Trust Me: Short Stories - Softcover

Updike, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449912175 ISBN 13: 9780449912171

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1996

Synopsis

The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife’s twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her father’s death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: “Man,” as one of these stories concludes, “was not meant to abide in paradise.”

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

s short story collections are occasions for celebration -- the pleasures to be found in them are great indeed. This marvelous volume contains one gem after another, stories to be savored one at a time and returned to again and again.

Here is trust betrayed -- and fulfilled. Here are parents struggling to maintain that fragile claim on their offspring's childish awe....Here are husbands and wives as only Updike knows them, leaving each other, loving each other, often at the same time. Here are passion ignited and quenched, absurd hope, regret at the last minute. Here is life as we live in it, in twenty-two stories of uncommon beauty and pathos from a master storyteller at the peak of his brilliant career.

From the Back Cover:

"Dazzling...We certainly can trust him -- we are in very good hands."

-- The New York Times

"It is in his short stories that we find Updike's most assured work...and almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly."

-- The Washington Post Book World

"For thirty years, John Updike has been among our most clearsighted, hard-working, emotionally courageous, technically adept, playful, serious, and productive artists....Read him."

-- USA Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0449912175
• ISBN 13: 9780449912171
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320