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Everyman
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
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Grief Cottage
- By: Gail Godwin
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.
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Character story or ghost story ?
- By RueRue on 12-18-17
By: Gail Godwin
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Until I Say Good-Bye
- My Year of Living with Joy
- By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, Bret Witter
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Susan Spencer-Wendel's Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy is a moving and inspirational memoir by a woman who makes the most of her final days after discovering she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). After Spencer-Wendel, a celebrated journalist at the Palm Beach Post, learns of her diagnosis of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, she embarks on several adventures, traveling to several countries and sharing special experiences with loved ones.
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Until I Say Good-Bye is a paradox for me.
- By Bonny on 03-19-13
By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, and others
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A Journal for Jordan (Movie Tie-In)
- A Story of Love and Honor
- By: Dana Canedy
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2005, Dana Canedy’s fiancé, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, began to write what would become a 200-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. He was killed by a roadside bomb on October 14, 2006. His son, Jordan, was seven months old. Inspired by his example, Dana was determined to preserve his memory for their son. A Journal for Jordan is a mother’s fiercely honest letter to her child about the parent he lost before he could even speak. It is also a father’s advice and prayers for the son he will never know.
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SAD
- By valerie on 12-12-21
By: Dana Canedy
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Your Heart, My Hands
- An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become One of America's Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons
- By: Arun K. Singh MD, John Hanc - contributor, Delos Cosgrove MD - foreword
- Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Leaving a life marked by crippling setbacks and his father's doubt, in 1967 a 20-something doctor from India arrived in America with only five dollars and the desire to claim his American dream. Faced with an entirely new culture, racism, and the lasting effects of disabling childhood injuries, through hard work and perseverance he overcame all odds. Now having performed over 15,000 open-heart surgeries, more than nearly every surgeon in history, Dr. Singh reflects on his most memorable patients and his incredible personal life.
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Remarkable!
- By Stacey on 12-01-22
By: Arun K. Singh MD, and others
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Day John Died
- By: Christopher Andersen
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Kennedy family biographer Christopher Andersen makes The Day John Died available for the first time as an ebook. Andersen draws on important sources - many talking here for the first time - to recreate in vivid and startling detail the events leading up to that fateful night off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. An inspiring, sympathetic, and compelling look at one of the most remarkable young men of our time, The Day John Died is more than just the definitive biography of JFK Jr. It is a bittersweet saga of triumph, love, loss, fate - and promise unfulfilled.
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Death and an Amazing Life
- By Admiralu on 07-21-19
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It's a God Thing
- When Miracles Happen to Everyday People
- By: Don Jacobson
- Narrated by: Matt Baugher, Brooke Bryant, Nan Gurley, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Series creators Don Jacobson and K-LOVE Radio have joined together to produce one of the most remarkable collections of modern-day miracles ever compiled. From angel appearances in hospital rooms to a mother saved from a would-be assailant in Hyde Park, from a young autistic girl becoming a beautiful ballerina overnight to a young backpacker who walked away from a terrorist attack, It’s a God Thing presents some of the most amazing stories of God’s hand on our lives.
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What an absolute blessing
- By Anthea on 11-05-15
By: Don Jacobson
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
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Patrimony
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Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.
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You must not forget anything
- By Darwin8u on 06-19-18
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Operation Shylock
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In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.
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The Counterlife
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The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
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Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
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The Human Stain
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It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America—a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral: Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. What follows is “terrific…inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review).
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Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
- By Jerome D. Blake on 12-13-23
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Patrimony
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Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.
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You must not forget anything
- By Darwin8u on 06-19-18
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Operation Shylock
- A Confession
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In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.
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The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
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Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
- By G. Benett on 10-03-19
By: Philip Roth
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The Human Stain
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 13 hrs
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It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America—a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
By: Philip Roth
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When She Was Good
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
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When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
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Goodbye, Columbus
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Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
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A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
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The Great American Novel
- By: Philip Roth
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Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it’s because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
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Nemesis
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Joachim Schönfeld
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Newark 1944. In der Stadt bricht eine schreckliche Polioepidemie aus. Die meisten Betroffenen sind Kinder...
By: Philip Roth
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The Professor of Desire
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself “a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that “ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time”—Village Voice.
By: Philip Roth
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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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The Humbling
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else.
By: Philip Roth
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My Life as a Man
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Philip Roth’s most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it.
By: Philip Roth
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Everyman
- A Morality Play
- By: Saland Publishing
- Narrated by: Burgess Meredith
- Length: 57 mins
- Abridged
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> Everyman is a late 15th-century English morality play. "Here begins a treatise [tale] of how the high Father of Heaven sends Death to summon every creature to come and give account of their lives in this world, told in the form of a morality play". Nothing is known of the author, but it is performed here by actor Burgess Meredith.
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Loved Everyman
- By Anonymous User on 12-12-19
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Indignation
- By: Philip Roth
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- Unabridged
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In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
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Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
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The New York Trilogy
- By: Paul Auster
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.
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Perhaps more interesting than important
- By Darwin8u on 10-04-13
By: Paul Auster
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- By: Raymond Carver
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Raymond Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark.
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Great stories, awful performance
- By Victor Capo on 02-14-19
By: Raymond Carver
What listeners say about Everyman
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- Paul
- 05-28-18
Fabulous Phillip Roth
Roth explores the thoughts that go through an aged man. Most older men will relate. Reader was spectacular. The words of Roth are like hands flowing through snow
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. Trimble
- 11-07-23
A book that will stick with me
This book encapsulates what it feels like to be an “Everyman” in America. It authentically describes a lot of the feelings you experience as you go through life, deal with its challenges, and search for purpose.
