The Maples Stories [Hardcover]

Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.

 

In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titledToo Far to Go,prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

Foreword

Snowing in Greenwich Village
Wife-Wooing
Giving Blood
Twin Beds in Rome
Marching Through Boston
The Taste of Metal
Your Lover Just Called
Waiting Up
Eros Rampant
Plumbing
The Red-Herring Theory
Sublimating
Nakedness
Separating
Gesturing
Divorcing: A Fragment
Here Come the Maples
Grandparenting

Acknowledgments
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff ofThe New Yorker. He was the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. He died in 2009.

FOREWORD

THE MAPLES PRESENTED themselves to the writl“Ť