A collection of twelve poems describing the activities in a child's life and the changes in the weather as the year moves from January to December.

"John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam." "The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of...

Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie return to the old Rhode Island seaside town where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne. Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish...

During an interview with a New York writer, seventy-nine-year-old artist Hope Chafetz describes her eventful life and her integral place in the saga of postwar American art.

Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie ply their individual witcheries in contemporary Eastwick, Rhode Island, and are themselves bewitched by a dark, wealthy, decadent stranger.

Author John Updike describes his life until the age of fifty-five

Classic love story of Tristao Raposo and Isabel Leme set in Brazil spanning twenty-two years from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Eighties.

New Englander Sarah Worth goes west to join a Hindu commune in Arizona. There she mingles with the other sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve salvation and release from illusion.

Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, "My Father's Tears" finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.