Discover Best Sellers Audiobooks in Fiction, Literary

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Title: Without a Hero

Subtitle: Stories

Author: T. C. Boyle

Narrator: Jonathan Reese

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-02-13

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 5 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

T. C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical", he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American phenomena such as a center for the treatment of acquisitive disorders; a couple in search of the last toads on Earth; and a real estate wonder boy on a dude safari near convenient Bakerfield, California. Sharp, guileful, and malevolently funny, Boyle's stories are "more than funny, better than wicked," says The Philadelphia Inquirer. "They make you cringe with their clarity."

Members Reviews:

Filthy With Fun

WITHOUT A HERO is a terrific collection of short stories by a highly inventive author. I recently enjoyed his novel INNER CIRCLE, and previously had noticed his imaginative, satirical stories in the pages of The New Yorker. Quite simply, T.C. Boyle is fun to read.

Short stories showcase Boyle's creativity and wit. Here we enjoy tales about over-monied California real estate moguls trophy hunting outside Bakersfield ("Big Game"); the astonomer and his collectibles-crazy wife who undergo reprogramming at the hands of a professional clutter organizer ("Filthy With Things"); the remarried, aged husband doting on his ridiculously demanding wife and his unpredictable reaction to her well-being in a hurricane ("Act of God"); the mud-splattered and half-crippled, never-say-die right guard for the Caledonia College football team ("56-0"); the beatnik who has hitchhiked across the US for a night of carousing with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs ("Beat"); and the young Irish-American boy sucking in both the carcinogenic fumes of bug-spray and prejudice ("The Fog Man"). The thriller of the bunch is the closer. In "Sitting on Top of the World" sexy ranger Elaine guards the forest from fire, splendidly isolated for days in the mountaintop station, enjoying her solitude. Until a stranger comes knocking....

Irony, Black Humor, and Satire pervade

I must confess that I feel guilty even writing a reveiw, let along giving 5 stars, for a book that I haven't read all of. I was only assigned six of the short stories in the book for my Satire class...and though I suppose I could have read more, I did not. However, that does not change the fact that the 6 stories I read were all brilliant in their own right.

BIG GAME- Trying to import African into Southern California, Bernard Puff learns too late the danger of trying to import one reality into another.

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN- DDT leads to devastation of Borneo...but wickedly funny and ironic, "Every cloud has a silver lining"

56-0- Ray Aurther Larry-Pete Fontinot tries one last time to taste glory in football. Far far far from Rudy.

FILTHY WITH THINGS- Materialism has a hold on Julian...but the remedy may prove worse than the disease. Twilight Zone-esque, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.

BEAT- Buzz's hero and the Beat culture are not as glamourous as they seem

THE FOGMAN- Rasicm at its most heartbreaking...and the moral: nothing changes.

Even if all the other stories in this book are completely horrid and abominations to the English language, you should still pick up a copy of T.

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Title: Canada

Author: Richard Ford

Narrator: Holter Graham

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-26-13

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 11 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic

Members Reviews:

Excellent first half.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, but the second half just dragged on.

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Titel: Der wunderbare Massenselbstmord

Autor:: Arto Paasilinna

Erzähler: Jürgen von der Lippe

Format: Unabridged

Spieldauer: 5 hrs and 9 mins

Sprache: Deutsch

Veröffentlichungsdatum: 01-08-13

Herausgeber: Lübbe Audio

Kategorien: Fiction, Literary

Zusammenfassung des Herausgebers:

"Denkst du an Selbstmord? Du bist nicht allein!" So lautet ein ungewöhnlicher Anzeigentext, der auf überraschend heftiges Interesse stößt. Niemals hätte der gescheiterte Unternehmer Onni Rellonen mit der Existenz so vieler Gleichgesinnter gerechnet, als er beschließt, seinem Leben ein Ende zu setzen. Aus einem zunächst vagen Vorhaben entwickelt sich ein konkreter Plan: Ein Bus wird gechartert, um an einsamer Stelle gemeinschaftlich das Leben zu beenden. Am verabredeten Tag besteigen die unternehmungslustigen Selbstmordkandidaten schließlich guten Mutes das gemietete Gefährt und starten ihre einzigartige Reise ohne Wiederkehr...

©2012 Bastei Lübbe (P)2013 Lübbe Audio

Mitglieder Bewertungen:

Good buy

This one was very good, I lent it to everybody in the family

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Title: Junky

Author: William S. Burroughs

Narrator: Andrew Garman, Mark Nelson, T. Ryder Smith

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-01-12

Publisher: Whole Story AudioBooks

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Burroughs first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through time spent kicking and time spent dealing, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report from the American postwar drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse, and unapologetic tone.

Members Reviews:

I love this book

Narrator is great, I'd recommend anything he reads. Obviously it's a great book by a great author too.

Fantastic book

Never read William boroughs,this is the my first time,it's a fantastic book,boroughs goes into a lot details.i would recommend to anyone.

