The afterlife and other stories
By: John Updike.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House; A.A. Knopf
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: Middle-aged persons -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Domestic fiction, American
Genres: Fiction.
Description: To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike's title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: "A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass." All twenty-two of the stories in this collection - John Updike's eleventh, and his first in seven years - in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to prescient sexual rumors, from the deaths of mothers and brothers-in-law to the births of grandchildren.