Dhalgren
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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By:
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Samuel R. Delany
About this listen
In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and best-selling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel that rivals the best American fiction of the 1970s.
Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there...the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - a poet, a lover, and an adventurer - known only as the Kid.
Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and a groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
©1975 Samuel R. Delany (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Kate Rudd
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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After her father's funeral, Zoe moved to the big city with her mother to start over. But change always brings trials, and life in the city is not so easy. Money is tight, and Zoe's only escape, as has always been the case, is in her dreams - a world apart from her troubled real life where she can spend time with her closest companion: her lost brother, Valentine.
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Cool idea that wanders around.
- By Caseym on 04-03-16
By: Richard Kadrey
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Magic to the Bone
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- By: Devon Monk
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- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
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Everything has a cost. And every act of magic exacts a price from its user---maybe a two-day migraine, or losing the memory of your first kiss. But some people want to use magic without paying, and they Offload the cost onto innocents. When that happens, it falls to a Hound to identify the spell's caster---and Allison Beckstrom is the best there is.
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Good start to a Great series
- By Dana on 12-30-11
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The Happy Man
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Charles Ripley has a good job as an engineer, a pretty wife, and an expensive house in a fashionable San Diego suburb. But it isn't until Ruskin Marsh moves in next door that Ripley realizes how passionless his life really is. Marsh, a connoisseur of the arts, high-powered lawyer, model husband and father, and effortless seducer of women, is so supremely alive that Ripley finds himself irresistibly drawn to him. But after Marsh's arrival, local girls begin to vanish, marriages end violently, and horribly mutilated corpses are found.
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a neighborhood friend telling you a crazy story
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Good People
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The $400,000 would take care of the mortgage payments that are starting to back up on Tom and Anna Reed. It would cover the credit-card debt they can't get out from under. It would help them find a way to have the child they desperately want but can't seem to conceive. It is more money than either of them has ever seen in one place. But they have no idea what it's doing in their house.
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What were the producers thinking?
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Passenger
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Best friends Jack and Conner can’t stay away from Marbury. It’s partly because of their obsession with this alternate world and the unresolved war that still wages there. But it’s also because forces in Marbury - including the darkest of the dark, who were not revealed in The Marbury Lens - are beckoning the boys back in order to save their friends… and themselves.
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plot twist at the end of the book 🤤🤤
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The Replacement
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Mackie is a Replacement — left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is slowly dying in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live among us. He just wants to play bass guitar and find out more about an oddly intriguing girl named Tate. But when Tate’s baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem....
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Undecided
- By K on 01-07-11
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The Marbury Lens
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Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time: he is kidnapped, but escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for their summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury. There is war in Marbury, which is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys.
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Like an addiction, I just couldn't stop listening.
- By Gini McKellar on 11-24-10
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Zombies: More Recent Dead
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The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.
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A well blended mix
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Brighton
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Kevin Pearce - baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton - was 15 when he left town in the back of his uncle's cab. He and his buddy, Bobby Scales, had just committed heinous violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn't want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin's future would remain as bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work, except in Brighton things never work the way they're supposed to.
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Mystery gets no better.
- By William H. Harrington on 10-27-18
By: Michael Harvey
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What listeners say about Dhalgren
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- M.Biblioswine
- 01-22-24
A great book
This is a thoughtful and great piece of literature. I don't typically like stories with explicit sex and vulgar language in it. I don't know why but Samuel Delany and William S. Burroughs are exceptions for me. It is as though those parts of their books blend in with the.parts I focus on and enjoy.
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- PIZZAKNIFE
- 04-21-21
Absolutely enthralling and insane.
The writing style, subject matter, characters and setting create a vision of confusing beauty and palpable terror. A precious gem and my new all time favorite novel
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1 person found this helpful
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- Steven Tomlinson
- 05-20-23
Excruciatingly Boring
I kept hoping it would get better. Even the graphic sex within the first 5 minutes was uninteresting. 1 hour in and I have no idea what this is about. I can’t take another.
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- Christopher
- 04-17-20
Great book, made more accessible by a great reader
This review is mostly about Rudnicki as narrator.
Dhalgren is an experimental novel in every way--form, genre, ethics, erotics, tone, temporal structure, you name it. No matter who voices this book, it will challenge a lot of readers. But honestly, I think Rudnicki gives first timers a lot of help. Rudnicki is a "heavy" reader, slow and careful. But in passage after passage, he helps cue the listener to multiple levels of meaning. Honestly, this is one of the best enhancements of a difficult novel by an intelligent narrator; five stars aren't enough for what Rudnicki accomplishes here.
Note: Delany plays with typescript and page design in a few places in Dhalgren, and there's no way Rudnicki can really "voice" those things. So if you want the full experience of every single passage, especially in the last section of the book, you'll have to get a paper copy (the Vintage one is fine). But, that aside, there's nothing lacking here.
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6 people found this helpful
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- James
- 02-28-16
The Most Disturbing, Enlightening Novel
Dhalgren is different than any book I have ever read. When it was first recommended to me, that friend told me, " This book turns everything you know on its head." That description was absolutely spot on. Delaney shows us, to an unbelievable extent, what is truly possible with language. From his poetic prose, to his vivid, explicit description of a society in the throes of social anarchy/mutual aid... Delaney astounds. This modern myth challenged me to the core - psychologically, philosophically, and morally. Hades is alive and real in the heart of America and the mind of our young Hermes, which we come to know affectionately as "the Kid".
