John Updike has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors. The most-rated is Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 2.
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
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
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.
Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 2
Summary
Nelson Algren reading from The Man With the Golden Arm, James Jones reading from The Thin Red Line, John Updike reading “Lifeguard” from Pigeon Feathers and Other, Bernard Malamud reading from “The Mourners” from The Magic Barrre.
©1963 Calliope Author Readings (P)1963 Calliope Author Readings