Pigeon Feathers - Couverture souple

When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”

“Electricity lights [John Updike’s] prose like a Christmas tree. . . . So full of fire and ice that it almost breaks through to some ‘fourth dimension’ in writing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Updike is not merely talented; he is bold, resourceful and intensely serious. . . . We hear talk now and then of a breakthrough in fiction, the achievement of a new attitude and hence a new method; something like that seems close at hand in Pigeon Feathers.”—Saturday Review
 
“A sustained pleasure . . . a world seen and described and interpreted by a subtle, poetic, intellectual, wondering consciousness . . . These are wonderfully written pieces.”—Library Journal