| Edition |
1st ed. |
| Description |
xxiii, 900 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Note |
Includes index. |
| Contents |
Large matters : Matters of state -- Gender and health -- Literature -- Burglar alarm -- Glittering city -- Geographical, calendrical, topical -- Matter under review : Introductions -- American past masters -- North American contemporaries -- Overseas -- Other continents -- Medleys -- Biographies -- Things as they are -- Visible matter : Movies -- Photos -- Art -- Personal matters. |
| Summary |
John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and-in a concluding section, "Personal Matters"-paragraphs on himself and his work. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Biographies of Isaac Newton and Queen Elizabeth II, Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Benchley and Helen Keller, are reviewed, always with a lively empathy. Two especially scholarly disquisitions array twentieth-century writing about New York City and sketch the ancient linkage between religion and literature. |
| ISBN |
0375406301 |
|
