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Book Cover for: My Father's Tears and Other Stories, John Updike

My Father's Tears and Other Stories

John Updike

Reader Score

74%

74% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 13 reviews on

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A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

John Updike mingles narratives of 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."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Jun 2nd, 2009
  • Pages: 304
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.04in - 5.60in - 1.13in - 1.02lb
  • EAN: 9780307271563
  • Categories: LiteraryShort Stories (single author)Psychological

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.

Critics’ reviews