God — whichever one you believe in — tells the best stories. Certainly, there is no ironist that can match your favorite deity’s.

At the time of John Updike’s surprising death from lung cancer in January, he was both an unsuccessful Nobel candidate and a longtime stranger to best seller lists. A good argument could be made that the indefatigably prolific author had out-written the readership he had and any readership he’d be likely to have.

And now in death, America got one of its greatest writers back. He never won the Nobel Prize, but then neither did Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, James Joyce, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, John Dos Passos, Julio Cortazar, Isak Dinesen, Theodore Dreiser, Norman Mailer, Alberto Moravia, Primo Levi, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller or W. H. Auden (which is, in its own way, at least as distinguished a list as the list of those who did: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, Luigi Pirandello, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Jean- Paul Sartre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Mann, Eugene O’Neill, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Boris Pasternak, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Isaac Bashevis Singer).

Somewhat incredibly, there is going to be a fall TV series trashing one of Updike’s lightest novels, “The Witches of Eastwick.” And his final book— the short story collection called “My Father’s Tears” — is so good that even the wickedest, most ageist and blockheadedly Oedipal apostle of YOUTH would have trouble avoiding it. We’re told in a note that except for “Morocco” from 1979, the “stories were composed in the 21st century in the order they have here.”

Which means that the book’s final story is one of the last things written by the dying writer. It’s a profoundly poetic, sustained and interlocking series of metaphors about a retired refinisher of “wood floors” whose work for 30 years “has conditioned me against digging too deep. Balancing in a crouch on the last dry boards like a Mohican steelwalker has taught me the value of the superficial, of that wet second coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard.”

Elsewhere in the story, he tells us that “young men now don’t want to go into” his life’s work, “though the market for such services keeps expanding with gentrification.”

And now that there is no more John Updike among us, we can see that few writers in American literature have ever had that realist’s mastery of “that wet second coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard” in his prose. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful performance, that final story in “My Father’s Tears” — exactly the kind of swan song one of America’s greatest short story writers should have.

Among the things that Updike’s lifelong industry gave us are some of the greatest stories of aging we’re likely to have. Most of what’s here is about lives busy with pill-taking and errands to the hospital to visit old friends laid low by cancer. Because Updike was one of the most extraordinary sexual realists we’re ever likely to know, the stories are, understandably, consumed by Yeatsian memories of the flesh.

Nor are all meant to be read as Updikean personae. The protagonist of “Delicate Wives” is far too much of a jerk to be imbued with the same sensitivities as the narrator of the title story. But then he is supposed to be that. No writer as great as Updike would dream of creating a hall of mirrors in which most weren’t deeply distorted images.

And yet you can, as always, understand why those put off by (envious of perhaps?) his virtuosic and incantatory stylistic gifts as a describer of the visible world could find evidence of sexism and crassness with only minimal searching.

In the crudest story in the book — titled “Varieties of Religious Experience” after his fellow Harvardian William James with sledgehammer irony — he describes the fall of the South Tower of the World Trade Center this way: “as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished with a silvery rippling noise” which is, no matter how you slice it, a millisecond when the most craftsmanlike watchmaker in all of American prose picked up the wrong tool for the job. But then, in all its crudity, the story has a kind of Hollywood film effectiveness,

even suspense.

It was the relentlessness of Updike’s prose genius that utterly defeated all but his hardiest and most devoted readers. But in his ending is clearly now his beginning, again, as the master he always was.

Now that Updike has joined the Nobel Prize for literature’s permanent salon des refuses, he can probably await the arrival on some future train (far distant train, we can only hope) of Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan master who is probably Yang to Updike’s Yin, Macro to Updike’s Micro.

If Updike apprehends the universal through the personal — infinity in a grain of sand — Galeano accumulates a universe through an aggregate of the personal. He is, at the age of 69, our time’s version of another Nobelist That Could Have Been But Wasn’t, John Dos Passos.

Hugo Chavez, no less, feels so strongly about Galeano’s stature among living Latin American masters (and truth tellers) that he gave President Obama a copy of Galeano’s 1971 “Open Vein of Latin America.”

Galeano’s trilogy “Memories of Fire” is one of the great literary achievements in the Latin American literary generation in between Marquez and Bolano.

What has always seemed to me crucial to understand about Galeano’s literary art is that he’s a former political cartoonist. His fragments of prose are the equivalents of a savage, poetic and encyclopedic cartoonist’s caricatures from our species’ history.

That’s what “Mirrors” is — 600 small vignettes of human history from the moment the arrow of desire cleaved humanity into man and woman to a 21st century where passengers at the airport have to bring the pillows with them that they slept on the night before so they could be “sent through a dream-reading machine,” lest there were “any dangerous dreams that threatened to disturb the peace.”

It’s the magic of a “factualist,” (all is based on fact) perhaps, but definitely an anti-realist.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

By John Updike Knopf 292 pages, $25.95

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

By Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried Nation Books 391 pages, $26.95

Jeff Simon is The News’ Arts and Books Editor.