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My Father's Tears

And Other Stories

And Other Stories

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

By John Updike

Best Seller
Paperback $16.00

May 25, 2010 | ISBN 9780345513809

Hardcover $25.95

Jun 02, 2009 | ISBN 9780307271563

Ebook $12.99

Jun 02, 2009 | ISBN 9780307272027

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    My Father's Tears by John Updike
    Paperback $16.00
    May 25, 2010 | ISBN 9780345513809

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      May 25, 2010 | ISBN 9780345513809

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    • Hardcover $25.95

      Jun 02, 2009 | ISBN 9780307271563

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    About My Father’s Tears

    “Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.” That’s how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories. He might have been writing about himself. In My Father’s Tears, the author revisits his signature characters, places, and themes—Americans in suburbs, cities, and small towns grappling with faith and infidelity—in a gallery of portraits of his aging generation, men and women for whom making peace with the past is now paramount. The Seattle Times called My Father’s Tears “a haunting collection” that “echoes the melancholy of Chekhov, the romanticism of Wordsworth and the mournful spirit of Yeats.”

    About My Father’s Tears

    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 brimming 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.

    About My Father’s Tears

    “Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.” That’s how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories. He might have been writing about himself. In My Father’s Tears, the author revisits his signature characters, places, and themes—Americans in suburbs, cities, and small towns grappling with faith and infidelity—in a gallery of portraits of his aging generation, men and women for whom making peace with the past is now paramount. The Seattle Times called My Father’s Tears “a haunting collection” that “echoes the melancholy of Chekhov, the romanticism of Wordsworth and the mournful spirit of Yeats.”

    Read An Excerpt

    Read An Excerpt

    Read An Excerpt

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    See all books by John Updike

    Also by John Updike

    Selected Poems of John Updike
    Olinger Stories
    S.
    Buchanan Dying
    Hugging the Shore
    See all books by John Updike

    Also by John Updike

    Selected Poems of John Updike
    Olinger Stories
    S.
    Buchanan Dying
    Hugging the Shore
    See all books by John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    About John Updike

    JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American… More about John Updike

    Product Details

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Paperback | $16.00
    Published by Random House Trade Paperbacks
    May 25, 2010 | 304 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9780345513809

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Hardcover | $25.95
    Published by Knopf
    Jun 02, 2009 | 304 Pages | 5-1/4 x 7-7/8 | ISBN 9780307271563

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Ebook | $12.99
    Published by Random House
    Jun 02, 2009 | 304 Pages | ISBN 9780307272027

    Praise

    “Classically Updike . . . written with fluidity and humor, intelligence and wit about the elusiveness of happiness, contentment, grace.”—Newsday
     
    “Here . . . one last time . . . are the cardinal virtues of a writer who bestrode the American literary landscape for more than a half century: a virtuosic talent for sensual description, the seemingly effortless weaving of image and theme, and an almost Proustian capacity to absorb the reader in the quiddities of childhood and adolescence.”—San Francisco Chronicle
     
    “A self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America, along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey.”—The Washington Post

    Table Of Contents

    Morocco

    Personal Archaeology

    Free

    The Walk with Elizanne

    The Guardians

    The Laughter of the Gods

    Varieties of Religious Experience

    Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage

    Delicate Wives

    The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

    German Lessons

    The Road Home

    My Father’s Tears

    Kinderszenen

    The Apparition

    Blue Light

    Outage

    The Full Glass

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