num_pages: 260
description: In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning, suffocation, and guilt. His self-seeking heroes tend to be forty; his heroines are asleep, seductive, longing, or reproachful. None of these characters is innocent, and all are looking vainly for the road back to an imagined Paradise. Pain and comedy closely coexist in this mainly domestic world of the 1970s, where life is indistinguishable from a television commercial (but what is it advertising?) and every morning’s paper brings news of lost Atlantises.
language: English
title: Problems and Other Stories
titlecomplete: Problems and Other Stories
genres: Fiction, 20th Century, American, American Fiction, Literary Fiction, Short Stories
ratings_count: 320
publisher: New York: Knopf