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Banal Nightmare
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Ruby McCollister
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature” (The New Yorker)
“Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her perverse sense of humor should be studied and celebrated.”—David Sedaris
Margaret Anne “Moddie” Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.
So begins Halle Butler’s sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.
Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.
Cover art: Yelling, 1994, by John Wesley. Used with permission of the estate of John Wesley. Private Collection, Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Image.
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Critic reviews
“Halle Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her perverse sense of humor should be studied and celebrated.”—David Sedaris
“In Butler’s world, everyone hates each other, every day is excruciating in its mundanity, every thought is the beginning of an Escherian journey round and round in hell, and somehow the whole thing is unbelievably funny. With the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art, Banal Nightmare attempts transcendence through anxiety and dissociation, nailing a series of contemporary characters—better pray you’re not one of them—to the wall.”—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
“This is a masterpiece, Butler’s best book yet. It burns with a wild, unforgiving fire, making most other novels seem vague and ho-hum in comparison. No feeling is skipped over. No thought is simplified. No idea is dumbed down. Like a knife dancing through air, it’s a manic, nerve-wracking read, painful and so weirdly funny. I felt gripped by it from beginning to end. . . . An unapologetic, totally original, modern marvel.”—Rachel B. Glaser, author of Paulina & Fran
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Chuck full of laughs to lift anyone's spirits.
- By Laura Boogaert on 09-22-24
By: Ginny Hogan
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I Can't Make This Up
- Life Lessons
- By: Neil Strauss - contributor, Kevin Hart
- Narrated by: Kevin Hart
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Superstar comedian and Hollywood box-office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller.
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Best Audiobook I Ever Listened To
- By Sam Clear on 07-13-17
By: Neil Strauss - contributor, and others
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American Psycho
- By: Bret Easton Ellis
- Narrated by: Pablo Schreiber
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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Fanntastic book but maybe not for everyone....
- By So Fain on 03-27-11
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Might have been an ok read...
- By mfseegs on 04-24-19
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Nobody Writes (or Performs) Like Halle Butler
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Bright Objects
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Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye. As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message.
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what an incredible read
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Perfume and Pain
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Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.
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Hilarious!!
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Beautiful
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In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships.
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Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.
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Might have been an ok read...
- By mfseegs on 04-24-19
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Nobody Writes (or Performs) Like Halle Butler
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Bright Objects
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Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye. As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message.
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what an incredible read
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Perfume and Pain
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Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.
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Hilarious!!
- By Marilyn on 05-22-24
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- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
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Beautiful
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The Hypocrite
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Unlikable characters
- By Amazon Customer on 09-22-24
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Anyone's Ghost
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It took three car crashes to kill Jake. Theron David Alden is there for the first two: the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those too-short, ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever—the end of the dream and the longing for the dream and the dream itself, all at once. Theron is not there for the third crash. And yet, their story contains so much joy and self-discovery.
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No redeeming characters - they're all awful
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State of Paradise
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Fantastic, philosophical, reflects the times
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The Anthropologists
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Foreigners make a country their own
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Little Rot
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.
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Fast paced thought provoking read
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By: Akwaeke Emezi
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A Good Happy Girl
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize—distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant—Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity.
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A good happy girl
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By: Marissa Higgins
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The Rent Collectors
- Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA's most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang's shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing.
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Well researched and well told...
- By totalpop on 10-16-24
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The Princess of 72nd Street
- A Novel
- By: Elaine Kraf, Melissa Broder - introduction
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes of what she calls “radiances.” While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, and liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday.
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Endless monologue of the bipolar experience
- By Juan Adames on 10-29-24
By: Elaine Kraf, and others
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Alice Sadie Celine
- By: Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
- Narrated by: Chloë Sevigny
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Best friends since high school, but now living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.
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extremely dull and joyless performance
- By Emily Johl on 01-13-24
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The Confidence Games
- By: Tess Amy
- Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Emma Oxley and Nellie Yarrow have been inseparable their whole lives. Ever since they reinvented themselves, changing their names and wiping clean their digital footprints, they have made a game of following wherever the next adventure leads and challenging themselves to thefts, street cons, and mind games. Adhering to only two rules—they will only swindle men, and only ones who deserve it—Emma and Nellie are secure in their reputation as the most trustworthy swindlers on the European black market. Until suddenly, they must play to save their own lives.
By: Tess Amy
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A Duke in the Night
- By: Kelly Bowen
- Narrated by: Ashford McNab
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The first novel in a new historical romance series from Kelly Bowen.
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Struggled with this book. Good Narration
- By Tracy T on 03-29-18
By: Kelly Bowen
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Fruit of the Dead
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Lyon
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan, Joy Osmanski
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s late-capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting, electric novel that readers will not soon forget.
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Imaginative and Beautiful Reimagining
- By Kenneth Skipper on 04-26-24
By: Rachel Lyon
What listeners say about Banal Nightmare
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Aaron S. Berman
- 10-08-24
Everything you want in a Butler novel
What makes Halle Butler so unique is her ability to describe the "banal nightmare" of 21st century life perfectly, while superimposing upon it the stream of consciousness thoughts we all experience from moment to moment. The more she avoids "plot" the better her prose becomes.
And while I cringed when I first saw that she had ceded the book's narration to someone else for the first time – Butler doesn't just read, she performs, after all – I quickly grew to love Ruby McCollister's interpretation of the text. She clearly knows Butler's narration style and has preserved the best aspects of that, while also bringing something more to the table. An excellent collaboration.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Joe Wilson
- 08-10-24
Titled correctly
This book is exactly what its title describes. Like listening to Search Party without the fun (Elliot & Portia). Excellently read and much more enjoyable as an audiobook. The ending was legitimately surprising and redeemed the book somewhat.
Butler was once asked to describe her book in three words and responded with “white blue smooth”. The first of those words accurately describes the novel.
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