John Updike Books In Order

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom Books In Publication Order

  1. Rabbit, Run (1960)
  2. Rabbit Redux (1971)
  3. Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
  4. Rabbit at Rest (1990)
  5. Licks of Love (2000)

Henry Bech Books In Publication Order

  1. Bech: A Book (1970)
  2. Bech Is Back (1982)
  3. Bech at Bay (1998)

Buchanan Books In Publication Order

  1. Buchanan Dying (1974)
  2. Memories of the Ford Administration (1992)

Scarlet Letter Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. A Month of Sundays (1974)
  2. Roger’s Version (1986)
  3. S. (1988)

Maples Stories Collections In Publication Order

  1. Too Far to Go (1979)
  2. The Maples Stories (1980)

Eastwick Books In Publication Order

  1. The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
  2. The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Poorhouse Fair (1958)
  2. The Centaur (1963)
  3. Of the Farm (1965)
  4. Couples (1968)
  5. Marry Me (1971)
  6. The Coup (1978)
  7. Your Lover Just Called (1980)
  8. More Stately Mansions (1987)
  9. Brazil (1994)
  10. In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
  11. Toward the End of Time (1997)
  12. Gertrude and Claudius (2000)
  13. Seek My Face (2002)
  14. Villages (2004)
  15. Terrorist (2007)
  16. The Women Who Got Away (2007)

Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. A&P (1961)
  2. The Alligators (1989)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Same Door, Short Stories (1959)
  2. Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1961)
  3. Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1963)
  4. Olinger Stories (1964)
  5. The Music School (1966)
  6. Midpoint and Other Poems (1969)
  7. The Dance of the Solids (1969)
  8. Museums and Women and Other Stories (1972)
  9. Cu*nts- Signed Limited Edition (1974)
  10. Tossing and Turning (1977)
  11. Problems and Other Stories (1979)
  12. Valentine Generation And Other Stories (1981)
  13. The Carpentered Hen (1982)
  14. Facing Nature (1985)
  15. Trust Me (1987)
  16. The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994)
  17. Friends from Philadelphia and Other Stories (1995)
  18. Licks of Love (2000)
  19. Americana (2001)
  20. The Early Stories (2003)
  21. Three Trips (2005)
  22. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (2009)
  23. Endpoint and Other Poems (2009)
  24. Collected Later Stories (2013)
  25. Collected Early Stories (2013)
  26. Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Magic Flute (1962)
  2. The Twelve Terrors of Christmas (1994)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Assorted Prose (1965)
  2. Picked-Up Pieces (1975)
  3. Hugging the Shore (1983)
  4. Self-Consciousness (1989)
  5. Just Looking (1989)
  6. Odd Jobs (1991)
  7. Golf Dreams (1996)
  8. More Matter (1999)
  9. Still Looking (2005)
  10. Due Considerations (2007)
  11. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010)
  12. Higher Gossip (2011)
  13. Always Looking (2012)
  14. In Love with a Wanton (2020)

Poetry Collections In Publication Order

  1. Seventy Poems (1972)
  2. Collected Poems, 1953-1993 (1993)
  3. A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1995)
  4. Selected Poems (2015)

Best American Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. The Best Short Stories of 1915 (1916)
  2. The Best Short Stories of 1916 (1916)
  3. The Best Short Stories of 1917 (1917)
  4. The Best Short Stories of 1918 (1918)
  5. The Best Short Stories of 1919 (1919)
  6. The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1921)
  7. The Best Short Stories of 1922 (1922)
  8. The Best Short Stories of 1923 (1923)
  9. The Best Short Stories 1924 (1924)
  10. The Best Short Stories of 1925 (1925)
  11. The Best Short Stories 1926 (1926)
  12. The Best Short Stories 1927 (1927)
  13. The Best Short Stories of 1928 (1928)
  14. The Best Short Stories of 1929 (1929)
  15. The Best Short Stories 1930 (1930)
  16. The Best Short Stories 1931 (1931)
  17. The Best Short Stories of 1932 (1932)
  18. The Best Short Stories 1933 (1933)
  19. The Best Short Stories 1934 (1934)
  20. The Best Short Stories 1935 (1935)
  21. The Best Short Stories 1936 (1936)
  22. The Best Short Stories 1937 (1937)
  23. The Best Short Stories of 1938 (1938)
  24. 50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 (1939)
  25. The Best Short Stories 1939 (1939)
  26. The Best Short Stories of 1940 (1940)
  27. The Best Short Stories 1941 (1941)
  28. The Best American Short Stories 1942 (1942)
  29. The Best American Short Stories 1943 (1943)
  30. The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944)
  31. The Best American Short Stories 1945 (1945)
  32. The Best American Short Stories 1946 (1946)
  33. The Best American Short Stories 1947 (1947)
  34. The Best American Short Stories 1948 (1948)
  35. The Best American Short Stories 1949 (1949)
  36. The Best American Short Stories 1950 (1950)
  37. The Best American Short Stories 1951 (1951)
  38. The Best American Short Stories 1952 (1952)
  39. The Best American Short Stories 1953 (1953)
  40. The Best American Short Stories 1955 (1955)
  41. The Best American Short Stories 1956 (1956)
  42. The Best American Short Stories 1957 (1957)
  43. The Best American Short Stories 1958 (1958)
  44. The Best American Short Stories 1959 (1959)
  45. The Best American Short Stories 1960 (1960)
  46. The Best American Short Stories 1961 (1961)
  47. The Best American Short Stories 1962 (1962)
  48. The Best American Short Stories 1963 (1963)
  49. The Best American Short Stories 1964 (1964)
  50. The Best American Short Stories 1965 (1965)
  51. The Best American Short Stories 1966 (1966)
  52. The Best American Short Stories 1967 (1967)
  53. The Best American Short Stories 1968 (1967)
  54. The Best American Short Stories of 1969 (1969)
  55. The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970)
  56. The Best American Short Stories 1971 (1971)
  57. The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972)
  58. The Best American Short Stories 1973 (1973)
  59. The Best American Short Stories 1974 (1974)
  60. The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 (1975)
  61. The Best American Short Stories 1975 (1975)
  62. The Best American Short Stories 1976 (1976)
  63. The Best American Short Stories 1977 (1977)
  64. The Best American Short Stories 1978 (1978)
  65. The Best American Short Stories 1979 (1979)
  66. The Best American Short Stories 1980 (1980)
  67. The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981)
  68. The Best American Short Stories 1982 (1982)
  69. The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983)
  70. The Best American Short Stories 1984 (1984)
  71. The Best American Short Stories 1985 (1985)
  72. The Best American Short Stories 1986 (1986)
  73. The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987)
  74. The Best American Short Stories 1988 (1988)
  75. The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989)
  76. The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990)
  77. The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990)
  78. The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)
  79. The Best American Short Stories 1992 (1992)
  80. The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993)
  81. The Best American Short Stories 1994 (1994)
  82. The Best American Short Stories 1995 (1995)
  83. The Best American Short Stories 1996 (1996)
  84. The Best American Short Stories 1997 (1997)
  85. The Best American Short Stories 1998 (1998)
  86. The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999)
  87. The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000)
  88. The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000)
  89. The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)
  90. The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002)
  91. The Best American Short Stories 2003 (2003)
  92. The Best American Short Stories 2004 (2004)
  93. The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005)
  94. The Best American Short Stories 2006 (2006)
  95. The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007)
  96. The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (2007)
  97. The Best American Short Stories1921 (2007)
  98. The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008)
  99. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (2009)
  100. The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010)
  101. The Best American Short Stories 2011 (2011)
  102. The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012)
  103. The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)
  104. The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014)
  105. The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015)
  106. 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015)
  107. The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016)
  108. The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017)
  109. The Best American Short Stories 2018 (2018)
  110. The Best American Short Stories 2019 (2019)
  111. The Best American Short Stories 2020 (2020)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. 50 Great American Short Stories (1963)
  2. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992)
  3. Deadly Sins (1994)
  4. The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 (1999)
  5. The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom Book Covers

