The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife s twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her father s death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: Man, as one of these stories concludes, was not meant to abide in paradise.
" Dazzling...We certainly can trust him -- we are in very good hands."
-- The New York Times
" It is in his short stories that we find Updike's most assured work...and almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly."
-- The Washington Post Book World
" For thirty years, John Updike has been among our most clearsighted, hard-working, emotionally courageous, technically adept, playful, serious, and productive artists....Read him."
-- USA Today
"Dazzling...We certainly can trust him -- we are in very good hands."
-- The New York Times
"It is in his short stories that we find Updike's most assured work...and almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly."
-- The Washington Post Book World
"For thirty years, John Updike has been among our most clearsighted, hard-working, emotionally courageous, technically adept, playful, serious, and productive artists....Read him."
-- USA Today
"The plainest of objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate. . . . I find myself searching for language to describe the very palpable pleasure that comes with experiencing in a writer authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit."--Marilynne Robinson, "The New York Times Book Review"
"It is in his short stories that we find Updike's most assured work. . . . And almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly."--"The Washington Post Book World"
"Dazzling . . . We certainly can trust him--we are in very good hands."--"The New York Times"
"The plainest of objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate. . . . I find myself searching for language to describe the very palpable pleasure that comes with experiencing in a writer authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit."--Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Book Review
"It is in his short stories that we find Updike's most assured work. . . . And almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly."--
The Washington Post Book World "Dazzling . . . We certainly can trust him--we are in very good hands."--
The New York Times
