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Title: Emerald City

Author: Jennifer Egan

Narrator: Charlie Thurston, Madeleine Lambert, Richard Waterhouse

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-01-12

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 25 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

These 11 masterful stories - the first collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egans characters - models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls - are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations.

Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City - a teens discovery of his fathers secret life, a financial trader who runs into the con man who swindled him - are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

Members Reviews:

and the stories are excellent. My one gripe

I'm about halfway through the audiobook, and the stories are excellent. My one gripe, and I found this EXTREMELY frustrating as a listener, is that there is almost no pause between the stories, and often the stories are told by the same narrator. So at one point I got confused because I hadn't realized one story ended and another began. Like many people, I listen while I'm driving; therefore, my attention cannot be 100 percent on the story. There is almost no pause, and there is no small musical interlude, between the stories. It was frustrating, because I missed that sense of satisfaction and closure that you get when you realize that this (last sentence/phrase) was the conclusion. Also, often I prefer to pause the recording before going into the next story, so I can process it. A small pause and/or musical interlude would give me the cue and space to do this.

charming

I'm a fan of Jennifer Egan. She's really good at character development and in a few short words you get an idea of what kind of person she's alluding to. Emerald City is composed of 11 short stories and while I enjoyed all of them, the first and last most resonated with me. The first is about a successful businessman who takes his family to China, supposedly on a vacation, but really to avoid the heat of an investigation into fraud. He runs across a man that grifted 25k from him years ago. The man doesn't recognize him and he starts following him around. They go around China, without him or the other man knowing why he's doing this and while he embroils his family in this mess he finds resolution with his own sins. The last story deals with a shy, 15 year old girl who does acid for the first time. Occurs in the 70s, in Manhattan, theirs some peer pressure from her friends, and she views the world differently at the end of the experience. My descriptions seem trite but Jennifer Egan is great in bringing a simple story to real life by enmeshing her sensibilities into her work

Dry and terse and reliably right

I love this writer, with her dry, terse voice that somehow tells all. As you read the stories, you can trust that something very real is going to happen; not something "fictional" or contrived, but an event such as could happen in real life. Not that the lives of her characters are like yours and mine; they all suffer from modern malaise of one kind or another; they all need love or else are so numb they don't know they don't have it.

One masterful story, "One Piece," chronicles an intense love needing to break out as a brother and sister strive for normalcy in an unimaginably beleaguered family.