John Updike has 21 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 17 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 21 ratings. The most-rated is Rabbit, Run.
Rabbit, Run
Summary
Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run - from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....
©1996 John Updike (P)2008 Random House Audio
Terrorist
Summary
The ever-surprising John Updike's 22nd novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of 18-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam.
The son of a bohemian Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of 11. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad's mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path.
When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.
But to quote the Qur'an: Of those who plot is God the best.
©2006 John Updike (P)2006 Brilliance Audio
Rabbit Redux
Summary
The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom - known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters - finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. How he resolves - or further complicates - his problems makes a compelling listen.
©1996 John Updike (P)2008 Random House
Couples
Summary
The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage, and adultery in America.
©2012 John Updike (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Witches of Eastwick
Summary
“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works.... [A] comedy of the blackest sort.” (The New York Times Book Review) Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick - and through the even darker fantasies of the town’s collective psyche. “A great deal of fun to read...fresh, constantly entertaining.... John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) “Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have.” (Newsday)
©1996 John Updike; 2008 Random House Audio
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Summary
Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows listeners an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the moving picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.
©2009 John Updike (P)2020 Random House Audio
Rabbit at Rest
Summary
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
©1996 John Updike (P)2009 Random House
The Centaur
Summary
Winner of the National Book Award and the Prix Du Meilleur Livre Étranger The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell's 15-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author's remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron's agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is "a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son".
©2017 John Updike (P)2017 Random House Audio
Rabbit Is Rich
Summary
The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), 10 years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the president collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last - until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.
©1996 John Updike (P)2009 Random House
First Words
Summary
Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was Johnathan and the Witchs. And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? Here is a funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers - those who are amused by and happy to share their own early efforts. These young writers are the same people who now dominate the best seller lists and occupy the most celebrate spots on bookshelves in our stores, libraries and homes. Authors include Margaret Atwood, Roy Blount Jr., Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Amy Tan, John Updike, Gore Vidal, and Paul Mandelbaum (editor).
©2009 Phoenix (P)2009 Phoenix
Trust Me
Summary
The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife's twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her father's death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: "Man," as one of these stories concludes, "was not meant to abide in paradise."
©2012 John Updike (P)2017 Random House Audio
Seek My Face
Summary
John Updike’s 20th novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The 78-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.
©2002 John Updike (P)2002 Random House Inc., Random House Audio, a Division of Random House Inc.
Twin Beds in Rome
Summary
The Maples Stories consists of eighteen classic stories from across John Updike's career, forming aluminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published the story "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. As Richard and Joan Maple's story continues in this fourth story in the collection, their marriage is falling apart. Though both intensely desire separation, they continue to hold on to their broken relationship. So rather than get away from each other, they go away with each other - to Rome.
©1979 John Updike (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Plumbing
Summary
The Maples Stories consists of eighteen classic stories from across John Updike's career, forming aluminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published the story "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. In this tenth story, "Plumbing," Richard Maple reflects on the past as his family moves into a new home.
©1979 John Updike (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Golf Dreams
Summary
Golf is neither work nor play, John Updike tells us: "Golf is a trip." Golf has been the subject of many books and the province of many experts, but few have written as sympathetically, or as knowingly, about the peculiar charms of bad golf and the satisfactions of an essentially losing struggle. John Updike has been writing about golf since he took the game up at the age of 25. In the nearly 40 years of pleasurable bafflement that have followed, he has composed essays for Golf Digest and short stories for The New Yorker concerning the sport. His memories, insights, and witty remarks make this a truly unique audiobook. John Updike will tell you, in his own voice and his own words, how he learned the game, plays the game, and loves the game.
©2017 John Updike (P)2017 Random House Audio
Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 2
Summary
The young John Updike’s portrayal of a haughty seminary student working as a lifeguard is witty and poetic, as the naïve hero surveys the beachgoers in his care, and contemplates a future of saving souls as well as bodies. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©1962 John Updike (P)1963 Calliope Author Readings
Rabbit Remembered
Summary
The stunning novella that concludes John Updike's acclaimed Rabbit series is now available on audio. Set 10 years after Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered returns listeners to the small Pennsylvania town where Harry's widow, Janice, and his son, Nelson, still reside. They are faced with a surprise when Annabelle, Harry's 39-year-old illegitimate daughter, arrives on the scene, bringing with her ghosts from the past.
©2009 John Updike (P)2009 Random House Audio
The Maples Stories
Summary
Collected together for the first time on audio, these 18 classic stories from across John Updike's career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement.
©2009 Everyman’s Library. All rights reserved. (P)2009 BBC Audio
The Widows of Eastwick
Summary
More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées - Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer? The old Rhode Island seaside town, where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne, is still magical for them. Now Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish them ill. How they cope with the lingering traces of their evil deeds, the shocks of a mysterious counterspell, and the advancing inroads of old age, form the burden of Updike's delightful, ominous sequel.
©2008 John Updike; 2008 Random House Audio
The John Updike Audio Collection
Summary
The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975. In describing how he wrote these stories in a small, rented, smoke-filled office in Ipswich, Massachusetts, he says, "I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due."
©2003 John Updike (P)2003 HarperCollinsPublishers, Inc.