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Stories
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Alice Munro
About this listen
A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time.
Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.
While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the audiobook ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.
Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
©2012 Alice Munro (P)2012 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Both Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey lend intuitive pacing to their nuanced performances of these works. The listener becomes steeped in the meaning and beauty of Munro's stories by virtue of the performers' deliberate pacing. They give each one the focus that is essential for the concentrated prose of the short story genre. Further, they convey the sense of profundity that these stories evoke with eloquent and clear deliveries." (AudioFile)
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
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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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The Plot Against America
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ron Silver
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
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Life is imitating Roth's art
- By Matthew on 08-04-16
By: Philip Roth
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
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Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
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Tenth of December
- Stories
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.
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Be prepared for something different...but good!
- By Mr. D on 02-21-14
By: George Saunders
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
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Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
How could the performance have been better?
Each of the short stories in this collection is read by a man or a woman. Neither reader is very good. All male voices performed by the female reader sound the same, and the female reader's inflection was completely inappropriate -- even occasionally changing the intended meaning or preventing it from being understood. Unfortunately, this stood in the way of my enjoyment of the stories, as well as my being able to learn anything from them. Very distracting. It's a shame; Alice Munro is supposed to be the best.....Poor narration CAN ruin an audiobook...
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Munro is an outstanding short story writer.
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Fantastic short stories
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Any additional comments?
Many of the stories had little plot, but instead pivoted on a small realization.I liked "Corrie" much better than the rest of the story because it had plot, excellent characterization, and a pivotal realization.
However, there was something more - effective use of the Unreliable Narrator (she adopts Howard's POV early on to give the reader information stated as fact, then later adopts Corrie's POV to state contradictory information as fact) to suggest a resolution that was never actually stated.
***(SPOILER ALERT)***
Many reviewers conclude (as Corrie apparently did) that Howard had been pocketing the blackmail money that supposedly was going to Sadie.
Let's assume that Sadie received that money and donated it to the church to pay for the new steeple, which Howard was then paid to design and build.
Remember how the parishioners all thought that Sadie was "a rare person", and they all knew who Corrie was, even though she didn't know them?
The deeper irony is that the new steeple was directly counter to the philosophy and wishes of Corrie's now-deceased father, who had hired the architect in the beginning of the story, which was how Howard the architect and Corrie met.
Remember how Corrie's father despised modern church buildings, and hired Howard to build a traditional one?
So, ultimately, the father's money paid for a steeple he would have despised.
"Corrie" was the best storrie
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Bit too slow
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Disappointed in this book
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Performance
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so so
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Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
yupWhat was one of the most memorable moments of Dear Life?
I would only say that I somewhat preferred the earlier stories to the final autobiographical notes.Have you listened to any of Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey ’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I found her a bit limited. ALL of her men sounded the same. Not just voice but inflections. I actually found this a bit distracting. On a few occasions, I thought that her emphasis was misplaced. But generally acceptable.Could you see Dear Life being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
oh for goodness' sake! who thinks up these questions?Any additional comments?
Yes. Why in the world not leave at least 5 seconds between stories. I generally listen while driving - and frequently in the dark. So it's not that easy or safe to dive for the 'pause' button. A good short story - and these are - sometimes ends beautifully and abruptly, leaving the listener lost in thought. But no time for that here! We've got to push on to the next story pronto!!! Not even two heartbeats to absorb the ending.PLEASE reconsider this policy.shimmering gems - jammed into too small a space
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Pleasantly captivating
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