Trust Me (short story collection)
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 First edition cover | |
| Author | John Updike |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short Stories |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | 1987 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 302 |
| ISBN | 978-0394558332 |
Trust Me: Short Stories is a collection of 19 works of short fiction by John Updike. Each story originally appeared in The New Yorker or other literary journals. The stories were collected in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf.[1]
The stories in the collection first appeared in The New Yorker, unless otherwise indicated.[2]
- "Trust Me" (July 16, 1979)
- "More Stately Mansions" (Esquire, October 1982)
- "Still of Some Use" (October 6, 1980)
- "The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd" (April 6, 1981)
- "Pygmalion" (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1981)
- "The City" (November 16, 1981)
- "Learn a Trade" (December 28, 1981)
- "The Ideal Village" (Ontario Review 17, Fall-Winter 1982-83)
- "Deaths of Distant Friends" (June 7, 1982)
- "The Other" (August 15, 1983)
- "One More Interview" (July 4, 1983)
- "Slippage" (February 20, 1984)
- "Poker Night" (Esquire, August 1984)
- "Made in Heaven" (The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1985)
- "Getting Into the Set" (Vanity Fair, October 1984)
- "The Wallet" Yankee, September, 1985)
- "The Other Woman" (December 23, 1985)
- "Beautiful Husbands" (Playboy, January 1987)
- "Leaf Season" (October 13, 1986)
Critical assessment
Literary critic Marilynne Robinson at The New York Times writes:
There are other stories in this collection I find estimable, and others still whose virtues it is not in my gift to discover. At the end I find myself searching for language to describe the very palpable pleasure that comes with experiencing in a writer authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit.[3]
Literary scholar Robert M. Luscher notes a stylistic shift in Trust Me in that “the highly adjectival style has been replaced with a slightly leaner one that accentuates his poetic precision and makes it even more evident that his command of the language exceeds that of most of his contemporaries.”[4]