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- B. Leddy
- 09-27-11
awesome
Scary portrait of old age amidst a life with no depth and no faith in anything. Writing is incredible.
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Overall
- Michael
- 07-01-06
Excellent reading
George Guidall is an excellent reader for Roth's novella -- unlike many other readers, he doesn't overact, and simply gets out of the way of Roth's prose. Recommended.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Welson Oliveira
- 07-21-19
Audiobook: great! Book: not so much.
The audiobook (performance) is better than the book itself. It's the first book I read from Philip Roth and I don't feel like picking another one from the author - half of the book I read in paperback. But I would for certain listen to another record by George Guidall! He was just great.
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Overall
- JOHN
- 05-31-06
Full Frontal Roth
This is a powerful book. If you are looking for a happy ending, denouement, or epiphany – look elsewhere. Right off the bat this book begins at the end, the funeral of the main, nameless character. So there are no illusions about how the story ends. But that’s really the point, because that is how the story ends for every human. Says the author, ‘old age isn’t a war- it’s a massacre.’
In a short space the back-story is filled in; from the main character’s childhood, his loving, Jewish parents, his doting big brother to his three failed marriages, his career uncertainty, his selfless daughter and estranged sons. Throughout, his medical history is detailed, along with his hypochondriacal dread. All of this is related in perfect Philip Roth unflinching fashion. And if this sounds dry, it is anything but. Roth skillfully lays bare the humanity of each character in only the way this author can.
This book will make the listener look at his or hers own life and mortality and I must say that it impacted me as strongly as any novel in recent history.
As with all Roth’s novels one can’t help but wonder that some of the material is autobiographical. Just how much is or isn’t makes no matter, because it could be universally autobiographical… for every man and woman.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Doggy Bird
- 03-24-13
Excellent narration, my favorite American author
This was a pleasure to hear, such an intelligent book. George Guidall's narration profits from the fact that he seems very comfortable and familiar with the text and its meaning as well as a generally pleasant voice.
I love Philip Roth's novels best of all American fiction, and this effort is a touching though short examination of the struggle with our common fate - to be one day full of life and loving life and the next day to die.
This particular struggle to understand his unavoidable fate concerns one man, very much from New Jersey, whose funeral opens the novella. His life and his work are seen through the prism of his relationships to those who attend his funeral. But the book seems (as so many of Roth's books do) as a personal cri de coeur, a struggle to understand illness in a man whose older brother has never been ill and to understand why he is so alone after so much love and passion in the first six decades of his life.
What I love so much about Roth's writing is the depth of his quest to understand how to live via an incredibly rational intelligence and a great feel for the absurd anchored in a time and American place. Not every book is perfect, but they are all better than most. Roth could only have written in America, not anywhere else in the world - his novels are those of immigrants and their succeeding generations and very anchored in the places and time in which he has lived. Perhaps that is what the Swedes say they don't like in Philip Roth's work - I recently read a comment that Americans don't get Nobel prizes because they are too 'narrow'.....but that is what I love about Roth's novels, how they illuminate what is unique about this time and place in America.
His later novels touch me at a level few authors can reach because they ask the most fundamental questions about life and love and fate while addressing our connection to time and place with an affection and an attention to detail that is unique. In 'American Pastoral' his discussion of Newark and the glove industry are like a paean to the artistry and craft of that time. In 'Everymen' he gives the same treatment to the jewelry trade in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He is able to represent the beauties of the world as it was when he grew up without suggesting that the past was better than the present. He pays tribute to the virtues of the past without worshiping it as better than today. He gives a sense for the nature of generations as they recede from the generations of immigrants who came here.
Roth writes of the landscape of his life with such detail and love, it always makes me emotional to talk about why I love his books so much.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Dave Smith
- 10-13-08
Grim, but worth the time
I listened to Everyman as a 48 year old who just starting to notice the accumulating effects of various abuses done to character, body, and mind. The book is honest, and yes, rather stark. Mr. Roth aptly describes life's arc and I am glad to have listened to this reading at this time in my life. As another listener already wrote, this is not a fun story. It provoked serious reflection.
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- BB
- 04-28-22
Buy ir!
It is every man. Probably women to... Though you have to ask that question and answer it for yourself...
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 07-01-06
Abused by the Narrator
I am giving this book a hefty four stars just because the writing level is Philiip Roth delivering his usual consistent quality, his facility with language much in evidence, his brilliance in targeted metaphor, and his characters meticulously drawn and never cliched. And he is one of our national literary treasures, along with Updike, Charles Frazier ("Cold Mountain") and Anne Tyler. There are other writers I've missed, but, contrary to belief in some circles, literature seems to be thriving as our national art form at the moment. Not that we always need a national art form, but I disagree that "the novel is dead".
Roth also gets special points for taking an "everystory" in which nothing unusual happens, a plot that unfolds day in and day out in lives across the country and all over the world, and turning it into a narrative with magnetic appeal and drama in detail. Isn't that what writing is about, really, the small everyday details?
But the story suffers from the narrrator's contribution. I respect Guidall's vast experience as an interpreter of audiobooks but in this case he just doesn't forge that critical bond with Roth. Throwing lines away, muttering like a sixtysomething curmudgeon himself, he removes any possible intimacy with the story and with its characters.
It compares negatively to the sensitive reading of Roth's "The Human Stain" by Arliss Howard, in which his rendering of lyrical phrases gave me chills and was the equivalent of listening to a musical work as significant as Handel's "Messiah" for example.
Instead of portraying a sensitive man dealing with the everyday challenges of a pedestrian life, Guidall gives us an oldish fuddy-duddy, sounding much like the aging, annoying uncle who appears at holiday dinners. Ergo four stars, not five.
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6 people found this helpful