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Title: The Secret Keeper

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Kate Morton

Narrator: Caroline Lee

Format: Unabridged

Length: 19 hrs and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-01-12

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 83 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

England, 1959. Laurel Nicolson is 16 years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to Green Acres for Dorothys ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by memories and questions she has not thought about for decades. She decides to find out the truth about the events of that summer day and lay to rest her own feelings of guilt. One photograph, of her mother and a woman Laurel has never met, called Vivian, is her first clue.

The Secret Keeper explores longings and dreams, the lengths some people go to fulfill them, and the strange consequences they sometimes have. It is a story of lovers, friends, dreamers and schemers, play-acting and deception, told against a backdrop of events that changed the world.

Members Reviews:

Good (ish) story, terrible narration :(

What did you like best about The Secret Keeper? What did you like least?

Story was a bit long....

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Caroline Lee?

The narrator kept changing her accent - sometimes mid sentence from Australian to semi Brittish... I found it so annoying that I stopped listening to the story for a few days until I could handle listening again. Then I had another break. In the end I read the book on my kindle. I wish I had never wasted my audible credit!

I would have used Caroline Lennon or someone more professional who can use one accent properly and doesn't sound like a 12 year old girl.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

No

Any additional comments?

I am never listening to anything by Caroline Lee ever again.

Another Kate Morton success

Kate Morton's skill is in creating intrigue and slowly, teasingly unraveling it. The Secret Keeper is an enjoyable mystery that keeps you guessing and changing you guess almost to the end. The story is set in the present with flashbacks to the London Blitz and England in the 1960's. The story is well paced and the twists are introduced skillfully. The exception to this is the central scene which involves a confusingly executed murder. The scene is so sparsely described that is difficult to picture how it actually happened and whether it would even be possible. Her two main female characters are interesting but all the rest are rather undeveloped and have a two dimensional quality. This impression could also be due to the narrator's lack of skill with accents, which were all rather garbled.

Overall, it is worth listening to, especially if you can forgive bad accents.

Fantastic story

One of the best stories I've listened to. It kept my attention and kept me guessing right until the end.

A great story, well told

What made the experience of listening to The Secret Keeper the most enjoyable?

I really enjoyed this book. It was well written with rich characters who were believable. I found it thought provoking and was caught right up in the story and found myself listening when I really should have been doing other things! The twist at the end was a bonus.

Wonderful story.

I loved this book and the narrator was fantastic. Very clever story that kept me entertained for the entire book.

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Titel: Der Gefangene des Himmels (Friedhof der vergessenen Bücher 3)

Autor:: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Erzähler: Andreas Pietschmann

Format: Unabridged

Spieldauer: 7 hrs and 26 mins

Sprache: Deutsch

Veröffentlichungsdatum: 10-26-12

Herausgeber: Argon Verlag

Bewertung: 5 von 5 von 1 Stimmen

Kategorien: Fiction, Literary

Zusammenfassung des Herausgebers:

Nach "Der Schatten des Windes" und "Das Spiel des Engels" der dritte große Barcelona-Roman!

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Title: Back to Blood

Author: Tom Wolfe

Narrator: Lou Diamond Phillips

Format: Abridged

Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-23-12

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 11 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor; the black police chief; a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict; crack dealers in the 'hoods; "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair; "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy; yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo; and a nest of shady Russians.

Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Members Reviews:

Good and Wolfe-like

Would you try another book from Tom Wolfe and/or Lou Diamond Phillips?

Yep

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Including the sociological workings of the metropolitan area where the story is set in what seemed likely to be accurate seemed most distinctly interesting. Too often authors either ignore such things or continue perpetuating the fantasy of how things go in the USA, instead of how it is and has been for decades. I'm not sure how a white male like Wolfe gets away with contradicting the fantasy that life in the USA is how it was supposedly was 60 years ago and no changes have occured. Most people get their career crucified if they tell the truth or contradict the fiction unless they are also pitching to a conservative audience only. My only guess as to why Wolfe gets a pass is that he does not associate what is going on with a political party. Anyway, it's nice to have fiction that is supposedly set in the present read like it is.If anyone else likes that aspect in a book Gone Girl by Gillian Flyn is a mystery-suspense book that does this very well too.

What aspect of Lou Diamond Phillipss performance would you have changed?

Can't think of anything I would change. He did a great job. Distinctive characters, both genders handled well, various accents too. Wolfe's device of repeating words 3-5 times to emphasize how intense a character feels about something is more annoying in audio form than text but that was his error, not Lou's IMHO.

Any additional comments?

I went with this abbriged version because it seemed long enough. It didn't seem incomplete and I liked it so I'm glad I didn't get the longer version. In case I'm the only one who ever reviews the abbriged, that unabbriged has many more reviews for you to check out.

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Title: Narcopolis

Author: Jeet Thayil

Narrator: Robertson Dean

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-08-12

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 18 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil's poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.

Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city's underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works in and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.

Decades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city's underbelly has become ever rawer. Those in their circle still use sex for their primary release and recreation, but the violence of the city on the nod and its purveyors have moved from the fringes to the center of their lives. Yet Dimple, despite the bleakness of her surroundings, continues to search for beauty - at the movies, in pulp magazines, at church, and in a new burka-wearing identity.

After a long absence, the narrator returns in 2004 to find a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but the passion he feels for them and for the city is revealed.

Critic Reviews:

"An elegant tapestry of beautifully observed characters and their complex lives." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Deep and seedy

In this opiate-veiled book, Thayil introduces readers to the seedy underbelly of Bombay. It begins in the 1970's and transitions with surreality into modern-day Mumbai--which has lost not only its tradition and identity, but also it's name. The story follows several memorable characters, all of whom fight addiction in one form or another. Addictions range from opiates to violence to sex to adulation. The most memorable character IMO is Dimple, a pipe-wallah, a prostitute, and an addict. Dimple's character is rather horrifying to the unjaded Westerner because she was abandoned by her mother and sold into prostitution as a child. At the age of 9, she was castrated and her penis was removed, which apparently makes her into a deliciously seedy prostitute (in the eyes of creepy men who make me shudder). When we are introduced to her, she is a little older, and is suffering some of the ill affects of her surgery--including addiction to opium, which was originally given to her as a narcotic for her pain. We watch Dimple as she changes from a beautiful young woman to a sickly and shriveled middle-aged woman.

Perhaps I'm reading too much in to the story (I think it would be clearer after a second reading, which it's not going to get), but I think Dimple was meant to represent India. When we met Dimple, she was young and beautiful, as was the young India.

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Title: Pharmacology

Author: Christopher Herz

Narrator: Kate Rudd

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-25-12

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 27 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

1993. San Francisco. The digital and pharmaceutical industries are booming. Theyre looking for the young, the hip, and those on the counterculture fringe to be both the face and consumer of their new world order. Recruited by an advertising agency focused on targeting a new drug to her own age demographic, Sarah Striker is grateful for the steady income, but she begins to question the side effects of the products shes pushing.

Sarah begins publishing an underground zine to expose the secrets behind the pharmaceutical industrys aims. Fulfilled by her quest to spread the truth, her new life seems to be working out perfectly - until she realizes that she herself is perilously close to becoming a victim of this new corporate world.

A kinetic, hyper-stylized jolt of pure energy, Herz delivers a strong follow-up to his debut novel, The Last Block in Harlem. Full of vibrant characters and razor-sharp dialogue, Pharmacology captures the voice of the Internet generation with style, heart, and soul.

Members Reviews:

Interesting but not my cup of tea.

I have never ever heard of this book and found it when I did a search for audiobooks narrated by Kate Rudd. You know Kate! She narrated The Fault In Our Stars! I loved her work with that book so much it made me purchase this one solely based on her work (and the price of course).

This story centers around Sarah Striker, a young high school graduate who moves to San Francisco to make some money to help pay for her father's cancer treatment. At the time of her leaving Kansas City, Mo. San Francisco is on the verge of the 90's internet boom and there are new and exciting things popping up everywhere. Like cafe's offering internet and computer usage.

This story was not a huge hit for me. There were a few things I was not really into. Most of the male authors I have read that write from a female perceptive seem to get women. Really get them in an errie kinda way. It's like they become a women while writing the book. I didn't have that feeling at all with this book. Sarah just seemed to be so one dimensional and have no real interest. She just hung out with friends who had interesting drug habits and almost surreal lives. I found it hard to connect with her and I really wanted to. Also, I am not really into the young drug addicts slowly killing themselves stories. (a la Trainspotting). Those kinds of characters are everywhere in this book and in Sarah's life. Is that normal for a non-drug using 18-ish young girl from Missouri to get hooked into that crowd and stay clean the whole time?

There were some great points to this story. Really! One, the overall topic of where and who created ADD as well as the behind the scenes of the big pharmaceutical companies was extremely interesting. I have to say now I don't look at their commerical the same way anymore. I have no idea if the author based the story point on real information but it seems real to me. Second, Kate Rudd (narrator) did a good job. In the beginning of the book she was not as "ON" as she was toward the middle and end of the audiobook. So far, The Fault In Our Stars is by far her best.

I will be looking at other audiobooks by her.

Fully Enjoyed

Would you listen to Pharmacology again? Why?

Yes.

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Title: The Curtain

Subtitle: An Essay in Seven Parts

Author: Milan Kundera

Narrator: Graeme Malcolm

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-25-12

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 10 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose."

In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.

Members Reviews:

Opinionated and interesting

Kundera is provocative as always in his analysis of the novel, history, memory, and forgetting. The usual suspects -- Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Gombrowicz, Musil, Kafka -- are paraded around, though never in a way that bores. The listener should be careful not to agree too quickly.