John Updike Reading “Lifeguard” from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike
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John Updike Reading “Lifeguard” from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

From Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 2

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Narrator John Updike

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Length 17 minutes
Language English
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This well-known short story appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, one of John Updike's earliest books and is narrated by a divinity student at his summer job. From the heights of his wooden throne, the fastidious and aloof young narrator delivers a silent sermon addressed to the beachgoers—"the middle-aged, burdened with children and aluminum chairs." Though full of himself and his mission, he appeals to us by virtue of his earnestness and promise, and the call for which he waits. Updike reads with a tender, ironic understanding of his haughty hero.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Audiobook details

Author:

Narrator:
John Updike

ISBN:
9781094095660

Length:
17 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Blackstone Publishing

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

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Reviews

“Electricity lights his prose like a Christmas tree…So full of fire and ice that it almost breaks through to some ‘fourth dimension’ in writing.”

“Some of the most beautiful writing in contemporary American literature is between the covers of this book.”

“A sustained pleasure…A world seen and described and interpreted by a subtle, poetic, intellectual, wondering consciousness…These are wonderfully written pieces.”

“Updike is not merely talented; he is bold, resourceful, and intensely serious…We hear talk now and then of a breakthrough in fiction, the achievement of a new attitude and hence a new method; something like that seems close at hand in Pigeon Feathers.”

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