The Witches of Eastwick

BEFORE THEY WERE THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, OUR HEROINES WERE A TRIO OF DELIGHTFULLY WICKED WITCHES. In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard, a sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, the wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose strobe-lit hot tub room became the scene of satanic pleasures. To tell you any more, dear reader, would be to spoil the joy of reading this hexy, sexy novel by the incomparable John Updike. Praise for New York Times Bestseller The Witches of Eastwick: "A dazzling book . . . Updike is devilishly clever." Los Angeles Times "New England's past and present are brilliantly interwoven in this narrative . . . [Updike] has brought [this] culture wittily and radiantly to life." The New York Times "A great deal of fun to read . . . fresh, constantly entertaining . . . John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation." The Philadelphia Inquirer "A wicked entertainment . . . In book after book, Updike's fine, funny impressionistic art strips the full casings of everydayness from objects we have known all our lives and makes them shine with fresh new connections." The New Republic "Witty, ironic, engrossing, punctuated by transports of spectacular prose." Time "Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have." Newsday Selected by Time as one of the Five Best Works of Fiction of the Year

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. 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. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.