Since 1953, John Updike's short stories have mapped places in America that would still be terra incognita without him. In small-town Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, his heroes live in the shadows of suburbia, stepping through adolescence, marriage, children, and divorce, somehow protected from, or oblivious to the thundering of history.
They are fathers telling stories to their children and teenage boys working the checkout at the A & P. They live immersed in an ordinary that Updike suspends between heaven and earth, between sorrow and beauty. With a new collection of more than 100 of his short stories, John Updike looks back over much packed dirt, at our lives, lived in his fiction.
