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Summary
Summary
"He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen as second to none in our time."
--William H. Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)
A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975.
The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the first, "Olinger Stories," already appeared as a paperback in 1964; in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as "a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern." These eleven tales, whose heroes age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are followed by groupings titled "Out in the World," "Married Life," and "Family Life," tracing a common American trajectory. Family life is disrupted by the advent of "The Two Iseults," a bifurcation originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. "Tarbox Tales" are followed by "Far Out," a group of more or less experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and "The Single Life," whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored.
Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper's to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review . All show Mr. Updike's wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
All Updike needs is the Nobel Prize to complete his list of major awards. In the very early years of his career, he seemed to spring full fledged as a short story writer, so he can hardly be said to have a body of apprentice work, to which this compilation of his early stories attests. They are mature pieces, and the collection contains several stories still considered masterpieces and which continue to appear in anthologies; these would include, of course, "A & P" and "Pigeon Feathers." What is particularly exciting to see is the publication again of his wonderful Olinger stories, particular favorites of Updike fans and, up to this point, out of print. The collection contains a grand total of 102 stories, and most were originally published in the New Yorker0 , Updike's basic professional residence during these years. But his New Yorker0 ties should not be considered a drawback to the enjoyment of his work, for his ingenuity, scope, and heart extend far beyond the island of Manhattan. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
John Updike's first published story ("Friends from Philadelphia", 1954) was not the first story he wrote. That was "Ace in the Hole", posted to the New Yorker on December 12 1953, just in time for Updike - who dates each of his stories to the day on which "a completed draft was sent off in the mails, irrespective of later revisions" - to give this very grand collection, a half-century later, the same span of years as its principal source and subject: his marriage to Mary Pennington, the mother of his four children. His first wedded protagonist steps out on page 81, in the eighth story, "The Persistence of Desire", in which the idea of infidelity is already stirring, and it is only in the last sentence of the book, when this highly variable, many- named but always Updikiform personage is already remarried, that his first marriage truly ends: when, after the long desperation of high adultery, separation and divorce so astonishingly described in the 1971-75 stories, he realises, on a run-down street corner, of his second spouse in name who stands beside him, that, at last, she had become his wife. The stories are ordered not by date of first composition or publication or dispatch, but by their intrinsic chronology, that of the life - Updike's - on which they directly draw. "Ace in the Hole", a study of the gnarliness (in the US sense) of early marriage, comes 14th, in a section about early independence called "Out in the World", after the "Olinger Stories" of childhood and schooldays. "Married Life" and "Family Life" follow. Adultery deepens and dominates in "The Two Iseults" - a somewhat preposterous title. Then come the "Tarbox Tales", then an oddity section, "Far Out", that includes stories about an iguanodon, a baluchitherium, and a cyclops. Finally there is "The Single Life": Updike lived alone for a year, although he was never unattached. The introduction is mannered in Updike's usual way, which is not to say it is uninteresting or unenjoyable. His statement of his aim - to "give the mundane its beautiful due", to be "immersed in the ordinary, which careful explication would reveal to be extraordinary" - is accurate, and his aim is also his achievement. These, however, are strikingly banal phrases for a man with a half- century acquaintance with defamiliarisation and a boundless will to originality. And his fabulous conceit, which is usually somehow disarmed or at least dissembled, like Saul Bellow's, or even sublimed away in the manner of Henry James, sticks out through his devices of impersonality, as when he explains his preference for a full collection over a selection: "Any story that makes it from the initial hurried scribbles into the haven of print possesses, in this writer's eyes, a certain valor, and my instinct, even forty years later, is not to ditch it but to polish it and mount it anew." This is the septuagenarian preening, for none of these stories lacks merit or needs this justification. It is a fabulous brood. Large weaknesses - errors - show in the earlier ones, but Updike touches his best almost from the start. Everything is already in place, or almost. There is no significant evolution of style or worldview: there is a remarkable lack of any such thing. Updike's shocking honesty of report, which was condemned for its cruelty by Nicholson Baker in his book U and I , and which some find irredeemably unlikeable, comes early, and quintessential Updikean sentences - like them or not - occur as early as 1958: "Her using my first name and the quality of her question did not, although except for a few parties we had hardly met, seem forward, considering the hour and that she had brought me coffee." Updike calls the stories "fragments chipped from experience and rounded by imagination into impersonal artifacts", and they obviously don't constitute an accurate autobiography of specific fact and circumstance. Sometimes, though, he speaks openly for himself, and the fragments' closeness to his daily experience gives them great authority as an autobiography