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.” “The plainest of objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate. . . . I find myself searching for language to describe the very palpable pleasure that comes with experiencing in a writer authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit.”—Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Book Review   “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   “Dazzling . . . We certainly can trust him—we are in very good hands.”— The New York Times 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. John Updike'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. 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. Trust Me   WHEN HAROLD was three or four, his father and mother took him to a swimming pool. This was strange, for his family rarely went places, except to the movie house two blocks from their house. Harold had no memory of ever seeing his parents in bathing suits again, after this unhappy day. What he did remember was this:   His father, nearly naked, was in the pool, treading water. Harold was standing shivering on the wet tile edge, suspended above the abysmal odor of chlorine, hypnotized by the bright, lapping agitation of this great volume of unnaturally blue-green water. His mother, in a black bathing suit that made her flesh appear very white, was off in a corner of his mind. His father was asking him to jump. “C’mon, Hassy, jump,” he was saying, in his mild, encouraging voice. “It’ll be all right. Jump right into my hands.” The words echoed in the flat acoustics of the water and tile and sunlight, heightening Harold’s sense of exposure, his awareness of his own white skin. His father seemed eerily stable and calm in the water, and the child idly wondered, as he jumped, what the man was standing on.   Then the blue-green water was all around him, dense and churning, and when he tried to take a breath a fist was shoved into his throat. He saw his own bubbles rising in front of his face, a multitude of them, rising as he sank; he sank it seemed for a very long time, until something located him in the darkening element and seized him by the arm.   He was in air again, on his father’s shoulder, still fighting for breath. They were out of the pool. His mother swiftly came up to the two of them and, with