Title: The afterlife and other stories
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.
Subjects: American Short stories, Short stories, American, Middle-aged persons, Married people, Fiction, Middle aged persons, Domestic fiction, American Domestic fiction, Domestic fiction, American, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Married people, fiction
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century