of spirit, an authority not so easily found in novels, where imagination dilates and characters take off on their own. What they reveal is an absolutely constant temperament. It is always intensely present in the writing; it never vanishes into its art. Its ruling principle is transience, the ache of loss, especially loss still to come. The pivot of its existence lies in the famous third story, "Pigeon Feathers" (1960), in which the boy David discovers that neither his relatives nor the local vicar really believe in life after death. Thus his own belief also fails, although he does not yet quite know it, and the scales of life tip hard and irreversibly. The 100 remaining stories pile up in the pan of loss. When, asks Updike in his introduction, has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? "Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear - these are the worthy, inevitable subjects." There is "no lack of affection and goodwill among characters caught in the human plight", as he says, "no lack of joy in these stories, though it arrives by the moment, and not by the month". But it is the momentariness, and the loss it almost immediately affords, that is thematically central. What the stories log, as their author unstoppably takes "inward notes on the bright, quick impressions flowing over him like a continuous voice", is his inability to settle in, to, for, on, or with the beauty to which he has unparalleled access. Is the inability the price of the access? No. Some writers say that their gift of observation is an alienation, but it needn't be. Is the problem that joy's hand is forever at his lips, bidding adieu? Yes, if you like, for then the point is that joy is not happiness and that these stories are not about happiness, which is something essentially non-momentary, a rel- atively enduring state of being, something that many see clearly only when they look back. ("I was happy then I realise.") Updike's honesty is applied to himself no less than others ("himself" is shorthand: it is his fictional avatars who are in question). There is no bias in his domestic squabbles, which are - this is praise - sickening. The commodification of women that occurs periodically in his writings is found here too, as when he sees all the women in his life as "broken arcs of one curve", or has to laugh at the comedy of the female body, that good kind clown, all greasepaint and bounce. But women commodify men no less than men women, and, crucially, Updike's fictionalised reports of his own worst aspects are not in any way exhibitionistic (unlike Rousseau's, say, or, arguably, St Augustine's). The Early Stories is a boundlessly vivid body of work. Updike consumes reality. The speed and capacity of his world-hunger are astonishing. And yet his physicality is always on the edge of disgust. It is the inverse of Emily Dickinson's (she is the more powerful sensualist). It is inseparable from the fastidiousness that founds his shocking penetration of insight. It is inseparable from his Manichaeanism ("We think we are what we think and see when in truth we are upright bags of tripe"), loss of faith stamping its little foot. It is tightly roped to his unbelieved-in, super- Protestant, spankingly transcendent God (the perfect opposite of Bellow's, so immanent, so Spinozan, as close and fishy - in Bellow's image - as an unwashed woman on a hot city day). Updike itemises the world, but this is not a criticism. Analytical reduction is revelation, given this precision of sensibility. There are regions of feeling Updike knows nothing about; his grasp of the larger shapes of things seems always cognitive, inferred first and felt only later, if at all; there is a sense in which his early model, JD Salinger, is a greater short- story writer. But Updike has wonderfully more information. When George Herbert's God looked down and denied humanity the blessing of rest, and singled out John Updike, as he quite clearly did, he had his reasons. Updike catches the finest shades of things, and in unrivalled quantity. Galen Strawson is professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. To order The Early Stories for pounds 22 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-bigfic.1 The stories are ordered not by date of first composition or publication or dispatch, but by their intrinsic chronology, that of the life - [John Updike]'s - on which they directly draw. "Ace in the Hole", a study of the gnarliness (in the US sense) of early marriage, comes 14th, in a section about early independence called "Out in the World", after the "Olinger Stories" of childhood and schooldays. "Married Life" and "Family Life" follow. Adultery deepens and dominates in "The Two Iseults" - a somewhat preposterous title. Then come the "Tarbox Tales", then an oddity section, "Far Out", that includes stories about an iguanodon, a baluchitherium, and a cyclops. Finally there is "The Single Life": Updike lived alone for a year, although he was never unattached. Updike's honesty is applied to himself no less than others ("himself" is shorthand: it is his fictional avatars who are in question). There is no bias in his domestic squabbles, which are - this is praise - sickening. The commodification of women that occurs periodically in his writings is found here too, as when he sees all the women in his life as "broken arcs of one curve", or has to laugh at the comedy of the female body, that good kind clown, all greasepaint and bounce. But women commodify men no less than men women, and, crucially, Updike's fictionalised reports of his own worst aspects are not in any way exhibitionistic (unlike Rousseau's, say, or, arguably, St Augustine's). Updike itemises the world, but this is not a criticism. Analytical reduction is revelation, given this precision of sensibility. There are regions of feeling Updike knows nothing about; his grasp of the larger shapes of things seems always cognitive, inferred first and felt only later, if at all; there is a sense in which his early model, JD Salinger, is a greater short- story writer. But Updike has wonderfully more information. When George Herbert's God looked down and denied humanity the blessing of rest, and singled out John Updike, as he quite clearly did, he had his reasons. Updike catches the finest shades of things, and in unrivalled quantity. - Galen Strawson.