Henry Bech Book Covers

Buchanan Book Covers

Scarlet Letter Trilogy Book Covers

Maples Stories Collections Book Covers

Eastwick Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Picture Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Poetry Collections Book Covers

Best American Short Stories Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

John Updike Books Overview

Rabbit, Run

‘Brilliant and poignant…
By his compassion, clarity of insight and crystal bright prose, he makes Rabbit’s sorrow his and our own.’THE WASHINGTON POSTHarry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid 20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back…
.

Rabbit Redux

The year is 1969, the end of a revolutionary decade, when men walked the moon and controversies raged over the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s liberation, morality and its decline. A liberated Rabbit Angstrom loses his wife to a hotshot used car salesman dripping with Vitalis and acquires a menage that includes his teenage son, a spaced out white chick, and an evangelical black man. Rabbit lives a life that is bent, a normal life refracted in a funhouse mirror. He courts complications, all the more bizarre for their believability.

Rabbit Is Rich

The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run 1960, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux 1971, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit’s middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest‘, the delightful last novel in the rabbit sequence, is both comic and moving. Rabbit, now in his middle fifties, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his wife and children come to stay and disaster ensues; Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating attack with his granddaughter and Nelson is discovered to have been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit. The resolution of the Angstrom Family’s conflicts is brilliantly described and draws a fascinatingly detailed picture of America at the beginning of the 1990s.

Licks of Love

A TOUCHING, ELEGIAC COLLECTION OF STORIES about infidelity, about the weight of family, about the dwindling of years, about the heart and other organs…
. Updike works so slowly and carefully that you rarely see the emotional punches coming. Newsweek THESE STORIES SHARE A THEME OF RETROSPECT AND A BITTERSWEET TONE OF FORGIVENESS…
. Updike, who has found in Rabbit an indispensable, if unlikely, vehicle for his truest insights into the mysterious of manhood, the promise of American life and the operations of divine grace, could no more pass up the opportunity for a further Rabbit report than Rabbit himself could forgo a bowl of macadamia nuts…
. His observations eddy and swirl into the main stream of his narrative, swelling it with life. The New York Times Book Review RABBIT REMEMBERED IS A THING OF RICH SATISFACTION…
. IMPOSSIBLE TO FORGET…
Throughout the collection are passages of stylistic certainty and bittersweet intimacy. The Boston Sunday Globe OUTSTANDING WORK…
We always suspected that Updike would try to pull one more Rabbit out of his hat. Now, some 10 years after the death of everybody’s favorite Updike character, Updike has done just that, and with great success…
. Rabbit Remembered ranks with his best work. The Star Ledger GLIMMERING…
SEDUCTIVE…
JOHN UPDIKE HITS HIS STRIDE Entertainment Weekly

Bech: A Book

In this classic novel by John Updike, we return to a character as compelling and timeless as Rabbit Angstrom: the inimitable Henry Bech. Famous for his writer’s block, Bech is a Jew adrift in a world of Gentiles. As he roams from one adventure to the next, he views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make you laugh with delight and wince in recognition.

Bech Is Back

The renowned Henry Bech is now fifty years old. In this wonderful classic novel, Bech reflects on his fame, travels the world, marries an Episcopalian divorc e from Westchester, and surprise to all writes a book that becomes a runaway bestseller. If you’ve never read Updike before, there’s no better place to start. If you’ve read him for years, you’ll be delightfully reminded of John Updike’s rightful place in the pantheon of quintessential American writers.

