I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
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Narrated by:
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Jim Meskimen
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By:
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Howard Norman
About this listen
A memoir of the haunting and redemptive events of the acclaimed writer's life - the betrayal of a con-man father; a murder-suicide in his family's house; the presence of an oyster catcher - each one, as the saying goes, stranger than fiction.
As with many of us, the life of novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of "arresting strangeness." Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman's story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a drifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales - including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is, "I hate to leave this beautiful place" - and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. In the Arctic, he receives news over the radio that "John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA." And years later, in Washington, DC, another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. Norman's story is also stitched together with moments of uncanny solace. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse Norman writes, "Everything I love most happens most every day."
In the hands of Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter, life's arresting strangeness is made into a profound, creative, and redemptive memoir.
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"'I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place' is a quiet, strong, introspective, patient, expansive memoir, and it benefits from an unusually sensitive delivery by Jim Meskiman, a reader wise enough to avoid the trap of overperformance now endemic to audiobook narrators." (Kyle Minor, Salon)
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Story
The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Insomniac City
- New York, Oliver, and Me
- By: Bill Hayes
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
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Touching and Intimate Portrait
- By Amazon Customer on 01-18-19
By: Bill Hayes
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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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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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They Left Us Everything
- A Memoir
- By: Plum Johnson
- Narrated by: Pilar Witherspoon
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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After almost 20 years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father and then for their cantankerous 93-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined.
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Thought provoking
- By Margaret on 05-02-17
By: Plum Johnson
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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The Great Spring
- Writing, Zen, and This ZigZag Life
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.
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An enjoyable insight
- By Leigh A on 05-22-23
By: Natalie Goldberg
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The Great Failure
- A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Original Recording
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"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.
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If you have been let down by anyone. Listen
- By Mia on 04-19-18
By: Natalie Goldberg
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After Visiting Friends
- A Son's Story
- By: Michael Hainey
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone.
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Son's Search for Father Brings on Self-knowledge
- By sheila kehoe on 08-15-13
By: Michael Hainey
What listeners say about I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ray Stewart
- 07-26-24
Quirky
This memoir of Howard Norman's life had its ups and downs in terms of interest for me, but overall I did enjoy it. I especially liked Norman's description of his boyhood summer where he worked in a bookmobile. I had read Howard Norman's book, The Bird Artist, many years ago. That book was quirky too.
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- Sandy
- 03-22-15
Gentle, entertaining look back on a man's life
I enjoyed this gentle, entertaining look back on a man's life. The reader had a perfect voice for this story.
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