Library Journal Review
Starting with "Ace in the Hole," a student work: 103 great stories. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You Carnival! In the vacant lot behind the old ice plant! Trucks have been unloading all afternoon; the WhirloGig has been unfolded like a giant umbrella, they assembled the baby Ferris wheel with an Erector Set. Twice the trucks got stuck in the mud. Straw has been strewn everywhere. They put up a stage and strung lights. Now, now, gather your pennies; supper is over and an hour of light is left in the long summer day. See, Sammy Hunnenhauser is running; Gloria Gring and her gang have been there all afternoon, they never go home, oh hurry, let me go; how awful it is to have parents that are poor, and slow, and sad! Fifty cents. The most Ben could beg. A nickel for every year of his life. It feels like plenty. Over the roof of crazy Mrs. Moffert's house, the Ferris wheel tints the air with pink, and the rim of this pink mixes in his excitement with the great notched rim of the coin sweating in his hand. This house, then this house, and past the ice plant, and he will be there. Already the rest of the world is there, he is the last, hurrying, hurrying, the balloon is about to take off, the Ferris wheel is lifting; only he will be left behind, on empty darkening streets. Then there, what to buy? There are not so many people here. Grownups carrying babies mosey glassily on the straw walks. All the booth people, not really Gypsies, stare at him, and beckon weakly. It hurts him to ignore the man with the three old softballs, and the old cripple at the merry-go-round, and the fat lady with her plaster Marys, and the skeleton suspended behind a fountain of popcorn. He feels his walking past them as pain. He wishes there were more people here; he feels a fool. All of this machinery assembled to extract from him his pathetic fifty cents. He watches at a distance a thickset man in earnestly rolled-up shirtsleeves twirl a great tinselled wheel with a rubber tongue that patters slower and slower on a circle of nails until it stops between two, and the number there wins. Only a sailor and two boys in yellow silk high-school athletic jackets play. None win. The thick tattooed arm below the rolled-up shirtsleeve carefully sweeps their nickels from a long board divided and numbered as if for hopscotch. The high-school boys, with sideburns and spotty whiskers on their bright-pink jaws, put down nickels again leadenly, and this time the man spinning the wheel shouts when it stops, seems more joyful than they, and reaches into his deep apron pocket and pours before them, without counting, a perfect little slipping stack of nickels. Their gums showing as if at a dirty joke, the two boys turn--the shimmer on their backs darts and shifts in cool z's--and walk away, while the man is shouting, "Hey, uh winneh. Hey, uh winneh, evvybody wins." His board is bare, and as his mouth continues to form the loud words his eyes lock Ben into a stare of heartbreaking brown blankness that seems to elucidate with paralyzing clarity Ben's state: his dungarees, his fifty cents, his ten years, his position in space, and above the particulars the immense tinted pity, the waste, of being at one little place instead of everywhere, at any time. Then the man looks away, and twirls the wheel for his own amusement. The fifty-cent piece feels huge to Ben's fingers, a wide oppressive rigidity that must be broken, shattered into twinkling fragments, to merge in the tinsel and splinters of strewn straw. He buys, at the first stand he strikes, a cone of cotton candy, and receives, with the furry pink pasty uncoiling thing, a quarter, a dime, and a nickel: three coins, tripling his wealth. Now people multiply, crowd in from the houses of the town, which stand beyond the lot on all sides in black forbidding silhouettes like the teeth of a saw. The lights go on; the faces of the houses flee. There is nothing in the lot but light, and at its core, on the stage, three girls wearing white cowboy hats and white spangled skirts and white boots appear, and a man also in white and bearing a white guitar strung with gold. The legs around Ben crush him toward the stage; the smell of mud mingles with the bright sight there. One of the girls coughs into the microphone and twists its neck, so a sharp whine pierces from the loudspeakers and cuts a great crescent through the crowd, leaving silence as harvest. The girls sing, toe-tapping gingerly: "The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamt I held you in my arms." The spangles on their