updike, of course, did not. so he sends his kharker to stockholm and what does he do but take up on stage his baby granddaughter and give her the last word. so updike, they see you as a successor to uptake. is there some direct chain here that leads to updike and then somewhere else? oh, god, it's so hard to tell. i mean, what did he give but some sort of unbelievable capacity for noticing? i mean, he really noticed the world and it seemed to me when i got the news that what we'd lost was a consciousness that you'll never find another version of it. he knew so much but he could do a face, a gesture, he could describe the things of the world and i... my own taste in prose fiction for those writers-- conrad's one, kipling's another-- who noticed the things the thingyness of the world, the taste, the feel, the touch. not only of another person but of the table, the sidewalk. so it's very hard to know who will step into such vast shoes. but we'll go on wanting, i'm sure, to hear a highly intelligent mind present us

and the question of the updikes manuscript, writers don't do many scripps anymore. the process is drawn. do you have an e-mail archive or something like that? >> the short answer is yes. it is a very, very good question. keeps me up at night. it is true. most works today are digital. virtually every writer writes on a computer. the text is an electronic memory. now, it can be printed out and so on. publishers are working from these electronic text. so even in the case of ambitious full-scale books their is a problem blem of preservation. in the case of the ephemera of the problem is enormous. so we have, for example, e-mail most e-mail is disappearing, has disappeared. the e-mail from the white house between 2001 and 2005 apparently has disappeared. there was also the case of the census of 1960. i don't know if you have heard of this. this is the senses of the united states which was kept on magnetic tapes. anyhow, some kind of electronic storage. it was thought that the entire census was no longer available because of the extinction of these archaic kinds of tapes

publishing house to have edited the works of writers including napalm, philip roth, norman mailer, john updike, that up down stint is reduced to a few fleeting illusions here as athill extended falling away in life. and romanticism, physical deterioration and the inevitability of death often large. surely the part of life with it -- which is within our range the fact of life is mysterious and exciting enough in itself and explaining her atheism to particular facing us all perhaps not exactly comforting but acceptable because truth. noting that within its own framework a life is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. athill treats us to several of her own. if they're buying emerges as a mythbreaking account that runs against the grain of many received notions of romance, death and guilt and the experience of old age and perhaps her most lyrical line in a book that generally avoids lyricism athill rights we are not just dots at the end of thin black lines into nothingness but our parts of the many colored river teeming with beginnings and becames and new beginnings are part o

the saul bellow, the herzog, the zuckerman and phillip roth, the updike "rabbit" character.en we were on the set i... i did have that idea of this would be an interesting character as those authors... bellow did it with herzog but rabbit and zuckerman, what would happen if you saw this guy ten years later, where would he be? and that's interesting to me. i... i'm curious. i don't even know. but i'm curious. >> rose: as to where he might be going. what is the most important thing that's informed screen writing for you. writing scripts. >> well i tend not to... i don't outline or i don't... i tend not to approach scripts as stories stories. the stories generally come from the characters. usually i have an idea of a person or a relationship or... or in some case a family with "the squid and the whale" and it was divorce. and i sort of start there and i try to let it build out from there. it takes a longer time to write them for reason. but i find i work best that way. i've tried to do it the other way where i have... i beat out the plot and i try to hit each beat and go that wa