Dead in Long Beach, California
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Lynnette Freeman
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By:
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Venita Blackburn
About this listen
Long-listed, Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2024
Long-listed, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2024
"This book rewired my brain; it's a bonafide knockout."—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
"You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do."—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives
A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality, from a soon-to-be superstar.
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.
Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.
A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 Venita Blackburn (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Despite the heavy subject matter, sensitively handled, this is frequently a deeply funny novel . . . Blackburn shares a deep intellect and odd sensibility with authors like George Saunders and Rion Amilcar Scott, but this novel is its own thing: intelligent, bizarre, and brilliantly written. An astonishing debut novel from a remarkably creative writer."—Kirkus (starred review)
"An engaging and original portrait of a woman on the verge . . . Blackburn is formidable, her writing is experimental in intriguing and meaningful ways, and this is another winner."—Booklist
"Bold and formally inventive . . . Blackburn is an excellent prose stylist. Coral’s sections are full of acerbic wit . . . This ambitious effort is worth a look."—Publishers Weekly
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It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.
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A Revelation!
- By wotsallthisthen on 04-07-24
By: George Orwell, and others
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The Art of War
- By: Sun Tzu
- Narrated by: Aidan Gillen
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.
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The actual book The Art of War, not a commentary
- By Nemo71 on 12-31-19
By: Sun Tzu
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Dead Med
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso, Scott Merriman
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Heather McKinley dreamed of becoming a doctor, she imagined curing sick kids and sporting pink stethoscopes. She never anticipated the sleepless nights, grueling exams, and endless labs. And she certainly never knew that her medical school earned the nickname Dead Med thanks to the tragic history of students overdosing on illegal drugs. But Heather would never consider doing anything like that. That is, until her longtime boyfriend dumps her, she finds herself failing anatomy, and her world starts to crumble.
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Hmm
- By Morgan Meaux on 08-22-24
By: Freida McFadden
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In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide.
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Beautiful, powerful book full of poetry
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Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
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Wow!
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Actor chewing noises disgusting. Did not finish.
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mesmerizing
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Frustrating
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Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.
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Not Netherland.
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Not the political story I expected
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The Empusium
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September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.
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Never ending Misogyny
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I did not enjoy this
- By MarcB on 09-17-24
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Wild Houses
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The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
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Insider look at a small crime
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What listeners say about Dead in Long Beach, California
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jeffrey Kazin
- 12-23-24
a pretentious slog
some of the most pretentious, calculated, inauthentic writing -- and reading -- I've experienced in some time. interesting concepts and notions, simply ham-handed.
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- Tedd Adams
- 09-15-24
What a disjointed mess
The premise sounded very interesting and I was looking forward to this one. The execution, however, could hardly be any worse. If this was meant to be a commentary on our over-stimulated, excessively distracted world, it works for that. But in telling a cohesive, comprehensible narrative, it falls far short.
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- Alison
- 01-25-24
Too much fluff
Get to the point of the story I can’t finish as it’s so annoying the vast amount of digressions
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- Maggie
- 02-01-24
BORING
Disliked the entire story. Couldn't finish it. Would not recommend. Should have saved the credit.
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- Dr Ag
- 02-25-24
Great Literary Work
Great literary work - This book covers complex and some socially charged subject matter. If readers take an objective approach to this work, the heart of each storyteller is exposed with deep insights about developmental years through adulthood that shape the character and life of individuals portrayed. Patience is a virtue that pays off if readers give this book its due attention!
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1 person found this helpful