Higher Gossip

"Higher Gossip" is a newly published collection of pieces by the late John Updike.  Updike was almost universally acknowledged as one of the finest writers America produced.  The excerpts in the NY Times review by Michiko Kakutani (Last Notes From a Man of Letters, November 29, 2011) provides ample support for his stature as a wordsmith.

He describes Kurt Vonnegut’s view of the universe as “basically atrocious, a vast sea of cruelty and indifference”

He describes Raymond Carver as managing to carve from a “near wreck of a life” — penury, heavy drinking, illness — “stories of exquisite directness, polish and calm that sit in the mind like perfect porcelain teacups,” though they often depict lives “beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival.”  

He writes about the resentment younger writers may feel toward “the gray-haired scribes” who “continue to take up space and consume the oxygen in the increasingly small room of the print world.” 

Definitely on the list to read.