idea. This feature should really be reserved for luxury editions; the combination of ordinary binding and artificially deckled ordinary paper looks anything but tasteful; in fact, it looks cheap. More importantly, a deckle fore-edge makes it very difficult to browse through the book; locating a particular story in this volume is a constant source of frustration, so I seldom open it any longer. If the publishers were absolutely set on deckling, they should have molested the head or tail edge (or both); the fore-edge needs to be smoothly cut because it has an important practical function: the reader slides his or her thumb across it when looking for something in the book.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars absorbing, 30 Jul 2009
By Lombard (Ireland) - See all my reviews
The Early Years has been a revelation and a reminder of how good writing can be.
The characters seem to exist before and after the short story. In terms of story and heart, it engages, and with precision, he brings us to the poetry of everyday life.
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