Bech at Bay

4 cassettes / 6 hoursRead by Ron RifkinCatch up with Bech. This unique AudioBook collects John Updikes classic Bech novels, Bech: A Book 1970, Bech is Back 1982, and the latest installment, Bech at Bay.’Mr. Updike finds full scope for his gifts here: for sly and cheerfully malicious pensees on contemporary life; for busy observations on human behavior.’ The New YorkerBech a Book 1970: This is where we meet him for the first time Henry Beck, a New York writer ‘with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose,’ whose first novel had become a minor classic. A rich and unforgettable portrait and a satire of the literary life. Bech Is Back 1982: When Bech comes back, he roams a number of third world countries as a cultural ambassador astonished at his won literary celebrity. From the era of Vietnam to the sagging end of the Seventies, his aesthetic embarrassments reveal truths about his trade and his times. Bech at Bay 1998: Our hero returns older, but scarcely wiser. He is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world ever more cheerfully crass. it’s not easy being Henry Beck in the post Gutenbergian world, but somebody has to do it, and he brings to the take that indomitable mixture of grit and ennui that only Updike could make so deliciously funny.

Buchanan Dying

5 x 8 New foreword by the author Praise for the original edition of Buchanan DyingBuchanan Dying is an abundant, even opulent, creative act…
very often Mr. Updike’s fantastic talent for mimicry produces quite marvelous results.’ Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Atlantic Monthly ‘Using the excuse of 19th Century speech, Updike has indulged his love of beautiful, ornate prose; we can sink deep into sentences balanced like mobiles and turned like pots on the wheel.’ Joyce B. Markle, The Chicago Tribune To the list of John Updike’s well intentioned protagonists Rabbit Angstrom, George Caldwell, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech add James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, the harried fifteenth President of the United States 1857 1861. In a play meant to be read, Buchanan, on his death bed, relives his political and private lives. A wide ranging afterword rounds out the dramatic portrait of one of America’s lesser known and least appreciated leaders. For this edition Updike has written a new foreword, discussing the two productions of the play and the historical context in which it was written. John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Massachusetts since 1957. He is the author of more than fifty books, and his novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Howells Medal.

Memories of the Ford Administration

‘Stunning…
Alf’s life and times are light and funny; Buchanan’s are dark and serious. Alternating between the two, Mr. Updike entertains and instructs…
in gorgeous prose.’THE WALL STREET JOURNALWhen junior college professor Alfred Clayton is asked to record his impressions of the Ford Administration, he recalls a turbulent piece of personal history as well. In a decade of sexual liberation, Clayton was facing a doomed marriage and the passionate beginnings of a futile affair with an unattainable Perfect Wife. But one memory begets another: Clayton’s unfinished book on James Buchanan. In John Updike’s fifteenth novel, he masterfully alternates between the two men, two lives, two American centuries one Victorian, the other modern shining an irreverent, witty, and sometimes caustic light on the contrasting views of social fictions and sexual politics…
.A MAIN SELECTION OF THE BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUBA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKFrom the Paperback edition.

A Month of Sundays

In this brilliant novel, John Updike has created one of his most memorable characters: the Reverend Tom Marshfield literate, charming, sexual whose outrageous behavior with the ladies of his flock scandalizes his parish…
. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Roger’s Version

A born again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who’d just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert’s wife and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl. From the Paperback edition.

S.

‘One of Updike’s lightest, funniest, and sliest fictions a comedy about the sneaky economies of the spirit.’THE NEW YORKERS. is Sarah Worth a doctor’s wife, North Shore matron, loving mother, and suddenly an ardent follower of a Hindu religious leader known as the Arhat, whom she decides to follow to his Arizona Ashram. In the letters and audiocassettes that Sarah sends to her husband, daughter, mother, brother, best friend, and anyone else who even touches her life, master novelist John Updike gives us a witty comedy of manners, a biting satire of life on a religious commune, and the story of an American woman in search of herself.

Too Far to Go

Stories that trace the decline and fall of a marriage, a history made up of the happiness of growing children and shared life, and the sadness of growing estrangement and the misunderstandings of love.

The Maples Stories

Book Jacket Status: Jacketed

Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.

In 1956, Updike published a story, Snowing in Greenwich Village, about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, Grandparenting, which returns us to the Maples s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

The Witches of Eastwick

BEFORE THEY WERE THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, OUR Hero*inES WERE A TRIO OF DELIGHTFULLY WICKED WITCHES.

In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard, a sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, the wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose strobe lit hot tub room became the scene of satanic pleasures.

To tell you any more, dear reader, would be to spoil the joy of reading this hexy, sexy novel by the incomparable John Updike.

Praise for New York Times Bestseller The Witches of Eastwick:

A dazzling book…
Updike is devilishly clever.
Los Angeles Times

New England’s past and present are brilliantly interwoven in this narrative…
Updike has brought this culture wittily and radiantly to life.
The New York Times

A great deal of fun to read…
fresh, constantly entertaining…
John Updike is a wizard of language and observation.
The Philadelphia Inquirer

A wicked entertainment…
In book after book, Updike s fine, funny impressionistic art strips the full casings of everydayness from objects we have known all our lives and makes them shine with fresh new connections.
The New Republic

Witty, ironic, engrossing, punctuated by transports of spectacular prose.
Time

Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.
Newsday

Selected by Time as one of the Five Best Works of Fiction of the Year

From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Widows of Eastwick

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorc es Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer? The old Rhode Island seaside town, where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne, is still magical for them. Now Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish them ill. How they cope with the lingering traces of their evil deeds, the shocks of a mysterious counterspell, and the advancing inroads of old age, form the burden of Updike s delightful, ominous sequel.

