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Beautiful Days
- Stories
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill, Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
A new collection of 13 mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien".
The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.
"Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.
In "Big Burnt", set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. "The Nice Girl" depicts a young woman who has been, through her life, infuriatingly "nice", until she is forced to come to terms with the raw desperation of her deepest self. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, "Les beaux jours" examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a "master" artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic "Undocumented Alien" depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.
In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior - until the hour when they do not.
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Critic reviews
"[A]ll three narrators read with tempered voices. Their no-frills deliveries capture the tension and hard realities of these modern tales of infidelity, deception, and broken dreams.... Oates also has a distinctly American voice, and Tavia Gilbert, Stephen Graybill, and Caitlin Kelly are quick to make the most of the straightforward rhythms and singular tones that can make a simple sentence sound at once brightly optimistic and devastating. Oates's work remains insightful, sometimes brutal, and always vital." (AudioFile)
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Story
In the little town of Palomo Grove, two great armies are amassing; forces shaped from the hearts and souls of America. In this New York Times best-seller, Barker unveils one of the most ambitious imaginative landscapes in modern fiction, creating a new vocabulary for the age-old battle between good and evil. Carrying its readers from the first stirring of consciousness to a vision of the end of the world, The Great and Secret Show is a breathtaking journey in the company of a master storyteller.
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Horrific Dark Fantasy
- By Michael on 09-05-16
By: Clive Barker
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The Cider House Rules
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 24 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
From one of America's most beloved and respected writers comes the classic story of Homer Wells, an orphan, and Wilbur Larch, a doctor without children of his own, who develop an extraordinary bond with one another.
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Wonderful
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 07-02-07
By: John Irving
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The Satanic Verses
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their airliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations.
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Use an audiobook to really enjoy Satanic Verses
- By David Edelberg on 11-24-12
By: Salman Rushdie
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A Happy Marriage
- A Novel
- By: Rafael Yglesias
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A Happy Marriage is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of their courtship and the final months of Margaret’s life as she says good-bye to her family, friends, children, and Enrique.
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A Difficult Review -- A Difficult Read
- By Lulu on 06-04-12
By: Rafael Yglesias
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My Soul to Keep
- By: Tananarive Due
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
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A Book I Can't Keep
- By Mistsofjade on 07-19-20
By: Tananarive Due
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The Vine of Desire
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil's attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America - and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.
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Vine of desire
- By Mz Shantay on 03-27-21
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Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
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House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
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Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
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Everywhere I Look
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.
By: Helen Garner
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One Amazing Thing
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi, Soneela Nankani, Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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Chris Power’s stories are peopled by men and women who find themselves at crossroads or dead ends - characters who search without knowing what they seek. Their paths lead them to thresholds, bridges, rivers, and sites of mysterious, irresistible connection to the past. A woman uses her mother’s old travel guide, aged years beyond relevance, to navigate on a journey to nowhere; a stand-up comic with writer’s block performs a fateful gig at a cocaine-fueled bachelor party; on holiday in Greece, a father must confront the limits to which he can keep his daughters safe.
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DNF because of intolerable narrator
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Definitely Dark and Deep
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Broke Heart Blues
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- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of a languid July, eleven-year-old John Reddy Heart drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. His mother, Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer, has brought her family east from Las Vegas to claim the rambling mansion left to her by a wealthy suitor. But it is John Reddy—already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley—who will claim the town itself.
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Beautiful Days
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A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.
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Extenuating Circumstances
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Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling and unforgettable works to date.
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Interesting stores
- By Polly on 06-11-24
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Evil Eye
- Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Luci Christian, Chris Patton, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Listeners know that few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, a fact confirmed by the four novellas presented here. All the novellas in this collection revolve around the theme of love gone wrong - horribly, shockingly wrong.
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Some of the stories are excellent!
- By Matthew S. Hill on 03-29-17
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Mothers
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- Length: 8 hrs
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Chris Power’s stories are peopled by men and women who find themselves at crossroads or dead ends - characters who search without knowing what they seek. Their paths lead them to thresholds, bridges, rivers, and sites of mysterious, irresistible connection to the past. A woman uses her mother’s old travel guide, aged years beyond relevance, to navigate on a journey to nowhere; a stand-up comic with writer’s block performs a fateful gig at a cocaine-fueled bachelor party; on holiday in Greece, a father must confront the limits to which he can keep his daughters safe.
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DNF because of intolerable narrator
- By clevahgrrl on 09-17-24
By: Chris Power
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Lovely, Dark, Deep
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- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
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From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of ten spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all. Insightful, disturbing, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates's astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.
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Definitely Dark and Deep
- By Monica on 01-10-17
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Broke Heart Blues
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- Narrated by: Finlay Stevenson, Cassandra Campbell, Fred Berman, and others
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In the heart of a languid July, eleven-year-old John Reddy Heart drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. His mother, Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer, has brought her family east from Las Vegas to claim the rambling mansion left to her by a wealthy suitor. But it is John Reddy—already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley—who will claim the town itself.
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Beautiful Days
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A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.
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Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling and unforgettable works to date.
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Interesting stores
- By Polly on 06-11-24
-
Evil Eye
- Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Luci Christian, Chris Patton, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Listeners know that few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, a fact confirmed by the four novellas presented here. All the novellas in this collection revolve around the theme of love gone wrong - horribly, shockingly wrong.
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Some of the stories are excellent!
- By Matthew S. Hill on 03-29-17
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The Interestings
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- Narrated by: Jen Tullock
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The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age 15 is not always enough to propel someone through life at age 30; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.
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Needs a better title, but a good read (listen)
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By: Meg Wolitzer
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Butcher
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In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation.
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JCO is a treasure
- By wooden indian on 10-16-24
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The Doll-Master
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they?In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination” that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
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Boring
- By Kelly on 10-17-19
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The (Other) You
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- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Kate Reading, Malcolm Hillgartner
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we’d made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she’d never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student’s affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated.
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Amazing
- By Betsy Ross on 01-28-23
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The Idiot
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.
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Fascinating point of view
- By Amazon Customer on 04-21-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Blonde
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Jayne Atkinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
She was an all-American girl who became a legend of unparalleled stature. She inspired the adoration of millions, and her life has beguiled generations of fans and fellow artists. The story of Norma Jeane Baker, better known by her studio name, Marilyn Monroe, has been dissected for more than three decades, but never has it been captured in a narrative as breathtaking and transforming as Blonde.
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ARE YOU KIDDING ME? NO UNABRIDGED VERSION?
- By ClearlyCrystalAnn on 02-07-13
What listeners say about Beautiful Days
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Matthew LeMay
- 01-23-20
Great at short story length
I discovered Joyce Carol Oates late and regret it. This is the second collection of short stories to which I’ve listened. I can’t say enough. They can’t be banished to a genre or theme but moreover do what short stories do in brilliant hands. The voice acting is superb.
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- Needles
- 11-18-18
Poor editing
There is barely a second of silence between stories, surely it should have been edited to allow a pause between each? very disconcerting and jarring. Returned.
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3 people found this helpful