Picked Up Pieces.

First Edition of John Updike's Picked Up Pieces; Inscribed by Him

Picked Up Pieces.

UPDIKE, John.

Item Number: 127

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

First edition of the author’s second collection of essays. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed by John Updike on the title page. Fine in a fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by the author. Photograph by Jill Krementz.

In Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”: “Better to praise and share,” he says in his Foreword, “than to blame and ban.” And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early “golf dreams,” and one big interview.

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