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The Centaur Audiobook
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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 fifteen-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.”
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"A brilliant achievement . . . No one should need to be told that Updike has a mastery of language matched in our time only by the finest poets."
— Saturday Review
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A triumph of love and art.
— The Washington Post -
Unsurpassed . . . Natural, pertinent, fresh, subtle, and superbly written.
— Newsweek
Awards
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Winner of National Book Awards, 1964
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Winner of National Book Awards, 1964
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About John Updike
John Updike (1932–2009) was the author of more than sixty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have been honored with two Pulitzer Prize Awards, the National Book Award, and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hugging the Shore, a collection of essays and reviews, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
About John MacDonald
John MacDonald (1952–2008) was a director, producer, and founder of the Washington Stage Guild in Washington, DC. A graduate of Catholic University, MacDonald was a popular figure in the Mid-Atlantic theater scene. He made dozens of recordings for the Talking Book program at the Library of Congress before entering the commercial audiobook field.