The Poorhouse Fair

At the County Home for the Aged, the inmates, having shed their cares and responsibilities, live out their remaining years. On the day of The Poorhouse Fair the order is broken and the old people take charge. It is a day neither Conner, the poorhouse prefect, nor his charges will forget.

The Centaur

‘A triumph of love and art.’ THE WASHINGTON POSTIn a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his relationship to the Titan Prometheus, ‘The Centaur‘ is one of Updike’s most brilliant novels. From the Paperback edition.

Of the Farm

Joey Robinson is a thirty five year old advertising consultant working in the urban jungle of Manhattan. One day, Joey decides to return to the farm where he grew up, and where his mother still lives. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife and an eleven year old stepson, he begins to reas*sess and evaluate the course his life has taken. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the country air, relates stories, makes confessions, seeks solace, and hopes for love. But all of their emotional musings and reflections pale when tragedy strikes one that threatens to separate the family, even as it draws them closer. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Couples

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late 20th century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read and remembered for a long time to come.

Marry Me

Sally is blonde, expensively dressed and married to Richard. He is the generous husband, making the kind of drunken compromise a man has to make when he is married to a desirable woman. Jerry met his wife Ruth at art school and for all their married lives, Jerry and Sally have been lovers.

The Coup

Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellelou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less did they expect him to acquire four wives.

Brazil

They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach: Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen from the Rio slums, surviving day to day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, an upper class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absent though very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought them together, betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart, Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil‘s wild west unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them…
Spanning twenty two years, from the mid sixties to the late eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence.’A tour de force…
Spectacular.’ Time’Updike’s novel, as tender as it is erotic, becomes a magnificently wrought love story…
. Beautifully written.’ Detroit Free PressFrom the Paperback edition.

In the Beauty of the Lilies

‘IT WILL LEAVE YOU STUNNED AND BREATHLESS…
. With grand ambition, Updike not only tracks the fortunes and falls of an American family through four generations and eight decades but also creates a shimmering, celluloid portrait of the whole century as viewed through the metaphor of the movies.’ Miami Herald’AN IMPORTANT AND IMPRESSIVE NOVEL: a novel that not only shows how we live today, but also how we got there…
. A book that forces us to reas*sess the American Dream and the crucial role that faith and the longing for faith has played in shaping the national soul.’ The New York Times’STIRRING AND CAPTIVATING AND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN…
This new novel displays a depth and a narrative confidence that make one sigh with sweet anticipation. This is the Updike of the Rabbit books, who can take you uphill and down with his grace of vision, his gossamer language, and his merciful, ironic glance at the misery of the human condition. ‘ The Boston Globe’AWESOME…
Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured, or chilling.’ The New Yorker’POWERFUL.’ The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Toward the End of Time

JOHN UPDIKE IS ‘A STYLIST OF THE HIGHEST ORDER, capable of illuminating the sublime in the mundane, thereby elevating all of human experience.’ Chicago TribuneToward the End of Time ‘is the journal of a 66 year old man, Ben Turnbull…
which reveals not only the world but the wanderings of his wits…
. So what if he jumps from a United States in the next century, disintegrating after a war with China, to ancient Egypt, or to virtual reality? So what if characters appear and disappear like phantoms in a dream?…
Turnbull’s journal is like Walden gone haywire…
. If Ben’s ruthlessness is evenhanded, so is his alarming intelligence; it falls on every scene, person, object, and thought in the book, giving it an eerie ambiance.’ The New York Times Book Review’A BOOK AIMED NOT TO RESOLVE BUT TO AROUSE A READER’S WONDER…
Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen.’ The Miami Herald’WONDERFUL RUSHES OF NEAR MELVILLEAN PROSE…
Toward the End of Time has a force that gets under your skin.’ New York Review of BooksA Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club

Gertrude and Claudius

John Updikes’s nineteenth novel tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father’s slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude’s girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle aged affair with her husband’s younger brother. A dark eyed dreamer with a taste for foreign adventure, he for decades has sought to quell his love for Gertrude, and at last returns to an Elsinore whose prince is generally elsewhere. Gaps and inconsistencies within the immortal play are to an extent filled and explained in this prequel; the figure of Polonius, especially, takes on a larger significance. Beginning in the aura of pagan barbarism, and anticipating Renaissance humanism and empiricism, this modern retelling of a medieval tale presents the case for its royal couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince.

Seek My Face

John Updike’s twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair 1959, takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy eight year old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001. From the Hardcover edition.

Villages

John Updike’s twenty first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education Bildung is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three Villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, ‘How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!’ His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of Villages: ‘A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.’This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty first century. From the Hardcover edition.

Terrorist

The ever surprising John Updike’s twenty second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen year old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur an, as expounded to him by a local mosque s imam.

The son of a bohemian Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad s mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.

But to quote the Qur an: Of those who plot is God the best.

A&P

Part of The Wadsworth Casebooks for Reading, Research, and Writing Series, this new title provides all the materials a student needs to complete a literary research assignment in one convenient location.

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

‘Some of the most beautiful writing in contemporary American literature is between the covers of this book…
‘ BOSTON HERALDThe triumphant collection of short stories by America’s most acclaimed novelist. From the Paperback edition.

The Music School

Hardback, ex library, with usual stamps and markings, in good all round condition.