swishing skirts spring prickles like tears in Ben's eyes. The three voices sob, catch, twang, distend his heart like a rubber band at the highest pitch of their plaint. "--I was mistaken, and I hung my head, a-and cried." And then the unbearable rising sugar of the chorus that makes his scalp so tight he fears his head will burst from sweet fullness. The girls go on to sing other songs, less good, and then they give way to a thin old man in suspenders and huge pants he keeps snapping and looking down and whooping into. He tells horrible jokes that make the nice fat ladies standing around Ben--nice fat factory and dust-mop women that make him feel protected--shake with laughter. He fears their quaking, feels threatened from beneath, as if there is a treacherous stratum under this mud and straw. He wanders away, to let the words of "You Are My Sunshine" revolve in his head. "Please don't take my sunshine away." Only the money in his pocket weighs him; get rid of it, and he will sail away like a dandelion seed. He goes to the booth where the wheel is turning, and puts his nickel on the board in a square marked 7, and loses it. He puts the dime there, and it too is taken away. Squeezed, almost hidden, between the crusty trousered haunches of two adults, he puts down his quarter, as they do, on the inner edge, to be changed. The tattooed man comes along, picking up the quarters and pouring, with his wonderfully automatic fingers, the little slipping stacks of five nickels; Ben holds his breath, and to his horror feels his low face catch in the corner of the man's absent-minded eyes. The thick solemn body snags in its smooth progress, and Ben's five nickels are raggedly spaced. Between the second and third there is a gap. A blush cakes Ben's cheeks; his gray-knuckled fingers, as they push out a nickel, are trembling sideways at each other. But the man goes back, and spins the wheel, and Ben loses three nickels one after another. The twittering wheel is a moon-faced god; but Ben feels humanity clouding the space between him and it, which should be unobstructed. When the tattooed arm--a blue fish, an anchor, the queer word peace--comes to sweep in his nickels, he feels the stippled skin breathing thought, and lowers his head against the expected fall of words. Nothing is said, the man moves on, returns to the wheel; but Ben feels puzzled pressure radiating from him, and the pointed eyes of a man in a suit with chalk stripes who has come to stand at the far side of the stand intersect this expanding circle, and Ben, hurrying to pour his money down a narrowing crack, puts down his last two nickels, still on 7. The rubber tongue leaps into pattering and as the wheel whirls the tattooed man leans backward to hear the one in chalk stripes talk; this one's tongue patters silently but a tiny motion of his smooth hand, simultaneous with a sideways stab of his eyes, is toward Ben. The rubber tongue slows, flops, stops at 7--no, 8. He lost, and can leave. The floor of his stomach lifts queerly. "Hey, kid." The man with terrible spoiled arms comes over. Ben feels that no matter how fast he would run those arms would stretch and snare him. "Huh?" "How old are you, kid?" "Ten." "Whatsamatta with ya, ya daddy rich?" A titter moves stiffly among the immense adult heads all around. Ben understands the familiar role, that he has undergone a hundred times with teachers and older boys, of being a comic prop. He understands everything, and wants to explain that he knows his eyes are moist and his cheeks red but that it's because of joy, freedom, not because of losing. But this would be too many words; even the one-word answer "No" sticks to the roof of his mouth and comes loose with a faint tearing noise. "Here." With his exciting expert touch, the tattooed man flicks Ben's two coins back across the painted number. Then he digs into his pocket. He comes up with the usual little stack of five, drops four, but holds the fifth delicately between the tips of two fingers and a thumb, hesitates so that Ben can reread peace in blue above his wrist, and then flips the fifth nickel up into his palm and thence down with a plunge into his dirty sagging apron pouch. "Now move away from the board, kid, move away. Don't come back." Ben fumbles the coins into his hands and pushes away, his eyes screwed to the sharp edge of painted wood, and he shoulders blindly backward through the legs. Yet all the time, in the midst of the heat and water welling up from springs all over his body, he is figuring, and calculates he's been gypped. Forty: he had the quarter and dime and