Killing: A Selection from the John Updike Audio Collection Audiobook

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 Ipswitch, 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.""

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“Herrmann’s voice is strikingly patrician, yet warm; Alexander’s is plummy and observant. The unexpected pleasure is that John Updike, in an unactorly way, manages to keep up with them. Even in his early seventies, he is able to modulate his voice to reveal the spaces amid the dialogue of his characters, the quantum chasms that exist between people. He reads with care for his words and characters, but without showing off. The audio collection contains fourteen of Updike’s most well-known stories, most of which demonstrate the author’s abiding faith in the redemption of human affiliation.”

— AudioFile on The John Updike Audio Collection