Trust Me

John Updike’s short story collections are occasions for celebration the pleasures to be found in them are great indeed. This marvelous volume contains one gem after another, stories to be savored one at a time and returned to again and again. Here is trust betrayed and fulfilled. Here are parents struggling to maintain that fragile claim on their offspring’s childish awe…
. Here are husbands and wives as only Updike knows them, leaving each other, loving each other, often at the same time. Here are passion ignited and quenched, absurd hope, regret at the last minute. Here is life as we live in it, in twenty two stories of uncommon beauty and pathos from a master storyteller at the peak of his brilliant career.

The Afterlife and Other Stories

‘QUINTESSENTIAL UPDIKE…
These tales are elegies for lost youth and receding passions.’ The New York Times’If one trait can account for John Updike’s staying power, it is the man’s exquisite grasp of ordinary miracles…
. With his small mirages, his puddles left by both the heroic and the damned, Updike can turn the simple, misguided efforts of a man into a signature of song.’ The Boston Globe’MARVELOUSLY MOVING…
These tales evoke a certain peace and a definite wonder at what an astonishingly graceful writer Updike is.’ USA Today’John Updike has rarely written more affectingly, more from the center of his being…
. This collection is about the passing of generations, and the way that passing leaves people marooned…
. Reviewing a novel of Vladimir Nabokov in 1964, Mr. Updike said, ‘He writes prose the only way it should be written that is, ecstatically.’ That ecstasy is evident on every page of THE AFTERLIFE.’ The New York Times Book Review’These are first rate stories, thoughtful and wise.’ The Cleveland Plain DealerAN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB

Americana

John Updike’s first collection of verse since his Collected Poems, 1953 1993 brings together fifty eight poems, three of them of considerable length. The four sections take up, in order: America, its cities and airplanes; the poet’s life, his childhood, birthdays, and ailments; foreign travel, to Europe and the tropics; and, beginning with the long ‘Song of Myself,’ daily life, its furniture and consolations. There is little of the light verse with which Mr. Updike began his writing career nearly fifty years ago, but a light touch can be felt in his nimble manipulation of the ghosts of metric order, in his caressing of the living textures of things, and in his reluctance to wave goodbye to it all.

The Early Stories

He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time. William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women 1972A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, Olinger Stories, already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as a square mile of middle class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern. These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled Out in the World, Married Life, and Family Life, tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of The Two Iseults, a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co exists with post Christian morals. Tarbox Tales are followed by Far Out, a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and The Single Life, whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review. All show Mr. Updike s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world. From the Hardcover edition.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father s Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. Personal Archaeology considers life as a sequence of half buried layers, and The Full Glass distills a lifetime s happiness into one brim*ming moment of an old man s bedtime routine. High school class reunions, in The Walk with Elizanne and The Road Home, restore their hero to youth s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in The Guardians, The Laughter of the Gods, and Kinderszenen. Love s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of Free, Delicate Wives, The Apparition, and Outage. In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.

Endpoint and Other Poems

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book. The opening sequence, Endpoint, is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in turning the oddities of life into words. Other Poems range from the fanciful what would it be like to be a stolen Rembrandt painting? he muses to the celebratory, capturing the flux of life. A section of sonnets follows, some inspired by travels to distant lands, others celebrating the idiosyncrasies of nature in his own backyard. For John Updike, the writing of poetry was always a special joy, and this final collection is an eloquent and moving testament to the life of this extraordinary writer.

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

Edward Gorey’s off kilter depictions of Yuletide mayhem and John Updike’s wryly jaundiced text examine a dozen Christmas traditions with a decidedly wheezy ho ho ho. This long out of print classic is the perfect stocking stuffer for any bah humbug. 32 pages, smyth sewn casebound book, with jacket.

Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose includes Updike’s early essays of humor and parody, some reportage for The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town,’ his description of Ted Williams’ last appearance in Fenway Park, several semi autobiographical first person accounts, and numerous book reviews. These all give us a well rounded observation of the author. Titles include: ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ ‘On the Sidewalk, Mr. Ex Resident,’ ‘Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy,’ ‘The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,’ ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town,’ ‘My Uncle’s Death,’ ‘Beerbohn and Others,’ ‘Faith in Search of Understanding,’ and ‘More Love in the Western World.’

Hugging the Shore

Since 1960 the novelist and poet has been reviewing books for the ‘New Yorker’, and the reviews of the last eight years make up the bulk of this volume. Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.

Self-Consciousness

Self Consciousness

One of our finest novelists now gives us his most dazzling creation his own life. In six eloquent and compelling chapters, the author of The Witches of Eastwick and the wonderful Rabbit trilogy gives us an incitingly honest look at the makings of an American writer and of an American man.

Here is Updike on his childhood, on ailments both horrible psoriasis and hilarious his experiences at the hands of a dentist, on his stuttering, on his feelings during the Vietnam War, on his genealogy. and on that most elusive of subjects, his innermost self. What emerges is a fascinating, fully formed portrait candid, often very, funny, and always illuminating.

