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John Updike: Collected Later Stories

84 stories written from 1976 to 2008, including such classics as “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “My Father’s Tears,” and “Trust Me” More

Edited by Christopher Carduff

“If one trait can account for John Updike’s staying power, it is the man’s exquisite grasp of ordinary miracles.”—The Boston Globe

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News Photos: Debut novelist Kevin Morris gives John Updike his “beautiful due”
March 13, 2017

Interviews Christopher Carduff on the “everyday sublime” of John Updike’s short stories
November 19, 2015

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In John Updike’s later stories, his signature protagonist—a onetime small-town Pennsylvania boy deeply moved by art, sex, faith, and the mystery of existence—arrives at middle age to find that the world remains a vale of soul-making. In some of these stories he is balancing two families, the one that he started in his twenties with his former college sweetheart and the one he has just married into. In others he is traveling—to Italy or Greece, Ireland or England; to Egypt, Ethiopia, or Morocco; to the world of his personal past or to some other sunken Atlantis—which heightens sensations and enlarges his sense of time, distance, and life’s possibilities. He encounters feral cats and near-fatal bee stings, prostitutes and plastic surgeons, omniscient Scottish caddies and sunglass-wearing Spanish policía. He improves his golf game, his German, and his portfolio. He inherits property, keeps his own counsel, and loses his wallet and his appendix. And he grows older.

Updike’s aging heroes are citizens of a universe that is expanding ever outward, dismayed by modern cosmology’s insistence that the future holds not a second Big Bang—and another, perhaps better, chance for Life—but only a further thinning-out of reality. This, like so much else in recent thought, is at odds with their churchgoer’s faith that life has pattern and purpose, that beginnings knit tightly with endings and create stories worth hearing, worth telling, worth living. Despite all, they remain prey to moments of wonder, as when, one morning in the rural south of England, one of them observes that “a miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass,” as if with the glow of an afterlife.

Of the eighty-four stories gathered here, fifty-three first appeared in The New Yorker. Most were revised by the author for his collections Problems (1979), Trust Me (1987), The Afterlife (1994), Licks of Love (2000), and My Father’s Tears (2009). All were written from 1976 to 2008, when Updike was in his mid-forties to mid-seventies, and are arranged here, for the first time, in the order in which they were completed.

Each is offered in its latest, definitive text, and some incorporate posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books. A companion Library of America volume, Collected Early Stories, gathers stories written from 1953 to 1975.

Christopher Carduff, editor, is a longtime publishing professional who edited John Updike’s posthumous collections Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism and Always Looking: Essays on Art. He currently serves as the Books Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

John Updike: Collected Later Stories is kept in print by a gift from Kevin Morris to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Domestic Life in America
From the Journal of a Leper
The Fairy Godfathers
The Egg Race
The Parade
The Faint
Guilt-Gems
Atlantises
Morocco
Trust Me
More Stately Mansions
Still of Some Use
The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd
Venezuela for Visitors
Pygmalion
The City
Learn a Trade
The Ideal Village
Deaths of Distant Friends
First Wives and Trolley Cars
The Other
One More Interview
Slippage
Poker Night
Made in Heaven
Getting Into the Set
The Wallet
The Other Woman
Beautiful Husbands
Leaf Season
The Afterlife
Wildlife
The Burglar Alarm
Conjunction
Brother Grasshopper
Spat
The Journey to the Dead
The Football Factory
Part of the Process
The Lens Factory
The Man Who Became a Soprano
Short Easter
A Sandstone Farmhouse
The Other Side of the Street
Aperto, Chiuso
Tristan and Iseult
Farrell’s Caddie
The Rumor
Falling Asleep Up North
The Brown Chest
His Mother Inside Him
Bluebeard in Ireland
Baby’s First Step
Playing with Dynamite
Scenes from the Fifties
The Black Room
Cruise
The Women Who Got Away
Lunch Hour
New York Girl
The Cats
My Father on the Verge of Disgrace
Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War
Oliver’s Evolution
Natural Color
How Was It, Really?
Metamorphosis
Personal Archaeology
Free
The Guardians
The Walk with Elizanne
The Laughter of the Gods
Varieties of Religious Experience
Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage
Delicate Wives
The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe
German Lessons
The Road Home
My Father’s Tears
Kinderszenen
The Apparition
Blue Light
Outage
The Full Glass

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-252-4 994 pages

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N° 243 Library of America Series

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