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The Afterlife and Other Stories
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The Afterlife and Other Stories Hardcover - 1994

by Updike, John

  • Used

Updike's first collection in seven years explores life beyond middle age. As usual in Updike's fiction, spouses quarrel, lovers part, children are brave, and houses with their decor have personalities. This is a world where innocence stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings may outnumber losses.

Description

Knopf. Used - Like New. Like New condition. Very Good dust jacket. With remainder mark. A near perfect copy that may have very minor cosmetic defects.
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Details

  • Title The Afterlife and Other Stories
  • Author Updike, John
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Condition New
  • Pages 336
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Knopf, New York
  • Date 1994-10-25
  • Bookseller's Inventory # F12B-01503
  • ISBN 9780679435839 / 0679435832
  • Weight 1.06 lbs (0.48 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.12 x 5.45 x 1.17 in (20.62 x 13.84 x 2.97 cm)
  • Themes
    • Topical: Family
  • Library of Congress subjects Married people, Middle-aged persons
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 94009818
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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From the rear cover

To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike's title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: "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". All twenty-two of the stories in this collection - John Updike's eleventh, and his first in seven years - in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to prescient sexual rumors, from the deaths of mothers and brothers-in-law to the births of grandchildren. As death approaches, life takes on, for some of these aging heroes, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misperception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur. Travel, whether to England or Ireland, Italy or the isles of Greece, heightens perceptions and tensions. As is usual in Mr. Updike's fiction, spouses quarrel, lovers part, children are brave, and houses with their decor have the presence of personalities. His is a world where innocence stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses.

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Media reviews

Citations

  • Booklist, 09/15/1994, Page 84
  • Booklist Editors Choice/Adult, 01/15/1995, Page 857
  • Kirkus Reviews, 09/01/1994, Page 1162
  • Library Journal, 10/15/1994, Page 89
  • Library Journal Prepub Alert, 07/01/1994, Page 69
  • Publishers Weekly, 09/05/1994, Page 88

About the author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.

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