John Updike

Just Looking

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY The wit and sharp observation one expects from novelist/short story writer/poet/essayist Updike are found in these 23 pieces on art, supplemented by 193 plates. He offers trenchant views on Monet ‘painting Nature in her nudity’; John Singer Sargent ‘too facile’; Andrew Wyeth’s ‘heavily hyped’ series of Helga nudes; Degas’s ‘patient invention of the snapshot before the camera itself was technically able to arrest motion and record the poetry of visual accident.’ He hops playfully from the ‘tender irony’ of Richard Estes’s hyperrealist Telephone Booths to a Vermeer townscape, and from children’s book illustration to American children as depicted by Winslow Homer. He pauses to savor the unfamiliar or forgotten: Ralph Barton’s wiry New Yorker cartoons, French sculptor Jean Ipousteguy’s futuristic re visioning of human anatomy, the elaborate, studied fantasies of churchgoing Yankee painter Erastus Salisbury Field. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Golf Dreams

‘BUBBLY AND QUIZZICAL AND LUMINOUS.’ Los Angeles Times’JOYFUL…
THE JACK NICKLAUS OF GOLF WRITING…
The 30 entries in this collection, drawn mainly from magazine pieces, constitute a championship round…
. This unbridled appreciation of golf’s mystical opportunities for grace and redemption will enthrall even those who have never followed an 80 yard worm burner with an elegant chip to the pin.’ People’VINTAGE UPDIKE AND A RARE TREAT FOR GOLFERS.’ San Francisco Chronicle’A BOOK WRITTEN UNDER A CLEAR BLUE SKY WITH AN UTTERLY PURE SWING…
ending with a handful of essays on the metaphysics of golf and great golf gurus, both writers and caddies. Here, Updike waltzes about the heavens of Nabokov, in pure esthetic bliss. And here his transcendental agonies and anxieties fuse into split second moments of impact that lift us from sand pit to rhapsody.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer

More Matter

John Updike’s fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years’ worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and in a concluding section, ‘Personal Matters’ paragraphs on himself and his work. More Matter, indeed, in an age which, his introduction states, wants ‘real stuff the dirt, the poop, the nitty gritty and not…
the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.’ Still, the fiction writer’s affectionate, shaping hand can be detected in many of these considerations. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Biographies of Isaac Newton and Queen Elizabeth II, Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Benchley and Helen Keller, are reviewed, always with a lively empathy. Two especially scholarly disquisitions array twentieth century writing about New York City and sketch the ancient linkage between religion and literature. An illustrated section contains sharp eyed impressions of movies, photographs, and art. Even the slightest of these pieces can twinkle. Updike is a writer for whom print is a mode of happiness: he says of his younger self, ‘The magazine rack at the corner drugstore beguiled me with its tough gloss,’ and goes on to claim, ‘An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.’

Still Looking

When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike’s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it. In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art. After beginning with early American portraits, landscapes, and the transatlantic career of John Singleton Copley, Still Looking then considers the curious case of Martin Johnson Heade and extols two late nineteenth century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Next, it discusses the eccentric pre moderns James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the competing American Impressionists and Realists in the early twentieth century, and such now historic avant garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elie Nadelman. Two appreciations of Edward Hopper and appraisals of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol round out the volume. America speaks through its artists. As Updike states in his introduction, The dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock: the same tense engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, can be discerned in both. On Just Looking Some of these essays are marvelous examples of critical explanation, in which the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work in an exhibition until a deep understanding of the art emerges. Arthur Danto, The New York Times Book Review These are remarkably elegant little essays, dense in thought and perception but offhandedly casual in style. Their brevity makes more acute the sense of regret one feels to see them end. Jeremy Strick, Newsday

Due Considerations

A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each. This is how John Updike, one of the world’s most acclaimed novelists, modestly describes his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. Due Considerations is his sixth collection, and perhaps the most moving, stylish, and personal volume yet. Here he reflects on such writers and works as Emerson, Uncle Tom s Cabin, Colson Whitehead, The Wizard of Oz, Don DeLillo, The Portrait of a Lady, Margaret Atwood, The Mabinogion, and Proust. Updike also provides a whimsical and insightful list of Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido, from Pocahontas and John Smith to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; muses on how the practice of faith changes but doesn t disappear; and shares his reaction to the attacks on 9/11 in Brooklyn that day, Freedom, reflected in the street s diversity and quotidian ease, felt palpable . Due Considerations proves that John Updike is, as noted in The Boston Globe, our greatest critic of literature. Praise for Due Considerations:A New York Times Notable Book The prose is clean, elegant, exquisitely calibrated…
. Updike is one of the best essayists and critics this country has produced in the last century. Los Angeles Times Book Review Updike s scope is rather breathtaking…
. When I do not know the subject well as in his finely illustrated art reviews of Bruegel, D rer and Goya I learn much from what Updike has to impart. When he considers an author I love, like Proust or Czeslaw Milosz, I often find myself appreciating familiar things in a new way. Christopher Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review With his pack rat curiosity…
his prodigious memory and attendant knack for choosing the just right fact or quote, and his ever present astonishment at both the stupidity and genius on display wherever he looks, Updike is in many ways an ideal critic…
. It is a privilege to be in the company of this wonderfully American voice. Rocky Mountain News Updike knows more about literature than almost anyone breathing today…
. He’s beyond knowledgeable he makes Google look wanting. Baltimore Sun Provocative and incisive…
This volume reminds us that Updike s prose sets our literary bar very high indeed. The Charlotte Observer Updike offers an effortless mastery of form and content. The Boston Globe

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

On September 28, 1960 a day that will live forever in the hearts of fans Red Sox slugger Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last at bat in Fenway Park. Seizing the occasion, he belted a solo home run a storybook ending to a storied career. In the stands that afternoon was 28 year old John Updike, inspired by the moment to make his lone venture into the field of sports reporting. More than just a matchless account of that fabled final game, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a brilliant evocation of Williams’ competitive spirit, an intensity of dedication that still ‘crowds the throat with joy.’ Now, on the 50th anniversary of the dramatic exit of baseball’s greatest hitter, The Library of America presents a commemorative edition of Hub Fans, prepared by the author just months before his death. To the classic final version of the essay, long out of print, Updike added an autobiographical preface and a substantial new afterword. Here is a baseball book for the ages, a fan’s notes of the very highest order.

