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 is passion ignited and quenched, absurd hope, regret at the last minute. Here is life as we live it, in twenty-two stories of uncommon beauty and pathos from a master storyteller at the peak of his brilliant career....

• Trust Me
• Killing
• Still of Some Use
• The City
• The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd
• Unstuck
• A Constellation of Events
• Deaths of Distant Friends
• Pygmalion
• More Stately Mansions
• Learn a Trade
• The Ideal Village
• One More Interview
• The Other
• Slippage
• Poker Night
• Made in Heaven
• Getting into the Set
• The Wallet
• Leaf Season
• Beautiful Husbands
• The Other Woman