Sad news. John Updike, one of the most pro­lif­ic authors of the last half cen­tu­ry, has died at the age of 76. The cause was appar­ent­ly lung can­cer. Get the obit here.

In Novem­ber, Updike pub­lished The Wid­ows of East­wick, a sequel to The Witch­es of East­wick, the best­seller he wrote back in 1984. On his book tour, he stopped in for an inter­view with Michael Kras­ny, here in San Fran­cis­co, and they cov­ered a wide range of issues — witch­es, sex, squir­rels, oak trees, Rab­bit Angstrom, his most famous char­ac­ter and how he died, and more. You can lis­ten here.

Added Con­tent:

As you prob­a­bly know, Updike was a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to The New York­er mag­a­zine since 1954. Today, they’re high­light­ing a few of his pieces, includ­ing a 1960 reportage on Ted Williams’ last game, a short sto­ry called Here Come the Maples (1976), and a 2006 essay called Late Works, which looks at writ­ers and artists con­fronting the end.

You can read oth­er archives of Updike con­tent at The Atlantic, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Repub­lic. (Thanks to the Dai­ly Dish for point­ing these out.)

Also, for good mea­sure, we’re adding a lengthy clip from 2006, which fea­tures Updike read­ing from his post 9–11 book, The Ter­ror­ist: A Nov­el.

Toron­to writer Robert Boy­czuk has released the short sto­ry col­lec­tion Hor­ror Sto­ry and Oth­er Hor­ror Sto­ries in trade paper­back. You can pur­chase it on Ama­zon, or down­load it in a free PDF for­mat here. Also now avail­able is a free audio/mp3 ver­sion of Boy­czuk’s short sto­ry, “Falling”. These finds were high­light­ed by Cory Doc­torow over at Boing­Boing. Doc­torow has else­where called Boy­czuk a “supreme­ly tal­ent­ed short-sto­ry writer.” For more infor­ma­tion on all this, browse this press release.

What are the 1000 best nov­els? The Guardian thinks it knows. This list was put togeth­er by The Guardian’s review team and a pan­el of experts. As you’ll see, the defin­i­tive list is help­ful­ly sub­di­vid­ed into themes: love, crime, com­e­dy, fam­i­ly and self, state of the nation, sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, war and trav­el.

On that note, I should also high­light a col­lec­tion of Life-Chang­ing Books put togeth­er by our read­ers. You’ll find many good reads here as well.