To the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an Afterlife: "A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig .
John Updike died in January 2009..
In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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.
From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.
About the Author: John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932.
Here is a world where wonder stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses.
As death approaches, existence takes on, for some of Updike\'s aging characters, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misperception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur. each reed of thatch, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass." All of these stories, each in its own way, partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own exquisite dearness. . .
To the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an Afterlife: "A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig
