Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike (English) Paperback Book

Description: Self-Consciousness by John Updike John Updikes memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his foreword states, "to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world." In the service of this metaphysical effort, he has been hair-raisingly honest, matchlessly precise, and self-effacingly humorous. He takes the reader beyond self-consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into sheer wonder at the miracle of existence. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. 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. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Review "Fascinating . . . These memoirs, often unabashedly philosophical, take us inside Updikes mind in the way that biography almost never can."—Chicago Tribune "Opulent . . . charming . . . [Updikes] best writing, like Nabokovs, is the prose of rapture."—The New York Times Book Review "Poignant . . . wonderfully crafted recollections . . . One completes this book wanting to convey some signal of gratitude, some affectionate readers embrace, to this good boy of a grown man who has striven so earnestly and masterly to describe life."—Chicago Sun-Times Review Quote "Fascinating...These memoirs, often unabashedly philosophical, take us inside Updikes mind in the way that biography almost never can ....Self-Consciousness is fresh assurance that Updike continues to work his magic on the page." Chicago Tribune "Nobody writes better about anything than Updike." The Washington Post From the Paperback edition. Excerpt from Book i. A Soft Spring Night in Shillington Had not my twenty-five-year-old daughter undertipped the airline porter in Boston, our luggage might have shown up on the carrousel in Allentown that April afternoon in 1980, and I would not have spent an evening walking the sidewalks of Shillington, Pennsylvania, searching for the meaning of my existence as once I had scanned those same sidewalks for lost pennies. The idea of lost luggage has been flavored for me with the terrible, the void, ever since William Maxwell gently said to me on our first acquaintance, in 1954, when I, newly a Harvard graduate and New Yorker contributor, was about to embark for England with my slightly pregnant wife: "People think lost luggage is just like death. It isnt." The words were meant to be comforting, perhaps in response to some nervously expressed worry of my own; but they had an opposite, disquieting effect. From early adolescence on, I had longed to get where now, for a brief interview, I was: inside The New Yorkers offices. And almost the first words spoken to me, with a certain stoic gaiety that made clear I had definitely left behind me the Christian precincts of Berks County, concerned death. I was to lose my luggage a number of times in the peripatetic future ahead: in 1978 my folding suit bag vanished between Rome and Dubrovnik and I was obliged to parade through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Israel in the rumpled denim leisure suit meant to be my airplane pajamas, and was ridiculed for my sartorial gaucherie in the Jerusalem Post; in 1980, my big yellow suitcase was mistakenly grabbed by somebody from Long Island (I know because his similar suitcase then became, uselessly and infuriatingly, mine) in Kennedy Airport and so I had to visit the Yanomam Details ISBN0812982967 Author John Updike Language English ISBN-10 0812982967 ISBN-13 9780812982961 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY B Short Title SELF CONSCIOUSNESS Residence Beverly Farms, MA, US Birth 1932 Death 2009 Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-03-13 Imprint Random House Trade Paperbacks Subtitle Memoirs Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-03-13 NZ Release Date 2012-03-13 US Release Date 2012-03-13 UK Release Date 2012-03-13 Place of Publication New York Pages 272 Publisher Random House USA Inc Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43731738;

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