Cleanness
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Narrated by:
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Garth Greenwell
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By:
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Garth Greenwell
About this listen
"Garth Greenwell's superb narration makes a powerful case for authors reading their own work. This bleak, honest novel is about the impossibility of knowing all the complicated truths of a person. Though the novel includes dialogue, Greenwell doesn't alter his voice as he shifts between characters, a choice that adds to the intensity and power of the first-person point of view." (BookTrib)
This program is read by the author.
In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.
In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student's confession recalls his own first love, a stranger's seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: With those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.
Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell's beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared "an instant classic" by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.
©2020 Garth Greenwell (P)2020 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020
Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2020
The Telegraph (UK) Best Books of the Year, 2020
New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2020
New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2020
NPR Best Book of the Year, 2020
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- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever - and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
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Prose style not to my liking
- By C.V. Cox on 10-18-20
By: V. E. Schwab
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The Gilda Stories
- By: Jewelle Gomez
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next 200 years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.
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A Critical and Timely Classic
- By Qasima Wideman on 08-09-19
By: Jewelle Gomez
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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Piece of Work
- Red Lipstick Coalition, Book 1
- By: Staci Hart
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Teddy Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
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His body is as chiseled as Adonis. His lips are as sculpted as David. And his ego is the size of the Guggenheim. You know the type: wolfish smile and the gravity of a black hole - the kind of man who sucks all the air from the room the second he enters it. My cocky boss thinks this internship was wasted on me, and he doesn’t hesitate to let me know. But he’s wrong, and I’m going to prove it to him. If I can stay away from his devil lips, that is....
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Very, very slow
- By Lisa Foster on 02-18-20
By: Staci Hart
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Outstanding. A Must listen.
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What listeners say about Cleanness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Maria Herrera
- 06-21-23
Beautiful writing
Ambiguities of experience are explored in a language that captures the struggle felt to understand oneself better if only to grasp onto something tangible. Beautiful writing, paced, deliberate in its choice of words.
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- Ronald Vincent Palmer
- 12-19-20
Loved his debut novel, this feels like notes for a money grab
If you were entranced by Garth Greenwell’s riveting debut novel, ‘What Belongs To You’, I recommend rereading it rather than reaching for Cleanness.
I’m a fan. I wanted to love it. The blurbs and accolades seem to be based on the first two chapters, which is typically all they read. But this effort is clearly notes and diaries that didn’t make the first cut or worse: an FSG money grab for the obsessive fans to purchase the follow up to his stunning debut.
I don’t know why they do this to such promising writers, but the market seems to demand another masterpiece ASAP.
The first novel feels like prose poems that took a decade to assemble. Cleanness is morose and rambling.
There are moments here that feel like a soap opera dashed off during vacation or worse: awkward marriage porn after stories of an adolescent erosion of trust and molestation.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Durm Guy
- 01-20-21
honest and heartfelt
I enjoyed Greenwell’s first novel and these stories continue the theme of an expat in Bulgaria dealing with cross cultural relationships and sex. Liked the author’s delivery—compelling but not overly dramatic.
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- T. Woolsey
- 12-31-20
Well written, but...
This book was tough to get through. It is a very detailed view of the inner life of a high school English teacher teaching in Bulgaria. The author uses his encounters with various men (who are invariably unavailable to him in one way or another) as an avenue towards self knowledge. There are extremely lengthy and extremely graphic descriptions of sexual encounters with his various partners. In the beginning the narrator is something of a doormat, but towards the end he is the cruel dominatrix only to sob after the encounter in which he beats his partner with a belt. I found the narrator to be so self absorbed - dwelling on every tiny feeling he is experiencing - that it began to annoy me. And then it just became boring. Fine reading of this book even though I have probably missed the point of it.
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- Michael Payne
- 03-08-20
Great narrator.
Last few sentences were quite good. Enjoyed some of the characters very much while some characters felt stereotypical. Narrator was very good.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jason
- 02-14-20
I miss the days when gay meant happy...
...but we’ve achieved peak misery with everyone else. And Greenwell is lyrical in his invocation of yearning unhappiness. This book reminded me Dale Peck’s Martin and John.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom
- 10-10-20
And they said gay fiction with psychological depth couldn’t be done.
But be advised that Greenwell’s depths are mostly cloudy with only occasional patches of sun. More troubling though is that the unnamed narrator never seems to learn anything from his mistakes. No plot points are digressions merely because there is no character arc to digress from. Sex happens, a lover comes and goes, attractions grow and then fizzle out, but for the narrator they are all equally uninstructive. For this reason Greenwell’s previous book What Belongs to You, also set in Sofia, Bulgaria is more satisfying because even though the narrator takes only a few hesitant baby steps towards self-knowledge, the story is really about Mitko, who, though sad, does have a substantial story.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 08-29-21
Lovely writing
… and presented to us just as beautifully by the author, a beautiful reader. Disconcerting, sensitive and poignant vignettes.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Paul
- 06-06-24
Beautiful writing
For me, What Belongs to You was a better, finer novel. This was more a collection of short stories, one of which I could only jump through as it was too violent for me. It involves pretty hard core BDSM. Another with that theme was quite troubling as well. Overt violence in sex is still violence and that is clear in those chapters. If you’re not wanting to be immersed in that experience, you may wish to skip those chapters. Overall, the stories were well told but didn’t really add up to much for me. The first novel was “of a piece” while this one was an exploration of tangents in the same locale. Garth is excellent at crafting gorgeous sentences. He reads his work smoothly, richly, and I was glad he did so again here.
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- Ben O
- 08-16-21
Deep
Very deep and emotional. This book make my think so much about what It means to be true to one's self and and what we owe each other.
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1 person found this helpful