{"product_id":"the-maples-stories-isbn-9780307271761","title":"The Maples Stories","description":"\u003cb\u003eEighteen classic short stories that form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled \u003ci\u003eToo Far to Go,\u003c\/i\u003e prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.\u003ci\u003eForeword\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSnowing in Greenwich Village\u003cbr\u003eWife-Wooing \u003cbr\u003eGiving Blood \u003cbr\u003eTwin Beds in Rome\u003cbr\u003eMarching Through Boston \u003cbr\u003eThe Taste of Metal \u003cbr\u003eYour Lover Just Called \u003cbr\u003eWaiting Up \u003cbr\u003eEros Rampant \u003cbr\u003ePlumbing \u003cbr\u003eThe Red-Herring Theory \u003cbr\u003eSublimating \u003cbr\u003eNakedness \u003cbr\u003eSeparating\u003cbr\u003eGesturing\u003cbr\u003eDivorcing: A Fragment \u003cbr\u003eHere Come the Maples \u003cbr\u003eGrandparenting \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including \u003ci\u003eThe Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Rabbit at Rest, \u003c\/i\u003ewon the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.\u003cp\u003eFOREWORD\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTHE MAPLES PRESENTED themselves to the writer in New York City in 1956,  dropped from his sight for seven years, and reappeared in the suburbs of Boston in  1963, giving blood. They figured in a dozen stories since, until the couple’s divorce  in 1976. Their name, bestowed by a young man who had grown up in a small town shaded  by Norway maples, and who then moved to the New England of sugar maples and flame-bright  swamp maples, retained for him an arboreal innocence, a straightforward and cooling  leafiness. Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they  also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane  moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under  heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.  The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are  incorrigibly themselves. The musical pattern, the advance and retreat, of the Maples’  duet is repeated over and over, ever more harshly transposed. They are shy, cheerful,  and dissatisfied. They like one another, and aremysteries to one another. One of  them is usually feeling slightly unwell, and the seesaw of their erotic interest  rarely balances. Yet they talk, more easily than any other characters the author  has acted as agent for. A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a  dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve  one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin. To the fourteen Maples  stories I have added two that from the internal evidence appear to take place in  Richard Maple’s mind, and a fragment that cried off completion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the thirty years  since the above preface was written, this collection of linked stories, quickly assembled  to coincide with a made-for-television movie called \u003ci\u003eToo Far to Go\u003c\/i\u003e, has had a gratifying  career in paperback: in England as a Penguin book titled \u003ci\u003eYour Lover Just Called\u003c\/i\u003e,  and in translations into, by my reckoning, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Serbian,  Japanese, and Hebrew. Some of the German editions of \u003ci\u003eDer weite Weg zu zweit \u003c\/i\u003e were  in hardcover, but this is the first hardbound edition in English. I was delighted  to be told of it, and have availed myself of the opportunity to revise a few words  and phrases, and to include one more Maples story, ‘Grandparenting.’ The couple surprised  me, in the mid-Eighties, by reappearing in a wintry Hartford, married to others but  brought together by the birth of their first grandchild. I have not encountered them  since, though mutual friends assure me that they are both still alive and look well,  considering.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohn Updike\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301971644645,"sku":"NP9780307271761","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307271761.jpg?v=1767740416","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-maples-stories-isbn-9780307271761","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}