Poet, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and novelist John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. His father taught high school math, and his mother wrote short stories and novels. Updike received his BA from Harvard University in 1954, the year he began to publish in The New Yorker. Updike is the author of more than fifty books. Among his volumes of poetry are Americana and Other Poems, Collected Poems 1953-1993, Facing Nature, and Tossing and Turning. The Widows of Eastwick picks up the stories of the three principal characters Updike first created in his 1984 bestseller The Witches of Eastwick, a mixture of graphics realism and magical fantasy set during the early in a socially conservative Rhode Island seaside community. In that novel Alexandra Spofford, Jane Smart, and Sukie Rougemont, all in their thirties, seem to possess the ability to perform black magic. When they come under the spell of the mysterious Darryl Van Horne, a stranger recently relocated to Eastwick, they begin engaging in a series of sexual orgies and rites of black magic that wreak havoc on people who cross their paths. The sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, begins with Alexandra still troubled by her evil actions in the first book, and searching, in her dreams, for "a tinfoil egg of death, whose discovery would reverse Jenny's death". You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Widows of Eastwick” by John Updike on our website.
