
Crossroads
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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David Pittu
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By:
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Jonathan Franzen
About this listen
"Narrator David Pittu superbly transports the listener into the lives of the Hildebrandts, a family with many secrets." - AudioFile Magazine
This program includes a bonus conversation between the author, Jonathan Franzen, and the narrator, David Pittu.
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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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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How to Be Alone
- Essays
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen, Brian d'Arcy James
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.
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The first story is the best
- By Susan S. on 01-20-14
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Guest
- A Novel
- By: Emma Cline
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her.
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We’ve known an Alex
- By Will Cathcart on 06-20-23
By: Emma Cline
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The Corrections
- A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Kelly Burke, Colin Stinton, Richard Schiff, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to 'one last Christmas' together near the turn of the millennium. A family saga, that sits against the backdrop of this century's changing face of America, the novel was published 10 days before 9/11 but is widely considered an observation of what happened to the American psyche after 9/11.
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Don't use your valuable audible credit on this!!
- By Linda M. Gulyn on 09-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Liberation Day
- Stories
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Tina Fey, Michael McKean, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
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Extraordinary
- By REBECCA on 10-18-22
By: George Saunders
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Crossroads
- Haven River Ranch
- By: Devney Perry
- Narrated by: Samantha Brentmoor, Connor Crais
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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I met West Haven when I was eight years old. He taught me to play poker when I was nine, and we made paper airplanes together when I was eleven. He kissed me when I was sixteen. He was the best part about my family’s summer vacations to Montana. He was the boy who stole my heart. I was twenty-three when life ripped us apart. Years later, I’m breaking my vow and returning to the ranch, not as a guest but its new owner. West might want me gone, but even he has to admit the only way to save his family’s legacy is with my help.
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🩵🩵Loved it!🩵🩵
- By 🌼Daisy H. on 07-18-24
By: Devney Perry
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Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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A Visit from the Goon Squad
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
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Deep and dazzling novel, brilliantly read!
- By J. W. Coop on 06-29-19
By: Jennifer Egan
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American Predator
- The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
- By: Maureen Callahan
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most people have never heard of Israel Keyes, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in modern history American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.
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Why you shouldn’t listen to Reviews
- By jofi00 on 10-23-19
By: Maureen Callahan
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Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
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tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
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The Flamethrowers
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family.
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Overrated
- By Amazon Customer on 09-30-24
By: Rachel Kushner
Less than! an hour in and I'm hooked...
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post book interview - awesome!
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Great story, not-so-great narrator
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Technically brilliant, philosophically pointless
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It's complicated.
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Insightful, engrossing, brilliantly narrated
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Still, I held on till the end and became engrossed in the narrative. If this was a book club read I would look forward to hashing out all the drivers and motivations, all the strengths, flaws, and especially the lies that reveal the human frailties showcased herein.
Convoluted, like life. Stay with it.
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Another Franzen Gem
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what a pleasure
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Loved this book
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