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- epiphanyp7a
- 02-28-16
Not for casual readers
Would you try another book from Samuel R. Delany and/or Stefan Rudnicki?
Samuel R Delany's Sci-Fi books are great. However Dhalgren is not really a sci-fi book. It is an exploration of experimental prose and poetry. Don't get me wrong, there are moments of genius in the chaos.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
There are a handful of powerful scenes in the book that are highly realistic. In fact, it is believed that some of the content has been adapted from Delany's own personal experiences. This would not be surprising.The weakest aspect of Dhalgren is it's length. If the book was cut in half, it would be more mainstream.
Any additional comments?
Overall Dhalgren is worth your time if you are a general lover of the written word, who is looking for something a little bit different, maybe even slightly insane.
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- mark roller
- 07-17-17
Interminable!<br />
The most alienated and alienating thing I have ever read. Boring, pretentious, chaotic and filled with explicit sex devoid of feeling. I wouldn't call it science fiction, but I would say it's an artifact of the sixties whose appeal will be pretty limited.
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- kwdayboise (Kim Day)
- 04-08-17
A classic I return to every few years
I am required to go back to this book every few years. The first book by Delany I ever read was Babel-17 when I was in high school. I enjoyed it. I and several high school friends also read Einstein Intersection and were blown away. One step closer to fanboy. Shortly after high school it seemed like every time I went to the drug store or supermarket the book rack had a copy of Dhalgren. This gigantic book with a strange cover. I finally broke down and bought it and was immediately hooked.
It’s interesting coming back to the book after several years. The book is overtly sexual. And not just sexual but polyamorous with what ends up being a threesome among the main character Kidd, a woman named Lanya, and a gang member named Denny. I think that was a partial draw, but the book in general with its setting in a mysterious city of Bellona and the odd interaction in the entire city kept me sailing through what, at that time, was the longest book I’d ever read.
It’s important to state that the book makes no real sense. It’s as psychedelic a book as you might get from the era (it was first published in 1975). I worried that I might be missing something or was too dense to understand some subtext. I was relieved, then, that the latest edition I read included an introduction by William Gibson, no illiterate regarding science fiction, in which he said that as much as he loved the book he didn’t understand it. The book is an enigma, It has a plot, carries along that plot. But what happened in Bellona? No one knows. It’s a city with its own individual apocalypse that doesn’t seemed to have gone beyond the city’s borders. The inhabitants are drawn from different places as if the city demanded their presence. They also seem to have difficulty leaving, or at least of finding their way out. Within the city limits there are codes but no laws. People scrounge for food but no one goes hungry. It’s a dangerous place and yet there’s a newspaper, a higher society, and some semblance of being a city but with no true government. Sexuality is casual and random, but Kidd’s threesome has familial affection for each other.
Kidd is a mystery throughout the book. Arriving in the city with amnesia after an apparent stay in a mental hospital. He finds a partially filled notebook and begins writing poetry on the blank pages. Almost as suddenly he stops writing but a book of his poems manages to get published. He takes work with a family in which the wife, at least, seems to be in denial about what’s happening around her, trying to live a normal life despite the strange noises outside her apartment. Even the name of the book is a mystery, with one fleeting reference to a man with the surname Dhalgren on a list of names.
After finishing the book I became a Delany addict, tearing through all the books I could find. (I’ve seen similar obsessions with Frank Herbert fans.) But I don’t think until I read Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories that I got a grip about what I loved in Delany and sought out in other science fiction or fiction in general: a sense of freedom and a traveler’s eye. I don’t think one really understands their surroundings until they leave them for awhile. And while travelling or experiencing another country (or another world) one gets perspective on what has been so entwined with you that it becomes invisible. The new world, too, seems brighter. Every small detail has meaning and consequence that have been lost in the things you leave behind. This is wonder. This is magic. Delany’s writings have that sense of wonder and magic while still managing to have taken on some of the deeper themes in literature.
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36 people found this helpful
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- W. Allen
- 05-11-16
The Human Story Always Captures the Reader
I find the depth of character emersive. The level of detail is astounding. One could make a movie, but you would lose the ordinary motovations of the characters. I'm not keen on the perverse as sodomy pervades the book. I think it provides a bleak normal the characters must accept to stay alive since sodomy appears to be a currency as does sex. Most stories have people running away from their bad circumstances, but these young people appear more willing to adapt to it. One has to wonder what has happened to the rest of the world. Dalgren is a deeper look into people than Ben Bova's "City of Darkness", which I enjoyed grearly. I'm sure I wil listen again!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Morris Nelms
- 09-10-21
Magnum opus
This novel is unique. I say that having read lots of novels. Delany takes us to a fictional city where something has happened. No one knows exactly what has happened. The laws of physics are not as applicable here as elsewhere. The main character is already struggling with his own perception of reality, and when you add the circumstances of the "autumnal city" to the mix, things get really bizarre. If you are looking for a linear plot, look elsewhere. If you don't mind having your brains scrambled a bit, and finding yourself amazed at the final pages, go for it. If you don't think you like SF, don't worry. This is SF, but it is so far removed from the traditional conventions of SF that lots of SF people trashed this book when it came out. Yet it is his most popular book, and with good reason. It is probably his most remarkable book, but he is a remarkable writer, so it's hard to say.
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