Higher Gossip

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009. This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic. It concludes with a moving meditation on a modern world robbed of imagination a world without religion, without art and on the difficulties of faith in a disbelieving age. In between are previously uncollected stories and poems, a pageant of scenes from seventeenth century Massachusetts, five late ‘golf dreams,’ and several of Updike’s commentaries on his own work. At the heart of the book are his matchless reviews of John Cheever, Ann Patchett, Toni Morrison, William Maxwell, John le Carr , and essays on Aimee Semple McPherson, Max Factor, and Albert Einstein, among others. Also included are two decades of art criticism on Chardin, El Greco, Blake, Turner, Van Gogh, Max Ernest, and more. Updike’s criticism is gossip of the highest order, delivered in an intimate and generous voice.

Collected Poems, 1953-1993

Now in paperback, John Updike’s dazzling collection of poetry as varied as the 40 years in which they were written including nearly every poem from his five previously published collections, and more than 70 new poems and his light verse.

The Best American Short Stories 1981

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Louis D. Rubin, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Tallent, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1983

Short Stories by Ann Tyler, Bill Barich, John Updike, Carolyn Chute, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the Amer ican short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such c lassic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest,’ Raymond Carve r’s ‘Cathedral,’ and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents. Hardcover edition also available. Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Short Stories 1993

The preeminent annual collection of short fiction features the writing of John Updike, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry, Diane Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dixon, and Mary Gaitskill.

The Best American Short Stories 1994

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1995

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1996

Each fall, The Best American Short Stories provides a fresh showcase for this rich and unpredictable genre. Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, the choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and an array of stunning new talent.

The Best American Short Stories 1997

The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx’s selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Junot D’az, and T. C. Boyle as well as an array of stunning new talent. In her introduction, Proulx writes that beyond their strength and vigor, these stories achieve ‘a certain intangible feel for the depth of human experience, not uncommonly expressed through a kind of dry humor.’ As ever, this year’s volume surprises and rewards.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

Edited by beloved storyteller Garrison Keillor, this year’s volume promises to be full of humor, surprises, and, as always, accomplished writing by new and familiar voices. The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling author.

The Best American Short Stories 1999

‘What I look for most in a story,’ writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, ‘what I crave, what I found in these twenty one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell.’ Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,’ by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy’s haunting story ‘The Uncharted Heart,’ a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. ‘Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before,’ writes Tan. ‘I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself.’ With twenty one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories 2000

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor always a preeminent master of the form THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, ‘Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller…
who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character’s and the writer’s own.’ Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content When a great annual collection comes out, it’s hard to know the reason why. Was there a bumper crop of high quality stories, or was this year’s guest editor especially gifted at winnowing out the good ones? Either way, the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories is a standout in a series that can be uneven. Its editor, E.L. Doctorow, seems to have a fondness for the ‘what if?’ story, the kind of tale that posits an imagination prodding question and then attempts to answer it. Nathan Englander’s ‘The Gilgul of Park Avenue’ asks: What if a WASPy financial analyst, riding in a cab one day, discovers to his surprise that he is irrevocably Jewish? In ‘The Ordinary Son,’ Ron Carlson asks: What if you are the only average person in a family of certifiable geniuses? And Allan Gurganus’s ‘He’s at the Office’ asks: What if the quintessential postwar American working man were forced to retire? This last story is narrated by the man’s grown son, who at the story’s opening takes his dad for a walk. Though it’s the present day, the father is still dressed in his full 1950s businessman regalia, including camel hair overcoat and felt hat. The two walk by a teenager. ‘The boy smiled. ‘Way bad look on you, guy.”

My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was ‘I think he likes you.’

The exchange typifies the writing showcased in this anthology: in these stories, again and again, we find a breakdown of human communication that is sprightly, humorous, and devastatingly complete. A few more of the terrific stories featured herein: Amy Bloom’s ‘The Story,’ a goofy metafiction about a villainous divorcee; Geoffrey Becker’s ‘Black Elvis,’ which tells of, well, a black Elvis; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ a story of an Indian man who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the collection itself, Lahiri’s story amas*ses a lovely, funny mood as it goes along. Claire Dederer

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Since the series’ inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best fifty five extraordinary stories that represent a century’s worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike’s contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959, to his most recent, in 1998. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

The Best American Short Stories 2002

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

This year’s Best American Short Stories features a rich mix of voices, from both intriguing new writers and established masters of the form like Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arthur Miller. The 2002 collection includes stories about everything from illicit love affairs to family, the immigrant experience and badly behaved children stories varied in subject but unified in their power and humanity. In the words of this year’s guest editor, the best selling author Sue Miller, ‘The American short story today is healthy and strong…
These stories arrived in the nick of time…
to teach me once more what we read fiction for.’

The Best American Short Stories 2003

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 2004

Story for story, readers can’t beat The Best American Short Stories series…
Each year it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story’ Chicago Tribune. This year’s most beloved short fiction anthology is edited by the best selling novelist Sue Miller, author of While I Was Gone, and, most recently, The World Below. The volume includes stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jill McCorkle, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, and Akhil Sharma, among others. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content In her opening remarks to The Best American Short Stories 2002, guest editor Sue Miller notes the difficulty of reading fiction produced during 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She also remarks that by the time she had finalized her 20 selections, this act of reading had restored her faith both in fiction’s significance and its ability to tap into timeless themes. The 2002 anthology includes stories best described as realist fiction or traditional fiction, many set in contemporary times. The tales range from E.L. Doctorow’s ‘A House on the Plains,’ a murder set at the turn of the century, to pieces with more recent settings, like ‘Puppy’ by Richard Ford, which shows how a New Orleans couple deals or doesn’t deal with the appearance of a stray dog. Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Nobody’s Business’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Seven’ deftly portray the disconnection a semi assimilated Indian American and Haitian American couple experience both as partners and as U.S. citizens. Leonard Michael’s ‘Nachman from Los Angeles,’ in contrast, adds some levity to the mix. Miller adds in her preface that maybe next year the tales will depart further from tradition, but judging from this volume no departure is necessary: the selections take the reader on a delightful journey through some of America’s best contemporary writers. Jane Hodges

The Best American Short Stories 2005

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane Tom Perrotta Alice Munro Edward P. Jones Joy Williams Joyce Carol Oates Thomas McGuane Kelly Link Charles D’Ambrosio Cory Doctorow George Saunders and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

The Best American Short Stories 2006

While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about, writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.

