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Title: the best book of 2003, likely the best book of the decade
Review: Why is there not more hoopla about this extraordinary volume? Although every story has been published before, the effect of reading them all through at once (at about a story a day since its publication, I am about a fifth of the way through) is stunning. In 1972, Vladimir Nabokov said that the greatest short stories of the past fifty years were written in America and he cited Updike as among its most inspired practitioners. He said, "I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle on its most inspired bit". Nabokov and Updike share the distinction of being the greatest American writers of the last half-century not to win a Nobel prize and the list of winners is made poor by their absence. American fiction writing does not get any better than this.
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