Selected Stories, John Updike
Selected Stories, John Updike
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Selected Stories
The Alligators, A & P, Pigeon Feathers, The Family Meadow, Witnesses, Separating

Author: John Updike

Narrator: John Updike

Unabridged: 2 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/12/2009

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published.

"A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story.

"Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds.

"The Family Meadow" describes a piece of America, a picnic reunion in New Jersey.

"The Witnesses" and "The Alligators" both deal with love, as felt by a middle-aged man and a fifth-grade boy.

"Separating" recounts the June day when Richard and Joan Maple separate, in front of their four children.

Mr. Updike, when asked to described his method of reading aloud, said "I try to picture the things describes, and to speak the words distinctly, and to let the emotion come through on its own."
The method works beautifully.

About The Author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.


Reviews

Goodreads review by kathryn

Yuppie Hester Prynne leaves a doctor and a guru and goes off to read textbooks on a Carribean island. People don't read enough feminist lit. anymore. And Updike writes women well, fuck whatever anyone else says.......more

An intriguing yet strangely deflating epistolary novel, S. is minor-league John Updike, the narrative never able to free itself from the bounds of its own gimmick. At times successful as a satire, this is the examination of a “modern” (mid-80s) Wasp housewife leaving her emotionally undutiful husban......more

Goodreads review by brian

well, S is another entry in updike’s saga to try and figure the lengths people will go to fill the god-shaped hole. this one concerns a wealthy new england housewife who leaves it all for a hindu ashram in arizona. unfortunately, the epistolary nature of S. causes a massive unraveling, mostly b/c th......more

Before getting to the bottom line on John Updike’s S. a little background on me. In reviewing a novel, I try to consider two major, if conflicting aspects. Great art is universal. The better a book is the less bound to its day and time. The basic problem and approach to resolution should be applicab......more

Goodreads review by Lena

S. is a novel which uses the letters and tapes of a middle-aged WASP woman to chronicle her time in a Rajneesh-style Arizona ashram. While I was intrigued by the concept, I had mixed feelings about the work. The epistolary structure offered an unusually intimate view into the main character’s world,......more