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To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Criticism, Literature, Essay collection, New York Times reviewedPeople
William Dean Howells (1837-1920), Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Philip Roth (1933-2018), Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Cleopatra Queen of Egypt (d. 30 B.C), Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), Umberto Eco (1932-2016), Karen Blixen (1885-1962), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2004), Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), Anne Tyler (1941-), Julian Barnes (1946-), Peter Handke (1942-), Patrick Süskind (1949-)Places
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Odd Jobs
November 28, 1992, Random House Value Publishing
Hardcover
in English
0517095122 9780517095126
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Odd jobs: essays and criticism
1991, Knopf, Distributed by Random House
in English
- 1st ed.
0679404147 9780679404149
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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- Created November 3, 2008
- 7 revisions
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November 12, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
August 24, 2010 | Edited by Magnus Manske | merge authors |
August 18, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
November 3, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Talis record |