My Father's Tears - And Other Stories

Zusatztext “Classically Updike . . . written with fluidity and humor! intelligence and wit about the elusiveness of happiness! contentment! grace.”— Newsday   “Here . . . one last time . . . are the cardinal virtues of a writer who bestrode the American literary landscape for more than a half century: a virtuosic talent for sensual description! the seemingly effortless weaving of image and theme! and an almost Proustian capacity to absorb the reader in the quiddities of childhood and adolescence.”— San Francisco Chronicle   “A self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America! along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey.”— The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. 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 of The New Yorker . His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Klappentext "Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned." That's how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories. He might have been writing about himself. In My Father's Tears, the author revisits his signature characters, places, and themes-Americans in suburbs, cities, and small towns grappling with faith and infidelity-in a gallery of portraits of his aging generation, men and women for whom making peace with the past is now paramount. The Seattle Times called My Father's Tears "a haunting collection" that "echoes the melancholy of Chekhov, the romanticism of Wordsworth and the mournful spirit of Yeats." Chapter One Morocco      The seacoast road went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept space, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowers—violets? poppies?— which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of ? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, or any Arabic or Berber. “Don’t stop, Daddy, don’t!” was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations.  We were an American family living in England in 1969 and had come to Morocco naively thinking it would be, in April, as absolute an escape to the sun as a trip to the Caribbean from the Eastern United States would be at the same time of year. But Restinga, where a British travel agency as innocent as we of climatic realities had sent us, was deserted and windy. The hotel, freshly built by decree of the progressive, tourism-minded king, was semicircular in shape. At night, doors in the curving corridors slammed, and a solitary guard in a burnoose kept watch over the vacant rooms and the strange family of pre-season Americans. By day, the waves were too choppy to swim in, and the Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black. Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet. When we lay down on the beach, wind blew sand into our ears. Off in the distance, apartment buildings of pink concrete were slowly being assembled, and there were signs that in a month vacationers from somewhere would fill the bleak plazas, the boarded-up arcades.  But for now there was only the whi...

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Classically Updike . . . written with fluidity and humor, intelligence and wit about the elusiveness of happiness, contentment, grace. Newsday
 
Here . . . one last time . . . are the cardinal virtues of a writer who bestrode the American literary landscape for more than a half century: a virtuosic talent for sensual description, the seemingly effortless weaving of image and theme, and an almost Proustian capacity to absorb the reader in the quiddities of childhood and adolescence. San Francisco Chronicle
 
A self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America, along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey. The Washington Post

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 25.05.2010
• EAN: 9780345513809
• ISBN: 978-0-345-51380-9
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 17 mm
• Series: Ballantine Books; Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks; Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature