Updike john biography jetty

After his death, in 1904, at the age of eighty-five, Heade's modest reputation fell into total eclipse until 1943, when his masterly canvas.
In Weide's film, we learn that Vonnegut invented Tralfamodore as a child when he was stargazing with his extended family on a jetty at their.
Kevin Barry's chaotic journey from “stoner entrepreneur” to Ireland's most unpredictable novelist.

•

Walking to school in the 1970s, Kevin Barry would step over gutters running red with blood. This was a decade before Limerick earned the moniker “Stab City” for its gang feuds and knife crime – which eventually escalated into full-on drug wars, with drive-by AK-47 shootings and hand grenades lobbed into sitting rooms. In Barry’s time, though, most of the violence was directed at livestock. Limerick was then known as “Pigtown”, with seven or eight slaughterhouses downtown, and the noise of their bloody business (“awful squealings as the pigs get electrocuted”) was part of the daily soundtrack. A magnificent river, the Shannon, ran through the city but, perversely, Limerick was built with its back turned on the water, while its streets streamed with blood.

Pigtown stayed with him. In his first novel, City of Bohane, a savagely funny dystopian western set in Ireland in 2053, the meat wagons carry “peeled heads of sheep, and the veined fleshy haunches of pigs, and the glistening trays of livers and spleens”.

A hundred miles and four counties north of Limerick, Barry, age

•

Ten Days that Shook Me

I spent ten days in May in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’

The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We are never going to have lunch, it seems, as this introductory session of talks began at ten and it is now 1.30 with no sign of it ending. We sit down one side of a long green-baize-covered table with the Soviet writers on the other, the most eye-catching of them the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, a stocky middle-aged man with a pal

•

Ian McEwan’s Anti-Memoir

Books

The author reflects on a charmed life—and all that could have gone wrong.

By Adam Begley

Listen to more stories on audm

Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. “I got totally obsessed with Russia invading Ukraine,” he says, an unfamiliar note of pain in his voice. “From February onwards, it filled my thoughts. Massacres in small villages northeast of Kyiv, like curling black-and-white photographs. Suddenly it’s here again—unbelievable, merciless brutality; old ladies shot in their kitchens.” He rubs his eyes (hay fever). A barbaric assault on European complacency, the invasion has reminded him how close we are, all of us, to annihilation.

Explore the October 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Aware of his good fortune, of his plush surroundings, he acknowledges “an en