
Appointment in Samarra
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
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Narrated by:
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Christian Camargo
About this listen
One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O'Hara's crowning achievement.
In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O'Hara's iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream - and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American writer.
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Story
In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.
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intense narrative of a dark and complex time
- By gnudung on 05-05-12
By: Robert Stone
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Humboldt's Gift
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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The Rainbow
- By: D. H. Lawrence
- Narrated by: Paul Slack
- Length: 20 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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D. H. Lawrence's controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization - the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of existence symbolized by the persistent, unifying motif of the "rainbow".
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Roy G. Biv, the Birds and the Bees
- By W Perry Hall on 10-16-16
By: D. H. Lawrence
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Point Counter Point
- By: Aldous Huxley
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.
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finally - another classic from Huxley
- By Andorboth on 02-20-24
By: Aldous Huxley
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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
- By: Anthony Powell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
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Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
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It is no good being a beauty alone...
- By Darwin8u on 02-24-16
By: Anthony Powell
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The Wings of the Dove
- By: Henry James
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.
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Not an easy read but SO worth it!
- By Julie Gray on 10-31-17
By: Henry James
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A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
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Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
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Lucky Jim
- By: Kingsley Amis
- Narrated by: James Lailey
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the audience through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
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Satisfactory, but a Bit Stale
- By SandyK on 07-18-23
By: Kingsley Amis
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- By: Carson McCullers
- Narrated by: Cherry Jones
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Carson McCullers was all of 23 when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her "the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced." The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells an unforgettable tale of moral isolation in a small southern mill town in the 1930s.
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Do yourself a favor
- By Barbara on 06-08-05
By: Carson McCullers
one of my favorite books from college
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Unexpected pleasure...
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Narrator is terrible
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It was ok.
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Not sure yet...
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Didn't think I'd like it
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excellent & a bit existentialist & Hemingway-esque
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Production: The reader was excellent and the effects were good.
Overall, I would recommend to buy but do not make it an urgent buy.
Appointment in Samarra
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A-1 read. I am reading all of his writing. Brilliant
I adore John O Hara
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Not up to my memory of O'Hara's work.
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