Olinger Stories: A Selection is a collection of 11 works of short fiction by John Updike published by Vintage Books in 1964.

In the long run, the unruly impulses in his style seem to have been brought under control by the same principle that liberates the narrator from the past.

[8]Appraising Updike's use of autobiography to examine his own personal and artistic development, author and critic Joyce Carol Oates invokes William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951): In assembling the short stories and sketches called, simply, Olinger Stories, Updike spoke of having said the "final word" in 1964; by having written The Centaur and transforming Olinger into Olympus, he closed the book on his own adolescence—the past is now a fable, receding, completed.

They have been arranged here in the order of the hero's age; in the beginning he is ten, in the middle stories he is an adolescent, in the end he has reached manhood.

The name Olinger (pronounced with a long O, a hard g, and the emphasis on the first syllable) was coined, to cap a rebuke, in a story called 'The Alligators'.