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John Updike: The Collected Stories (boxed set)

The Library of America presents the definitive Updike: 186 classic stories spanning his entire career More

Edited by Christopher Carduff

“To the Library of America’s great credit, any real reckoning with Updike’s stature now has to contend with his collected short stories at least as much as it does with the four Rabbit novels . . . . In fact, it’s no hyperbole to suggest that he may eventually be regarded as a great short story writer who also happened to write some good novels.”—PopMatters

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Video Video rewind: Updike and Cheever, “together again” on the small screen
August 27, 2021

Video Adam Gopnik: The secret behind John Updike’s productivity
June 7, 2019

Interviews John Updike, Pennsylvania, and “the matter of America”
December 10, 2018

From his first collection, The Same Door, released in 1959, to his last, My Father’s Tears, published fifty years later, John Updike was America’s reigning master of the short story, “our second Hawthorne,” as Philip Roth described him. Here, in two authoritative volumes, are 186 unforgettable stories, beginning with “Ace in the Hole” (1953), a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, and concluding with “The Full Glass” (2008), the author’s “toast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance from it be damned.” Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time.

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.

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

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

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

Video Video rewind: Updike and Cheever, “together again” on the small screen
August 27, 2021

Video Adam Gopnik: The secret behind John Updike’s productivity
June 7, 2019

Interviews John Updike, Pennsylvania, and “the matter of America”
December 10, 2018

Interviews Four books—and a flawed Everyman—that made John Updike’s name as a novelist
November 16, 2018

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

Ace in the Hole
Friends from Philadelphia
A Game of Botticelli
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth
Dentistry and Doubt
The Kid’s Whistling
Toward Evening
Snowing in Greenwich Village
Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?
His Finest Hour
Sunday Teasing
The Lucid Eye in Silver Town
A Trillion Feet of Gas
Incest
A Gift from the City
Intercession
The Alligators
The Happiest I’ve Been
Walter Briggs
The Persistence of Desire
Still Life
Flight
Should Wizard Hit Mommy?
Dear Alexandros
A Sense of Shelter
Wife-wooing
Pigeon Feathers
Home
Archangel
The Sea’s Green Sameness
You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You
The Astronomer
A & P
The Doctor’s Wife
Lifeguard
The Crow in the Woods
The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island
Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car
Unstuck
In Football Season
The Indian
A Madman
My Uncle’s Death
Solitaire
Leaves
The Stare
Museums and Women
Avec la Bébé-sitter
Four Sides of One Story
The Morning
At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie
The Christian Roommates
My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails
Eclipse
Harv Is Plowing Now
The Music School
The Rescue
The Dark
God Speaks
The Bulgarian Poetess
The Family Meadow
Man and Daughter in the Cold
The Hermit
During the Jurassic
The Witnesses
The Pro
The Slump
Under the Microscope
The Corner
The Day of the Dying Rabbit
I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying
Cemeteries
The Deacon
I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me
One of My Generation
The Hillies
The Orphaned Swimming Pool
Plumbing
The Carol Sing
Minutes of the Last Meeting
The Baluchitherium
The Tarbox Police
When Everyone Was Pregnant
The Beloved
The Invention of the Horse Collar
Jesus on Honshu
Commercial
The Gun Shop
Believers
How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time
Nevada
Son
Daughter, Last Glimpses of
Ethiopia
Transaction
Augustine’s Concubine
Killing
The Chaste Planet
A Constellation of Events
The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals
Problems
Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer
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: 978-1-59853-250-0 1949 pages

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