Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
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Narrated by:
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Kirsten Potter
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Bronson Pinchot
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By:
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Maile Meloy
About this listen
Award-winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to fans.
p>Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers and listeners. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship.A ranch hand falls for a recent law-school graduate who appears unexpectedly—and reluctantly—in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.
Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy’s singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.
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Editorial reviews
Maile Meloy’s tender, transcendent collection of 11 short stories, Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, examines the aftermath of ordinary human ambiguity and betrayal as narrated by Bronson Pinchot and Kirsten Potter, two superb readers who breathe pathos and wry humor into each tragicomedy with haltingly paced, loaded silences that mimic awkward conversations in real time.
The concept of dual narrators isn’t gimmicky here. Like campfire singers passing a harmonica, Pinchot and Potter are in total sync, taking turns chronicling Meloy’s morally confused cast of ranchers, doctors, teachers, and lawyers. Like many of us, these characters are so tethered to the safety of routine, they’d rather bicker, ski, drive around strangers named Bonnie and Clyde even horse ride straight into affliction, than commit a single life-altering action. “The Children” introduces Fielding, a cheater who ultimately settles for his wife. “A braver man, or a more cowardly one, would simply flee,” Fielding notes. “A happier or more complacent man would stay and revel in the familiar... He seemed to be none of those things.”
Rural Montana, with its bleak, glacial skies, anchors much of Both Ways, and its austere setting captures the hardship and risk of loving. In “Nine”, Valentina’s caring mother is too distracted by a sour boyfriend to notice she’s steamed and served a slug for dinner, along with fresh vegetables from the garden. Existing in survival mode may be honorable in this world, but Potter and Pinchot reject the constant climate of prickliness by pitching their voices low and earthy. Their murmurs, sweet and smoky as black cherry jam, elevate the spare, contained beauty of Meloy’s prose, all exquisite lines and bones, into the fiction writing equivalent of Audrey Hepburn’s face. Nita Rao
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Story
By the time Wendy Lawless turned 17, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.... Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
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Not an Engaging Listen
- By Sobriquet on 03-13-13
By: Wendy Lawless
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She Got Up Off the Couch
- By: Haven Kimmel
- Narrated by: Haven Kimmel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When we last saw Zippy, she was oblivious to the storm that was brewing in her home. Her mother, Delonda, had literally just gotten up off the couch and ridden her rickety bicycle down the road. Her dad was off somewhere, gambling or "working." And Zippy was lost in her own fabulous world of exploring the fringes of Moorland, Indiana.
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Great fun !!
- By Kim on 04-20-11
By: Haven Kimmel
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The Wangs vs. the World
- By: Jade Chang
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he's just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family's ancestral lands - and his pride. Outrageously funny and full of charm, The Wangs vs. the World is an entirely fresh look at what it means to belong in America - and how going from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings one family together in a way money never could.
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Spectacular
- By Barbara on 10-11-16
By: Jade Chang
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The UnAmericans
- Stories
- By: Molly Antopol
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Again and again, Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.
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Sensational stories! Brilliant new author.
- By MidwestGeek on 05-04-14
By: Molly Antopol
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She's Come Undone
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.
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Really disappointing narrator!
- By Jessica Williams on 01-21-12
By: Wally Lamb
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I'll Be There
- By: Holly Goldberg Sloan
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Bell believes in destiny. To her, being forced to sing a solo in the church choir - despite her average voice - is fate: because it's while she's singing that she first sees Sam. At first sight they are connected. Sam Border wishes he could escape, but there's nowhere for him to run. He and his little brother, Riddle, have spent their entire lives constantly uprooted by their unstable father. As Sam and Riddle are welcomed into the Bells' lives, they witness the warmth and protection of a family for the first time.
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Needs to be a film!
- By TreasureHunter on 06-25-16
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The Magician's Assistant
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Karen Ziemba
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.
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Patchett Has It
- By Pamela Harvey on 06-10-08
By: Ann Patchett
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Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
- By: Juliann Garey
- Narrated by: Dan Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.
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Psychosis or Syphilis?
- By Vira on 04-02-13
By: Juliann Garey
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The Rest of Her Life
- By: Laura Moriarty
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy, the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community.
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Obnoxious musical interludes ruin the story
- By Joan on 12-25-11
By: Laura Moriarty
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Marrow
- By: Tarryn Fisher
- Narrated by: Audra Pagano
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.
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HUH?? I'm so confused LOL
- By ❤️Cyndi Marie❤️🎧Audiobook Addicts🎧 on 09-15-16
By: Tarryn Fisher
What listeners say about Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Barbara
- 09-19-23
Great stuff
I have truly enjoyed the collection of stories in this collection. My first time reading this author, looking forward to more.
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- deanna saul
- 09-28-21
I enjoyed these stories
I was surprised to find I liked ALL of the stories. I thought they were well written, creative, and definitely made me feel for the characters.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom Craven
- 11-15-17
Tremendous, thought-provoking storytelling
I heard the last story in this collection, "O Tannenbaum" on a podcast and found it so moving I immediately used an Audible credit to get the entire audiobook. I was not disappointed.
The stories are primarily set in the American West, and primarily character-driven portraits of desire and eventuality. They are at times somehow cinematic, and I daydreamed about making them into a series. Apparently this has already been done - a movie has, anyway - and I look forward to seeing it.
But I prefer audio, and it is for books like this. Warm, personal portraits perfectly tailored for audio. The reading performances, both male and female, are excellent. The only miss was mispronouncing the author's name at the very end of the book, which was more funny than anything.
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- Bella
- 02-21-22
A beautiful selection of short stories
Some of the stories had a surprising end
I felt that the stories were really smart.
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- KatSuri
- 10-14-23
Unexpected
The stories were delightfully unconventional. I loved the narration with the switching male/female perspectives. My only regret was that I wanted each story to become a novel!
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- Carmen Borrasé Povedano
- 10-17-21
Excellent
Richly detailed depictions of not so rare situations.
Great narration. New author for me; now going to find more of her books. Really really enjoyed this!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Robert from Santa Cruz
- 09-11-21
Compelling variety of stories
Each of these stories grabbed me. The characters, the writing style, the plots. What impressed me the most was that each story was so distinctively different. Highly recommended if you enjoy great tales, well told.
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- mary miller
- 09-14-22
Sweet short stories
Lovely short stories! If you are short for time, this is a great pick. A great listen.
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- Anna Rana
- 09-06-21
too sad
I was unable to finish this book because every single story had a sad ending. It was clear there would be no feel good moments, and I'd had enough. I left the last two chapters unread
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2 people found this helpful
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- solomon d.
- 03-19-21
Poignant Stories
These stories are expertly written, featuring characters that feel very real. I enjoy that most of the stories are around half an hour long, as for me at least that is a convenient length of time to listen to an audiobook. Both narrators do a perfect job.
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1 person found this helpful