JOHN UPDIKE
Winner,
PULITZER PRIZE for Fiction
1982 (RABBIT IS RICH) & 1991 (RABBIT AT
REST)
Gwendolyn Stewart
Photographs c. GWENDOLYN STEWART 2008. All Rights Reserved.
"I broke my foot so I grew a beard" -- a red beard, John Updike reminded me June 6, 2005, at the PEN New England "Writing Baseball" Evening at Fenway Park.
"Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg." -- from Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu": "The affair between Boston and Ted Williams was no mere summer romance.... Though we thumped, wept, and chanted 'We want Ted' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. ... Gods do not answer letters."
RECOMMENDED: Anthony Quinn article in THE TELEGRAPH ("A Dirty Young Man Comes of Age")
An interesting profile (in spite of the lame title), based partially on observation and interviewing, which traces back through Updike's history (including "the worst thing that he had done in his life") and announces his newest novel, VILLAGES (Knopf, October 2004), described by the Washington Post as "A coming-of-age story in which women -- many, many of them -- are a young man's defining teachers."
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GWENDOLYN STEWART is both a photojournalist and a political scientist specializing in political leadership in Russia, China, and the U.S. A former Bunting/Radcliffe Fellow, she is an Associate (and former Post-Doctoral Fellow) of the Davis Center for Russian Studies and Central Eurasian Studies at Harvard, as well as an Associate in Research of the Harvard Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. For the Fairbank Center she co-founded and co-chairs the China Current Events Workshop, a monthly forum for examining pressing issues in Greater China. Her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (Sic Transit) dealt with the role of the leaders of the republics, especially Boris Yeltsin, in the breakup of the Soviet Union. She is currently writing RUSSIA REDUX , the story of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: part political analysis, part travel-memoir. Imagine wandering over the largest country on earth, not in the train of a railroad, but in the train of one of the most powerful and contradictory men on earth. Or all by yourself.
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An exhibition of a quarter-century of the photography of Gwendolyn Stewart entitled "HERE BE GIANTS" was held last year at Harvard.
Photographs from the show are available for purchase.
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GWENDOLYN STEWART: MORE PHOTOGRAPHS & MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR/PHOTOGRAPHER
GAO XINGJIAN: CHINA'S FIRST NOBEL LAUREATE IN LITERATURE
DAN WAKEFIELD
THE BIG DIG/FREDERICK SALVUCCI
BILL & BORIS &
VLADIMIR & GEORGE & Strobe Talbott's THE RUSSIA HAND: AMERICA'S RUSSIA
POLICY BORIS YELTSIN'S
MIDNIGHT DIARIES THE PHOENIX: YELTSIN &
THE FUTURE OF RUSSIAN LEADERSHIP
