
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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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.
- By Amazon Customer on 10-31-24
By: Joseph O'Neill
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The Stardust Grail
- A Novel
- By: Yume Kitasei
- Narrated by: Katharine Chin
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future. Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it.
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Pronouns are out of control
- By C P on 09-11-24
By: Yume Kitasei
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The Coin
- A Novel
- By: Yasmin Zaher
- Narrated by: Sarah Agha
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
- By amybarnard on 08-03-24
By: Yasmin Zaher
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Beautyland
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she's different: she possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings.
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Unforgettable
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-24
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Shred Sisters
- A Novel
- By: Betsy Lerner
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life.
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Fairly common storyline
- By Placeholder on 10-22-24
By: Betsy Lerner
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Language City
- The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
- By: Ross Perlin
- Narrated by: Ross Perlin
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century, and when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and codirector of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.
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Fascinating Read
- By annei on 06-02-24
By: Ross Perlin
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The Pairing
- By: Casey McQuiston
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin, Max Meyers
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all. Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris.
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good story but distracting narrator
- By Kindle Customer on 08-10-24
By: Casey McQuiston
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Piglet
- A Novel
- By: Lottie Hazell
- Narrated by: Rebekah Hinds
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.
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Revelation through Food
- By M.A. on 10-07-24
By: Lottie Hazell
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The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
- A Novel
- By: Janice Hallett
- Narrated by: Annie Aldington, Nneka Okoye, Gareth Armstrong, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared.
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Actor chewing noises disgusting. Did not finish.
- By Schwarzian on 03-12-24
By: Janice Hallett
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Great Expectations
- A Novel
- By: Vinson Cunningham
- Narrated by: Aaron Goodson
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life in this “coming of age story that captures the soul of America” (The Washington Post), the debut novel from The New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Vinson Cunningham.
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Not the political story I expected
- By Aeroduncan on 12-19-24
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Neighbors and Other Stories
- By: Diane Oliver
- Narrated by: Emana Rachelle
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
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mesmerizing
- By Dee in Philly on 02-26-24
By: Diane Oliver
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Praiseworthy
- By: Alexis Wright
- Narrated by: Jacqui Katona
- Length: 36 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Guy on 11-11-24
By: Alexis Wright
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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2 people found this helpful