Updike News

The editors of the Literary Review magazine said best-selling American author Jonathan Littell won the prize for describing a sex act as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg." The offending passage compared female genitalia to various Greek fiends, including the mythical monster Gorgon and "a motionless ...

Writer Nadine Gordimer has devoted her life to fighting for the rights and health of the less fortunate and oppressed.

When David Updike compares himself, as a writer, to anyone in his family, it is usually to his grandmother.

Fair or not, it is next to impossible to read David Updike without comparison to his paterfamilias, John, the iconic American author who died earlier this year.

For David Cross, the retired television journalist at the centre of Justin Cartwright's new novel, the line from Ulysses that gives the book its title is a prism of meanings and associations.

For David Cross, the retired television journalist at the centre of Justin Cartwright's new novel, the line from Ulysses that gives the book its title is a prism of meanings and associations.

In South Africa as a child and a boy, I read a huge amount. There seems to have been something anthropomorphic about my early reading: animals flew, boys talked to horses and rodents were lovable.

I DON'T WANT TO BE A TEASE, BUT there's a scene in Justin Cartwright's latest novel To Heaven By Water that is so blatantly taboo-breaking that it's impossible to talk about without shattering one's enjoyment of the book.

Actors from A Contemporary Theater will read from a selection of John Updike's short stories.

The blurb for John Updike's last collection of stories finds him in a "valedictory mood," words that speak truly to the stories, individually and collectively.

'The world itself is stolen goods. All property is theft and those who have stolen most of it make the laws for the rest of us.' UPDIKE must have referred to the aristocrats of his time and this quote could be relevant to the past.