nickel, and they gave him back only six nickels: thirty. The injustice. They pretend he's too little to lose and then keep a dime. The waste. The lost dime seems a tiny hole through which everything in existence is draining. As he moves away, his wet knees jarring, trying to hide forever from every sailor and fat woman and high-schooler who witnessed his disgrace, the six nickels make a knobbed weight bumping his thigh through his pocket. The spangles, the splinters of straw and strings of light, the sawtooth peaks of houses showing behind the heads of grown-ups moving above the scent of grassy mud are hung like the needles of a Christmas tree with the transparent, tinted globes confusing his eyelashes. Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attempts to give ourselves to her wholly. Excerpted from The Early Stories, 1953-1975 by John Updike All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Olinger Stories | |
| You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You | p. 3 |
| The Alligators | p. 7 |
| Pigeon Feathers | p. 13 |
| Friends from Philadelphia | p. 34 |
| A Sense of Shelter | p. 41 |
| Flight | p. 52 |
| The Happiest I've Been | p. 67 |
| The Persistence of Desire | p. 81 |
| The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island | p. 91 |
| Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car | p. 102 |
| In Football Season | p. 122 |
| Out in the World | |
| The Lucid Eye in Silver Town | p. 129 |
| The Kid's Whistling | p. 138 |
| Ace in the Hole | p. 144 |
| Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth | p. 152 |
| The Christian Roommates | p. 161 |
| Dentistry and Doubt | p. 184 |
| A Madman | p. 190 |
| Still Life | p. 201 |
| Home | p. 214 |
| Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow? | p. 225 |
| His Finest Hour | p. 237 |
| A Trillion Feet of Gas | p. 248 |
| Dear Alexandros | p. 257 |
| The Doctor's Wife | p. 261 |
| At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie | p. 269 |
| Married Life | |
| Toward Evening | p. 283 |
| Snowing in Greenwich Village | p. 288 |
| Sunday Teasing | p. 296 |
| Incest | p. 303 |
| A Gift from the City | p. 315 |
| Walter Briggs | p. 334 |
| The Crow in the Woods | p. 340 |
| Should Wizard Hit Mommy? | p. 344 |
| Wife-Wooing | p. 350 |
| Unstuck | p. 354 |
| Giving Blood | p. 361 |
| Twin Beds in Rome | p. 372 |
| Marching through Boston | p. 380 |
| Nakedness | p. 389 |
| Family Life | |
| The Family Meadow | p. 397 |
| The Day of the Dying Rabbit | p. 401 |
| How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time | p. 411 |
| The Music School | p. 416 |
| Man and Daughter in the Cold | p. 421 |
| The Rescue | p. 428 |
| Plumbing | p. 436 |
| The Orphaned Swimming Pool | p. 442 |
| When Everyone Was Pregnant | p. 446 |
| Eros Rampant | p. 451 |
| Sublimating | p. 462 |
| Nevada | p. 470 |
| The Gun Shop | p. 480 |
| Son | p. 491 |
| Daughter, Last Glimpses of | p. 496 |
| The Two Iseults | |
| Solitaire | p. 505 |
| Leaves | p. 510 |
| The Stare | p. 514 |
| Museums and Women | p. 520 |
| Avec la Bebe-Sitter | p. 530 |
| Four Sides of One Story | p. 537 |
| The Morning | p. 546 |
| My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails | p. 552 |
| Harv Is Plowing Now | p. 559 |
| I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me | p. 564 |
| Tarbox Tales | |
| The Indian | p. 573 |
| The Hillies | p. 579 |
| The Tarbox Police | p. 584 |
| The Corner | p. 589 |
| A & P | p. 596 |
| Lifeguard | p. 602 |
| The Deacon | p. 608 |
| The Carol Sing | p. 614 |
| The Taste of Metal | p. 618 |
| Your Lover Just Called | p. 623 |
| Commercial | p. 630 |
| Minutes of the Last Meeting | p. 636 |
| Believers | p. 640 |
| Eclipse | p. 645 |
| Far Out | |
| Archangel | p. 649 |
| The Dark | p. 651 |
| The Astronomer | p. 656 |
| The Witnesses | p. 661 |
| A Constellation of Events | p. 666 |
| Ethiopia | p. 675 |
| Transaction | p. 682 |
| Augustine's Concubine | p. 702 |
| During the Jurassic | p. 708 |
| Under the Microscope | p. 713 |
| The Balcuhitherium | p. 716 |
| The Invention of the Horse Collar | p. 719 |
| Jesus on Honshu | p. 723 |
| The Slump | p. 727 |
| The Sea's Green Sameness | p. 730 |
| The Single Life | |
| The Bulgarian Poetess | p. 737 |
| The Hermit | p. 751 |
| I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying | p. 765 |
| Separating | p. 788 |
| Gesturing | p. 799 |
| Killing | p. 810 |
| Problems | p. 820 |
| The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals | p. 823 |
| Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer | p. 829 |
| Index of Titles | p. 835 |