John Updike's best known, most anthologized and most frequently taught short story, "A & P," first appeared in The New Yorker (22 July 1961: 22-24), a publication that assumes a reader with considerable literary and cultural knowledge. Updike, for whom literature and art have been intertwined sinc...

"Let me see, what stories should I choose to discuss in my response paper?" I asked myself. "Well, all stories we came across were very interesting and worth reading, maybe except one or two that were painfully long. So I really ought to pick the ones that caught my attention t...