This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In The View from Castle Rock, the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander s cast of young characters in How We Avenged the Blums confronts a bully dubbed The Anti Semite to both comic and tragic ends. In Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart wrenching look at a young man s choices when his father along with most of the men in his small town is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li s After a Life reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in Tatooizm, Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple s relationship that has run its course.

Ann Patchett brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness to The Best American Short Stories 2006 , writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, and she is, surely, every story writer s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

In his introduction to this volume, Stephen King writes, Talent does more than come out; it bursts out, again and again, doing exuberant cartwheels while the band plays ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’…
Talent can t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. In fact, that’s its job. Wonderfully eclectic, The Best American Short Stories 2007 collects stories by writers of undeniable talent, both newcomers and favorites. These stories examine the turning points in life when we, as children or parents, lovers or friends or colleagues, must break certain rules in order to remain true to ourselves. In T. C. Boyle s heartbreaking Balto, a thirteen year old girl provides devastating courtroom testimony in her father s trial. Aryn Kyle s charming story Allegiance shows a young girl caught between her despairing British mother and motherly American father. In The Bris, Eileen Pollack brilliantly writes of a son struggling to fulfill his filial obligations, even when they require a breach of morality and religion. Kate Walbert s stunning Do Something portrays one mother s impassioned and revolutionary refusal to accept her son s death. And in Richard Russo s graceful Horseman, an English professor comes to understand that plagiarism reveals more about a student than original work can. New series editor Heidi Pitlor writes, Stephen King s dedication, unflagging hard work, and enthusiasm for excellent writing shone through on nearly a daily basis this past year…
We agreed, disagreed, and in the end very much concurred on the merit of the twenty stories chosen. The result is a vibrant assortment of stories and voices brim*ming with attitude, deep wisdom, and rare compassion.

The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 1890 1941 was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains 1917 and The Forgotten Threshold 1918.

The Best American Short Stories 2008

This brilliant collection, edited by the award winning and perennially provocative Salman Rushdie, boasts a magnificent array Library Journal of voices both new and recognized. With Rushdie at the helm, the 2008 edition reflects the variety of substance and style and the consistent quality that readers have come to expect Publishers Weekly. We all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are. The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself. Salman Rushdie, editorThe Best American Short Stories 2008 includes KEVIN BROCKMEIER ALLEGRA GOODMAN A. M. HOMES NICOLE KRAUSS JONATHAN LETHEM STEVEN MILLHAUSER DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ALICE MUNRO GEORGE SAUNDERS TOBIAS WOLFF and others

The Best American Short Stories 2009

Edited by critically acclaimed, best selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year’s collection serve as a provacative literary ‘antenna for what is going on in the world’ Chicago Tribune. The collection boasts great variety from ‘famous to first timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds’ St. Louis Post Dispatch, ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best selling Best American.

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by the award winning, best selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative Wall Street Journal. With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America s oldest and best selling story anthology is sure to be of enduring quality Chicago Tribune this year.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

With a New AfterwordAs a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

‘How ironic,’ Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, ‘that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies.’ Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? ‘Isn’t the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?’

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many ‘different, unexpected’ gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can’t be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain’s ‘Cannibalism in the Cars,’ a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ‘That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to…
a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy’. From Melville come the juxtaposed tales ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,’ of which Oates says, ‘Only Melville could have fashioned out of ‘real’ events…
such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction.’ From Flannery O’Connor we find ‘A Late Encounter With the Enemy,’ and from John Cheever, ‘The Death of Justina,’ one of Cheever’s own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O’Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.

This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

In its brief existence, THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES has established itself as a peerless suspense anthology. Compiled by the best selling mystery novelist Ed McBain, this year’s edition boasts nineteen outstanding tales by such masters as John Updike, Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as stories by rising stars such as Edgar Award winners Tom Franklin and Thomas H. Cook. The 1999 volume is a spectacular showcase for the high quality and broad diversity of the year’s finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing. ‘Keller’s Last Refuge’ by Lawrence Block, ‘Safe’ by Gary A. Braunbeck, ‘Fatherhood’ by Thomas H. Cook, ‘Wrong Time, Wrong Place’ by Jeffery Deaver, ‘Netmail’ by Brendan DuBois, ‘Redneck’ by Loren D. Estleman, ‘And Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing’ by Gregory Fallis, ‘Poachers’ by Tom Franklin, ‘Hitting Rufus’ by Victor Gischler, ‘Out There in the Darkness’ by Ed Gorman, ‘Survival’ by Joseph Hansen, ‘A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail’ by David K. Harford, ‘An Innocent Bystander’ by Gary Krist, ‘The Jailhouse Lawyer’ by Phillip M. Margolin, ‘Secret, Silent’ by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘In Flanders Fields’ by Peter Robinson, ‘Dry Whiskey’ by David B. Silva, ‘Sacrifice’ by L. L. Thrasher, ‘Bech Noir’ by John Updike

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

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