Improvement
A Novel
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By:
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Joan Silber
About this listen
One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them.
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect; yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker's Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far-off places - and loves - around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.
A novel that examines conviction, connection, repayment, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki's beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna's body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.
©2017 Joan Silber (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Young Hearts Crying
- By: Richard Yates
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship in the 1950s to their divorce in the '70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II, and at first he and his new wife, Lucy, enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates a fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation.
By: Richard Yates
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Digging Up Mother
- A Love Story
- By: Johnny Depp - foreword, Doug Stanhope
- Narrated by: Doug Stanhope and Friends
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Doug Stanhope is one of the most critically acclaimed and stridently unrepentant comedians of his generation. What will surprise some is that he owes so much of his dark and sometimes uncomfortably honest sense of humor to his mother, Bonnie.
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Not my thing.
- By J. Harral on 01-27-18
By: Johnny Depp - foreword, and others
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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Mislaid
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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The Turner House
- By: Angela Flournoy
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over 50 years. Their house has seen 13 children grown and gone - and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a 10th of its mortgage.
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The narrator's performance made the difference.
- By KT on 06-11-15
By: Angela Flournoy
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The Last Picture Show
- Thalia Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Larry McMurtry
- Narrated by: John Randolph Jones
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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An almost-true story about a small town in Texas that ought to exist if it doesn’t, with characters like Sam the Lion, the delectable Jacy, and Ruth Popper, the coach’s wife. Set in a small, dusty, Texas town, The Last Picture Show introduced the characters of Jacy, Duane, and Sonny: teenagers stumbling toward adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.
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Not very good
- By Randall on 07-02-17
By: Larry McMurtry
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Miss Fortune
- Fresh Perspectives on Having It All from Someone Who Is Not Okay
- By: Lauren Weedman
- Narrated by: Lauren Weedman
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Weedman is not okay. She's living what should be the good life in sunny Los Angeles. After a gig as a correspondent with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she scored parts in blockbuster movies, which led to memorable recurring roles on HBO's Hung and Looking. She had a loving husband and an adorable baby boy. In these comedic essays, she turns a piercingly observant, darkly funny lens on the ways her life is actually not okay.
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Good
- By Ajules29 on 04-02-16
By: Lauren Weedman
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God-Shaped Hole
- A Novel
- By: Tiffanie DeBartolo
- Narrated by: Rachael Warren
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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When Beatrice Trixie Jordan replies to a personal ad, she meets Jacob Grace, a charming, effervescent 30-something free-spirit writer passionately seeking life. He possesses his own turns of phrase and ways of thinking and feeling that dissonantly harmonize with Trixie's off-center vision. As they rollercoaster through the joys and furies of their wrenching romance, they try to come to terms with the hurt brought about by both of their distant fathers who, in different ways, forsook them.
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To see a fortune teller or not to see one...
- By Renee on 08-08-18
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Vegas Rich
- Vegas, Book 1
- By: Fern Michaels
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With a heart full of dreams, Sallie Coleman leaves Texas and heads west determined to get as far from the squalor of her dirt poor beginnings. With its shifting sands, smoky saloons, and bingo palaces, Las Vegas seems like a paradise. A paradise where an extraordinary twist of fate makes Sallie the most powerful businesswoman in Nevada.
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Get this booK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-26-10
By: Fern Michaels
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Nearly Normal
- Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
- By: Cea Sunrise Person
- Narrated by: Cea Sunrise Person
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
- By Pamela Plimpton on 03-15-19
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Kissing Games of the World
- By: Sandi Kahn Shelton
- Narrated by: Myra Platt
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What if the one person you can't bear to be with is also the one person you can't bear to be without? Jamie McClintock is a free-spirited artist and single mother who has at last found peace and freedom sharing a farmhouse with an elderly man and his young grandson. But when the old man dies suddenly her idyllic country life comes to a halt as the old man's estranged son, Nate, returns to claim the house and his child.
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Great Writer, Great Narrator ! Loved it!
- By Ms. Critic on 05-30-09
What listeners say about Improvement
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- Joe Kraus
- 08-04-18
Looks Like a Mess but Conjures a Messianic Goal
One answer to post-post-structuralism was the idea (mostly by way of Delleuze and Guattari) of the rhizome, the sense that there is a structure beyond easy structure, an organic form that blurs the line between a recognizable pattern and mess. That is, the rhizome has a pattern, but it isn’t anything we can replicate. It grows where space and opportunity permit, and it’s only after the fact that we can see it’s all done I support of the mushroom or other fungus above it.
I’m a big admirer of what seems the flavor-of-the-decade in American literary structure. I’m thinking of the model that Colum McCann pioneered with Let the Great World Spin, and that Jennifer Egan took further in A Visit from the Goon Squad. That’s the one where we get a story (or chapter) about one character, move to a story about a character only tangentially connected to the first one, and then on to others. There’s never an indirect connection among all the loose ends, but there are some indirect ones. The result is that we as readers get something like a bird’s eye view of a tangled group of people who don’t realize how they affect one another.
In case no one has yet done so, I propose calling those novels rhizomatic. That is, their structure becomes evident only after the fact. They grow where their stories take them, but they eventually double back. There’s pattern – or maybe just the residue of pattern to them – but it takes completing the novel to get a sense of the power it promises.
This is my second Joan Silber, and I think she is as gifted in this form as McCann or Egan – and that’s saying a lot. As I read Fools, her next most recent book, her innovation within this form is to look at communities across generations. In that book, she asks what became over the decades of the great dreams and passions of a group of “fools,” of the anarchists and Dorothy-Day-befriending young people who envisioned a better world in early 20th Century Bohemian New York.
I think this one is the doing the same thing only more subtly. The closest thing we have to a central character – though not the central narrator – is Kiki, a 1960s free-thinker who spends much of the 1970s living in Turkey as the aftermath of a kind of happy accident in meeting a man she loved on her world travels.
Kiki is far from a caricature, but at one level she embodies a radically hopeful sense that the world gives us the opportunity to be better than we are, that it promises us a chance at – as the title says – improvement.
For most of these narratives, Kiki is late middle-aged, and we see the influence she has on her niece, Reyna, who falls in with a crowd of small-time hustlers. We get a variety of narrators giving us chapters that don’t entirely fit together, but the movement of the book culminates in Reyna thinking she is sacrificing her aunt’s legacy – in the form of a valuable carpet she gave her from Turkey – in order to recompense a woman she may have inadvertently wronged. (SPOILER: Lynette holds her responsible for the death of her brother, Claude, but it’s a consequence of an accident. Reyna might have prevented it, but she’d have run a clear risk herself.)
As it turns out, though, Reyna’s selling the carpet to help someone who won’t even know she’s helped her is exactly Kiki’s legacy. As she says near the end, it wouldn’t be a gift if she’d had any hope for it other than that Reyna use it as she saw fit. Reyna, then, without quite knowing it, is an heir to Kiki’s hope for improving the world. And Lynette, who gets the money without knowing its source, goes on to improve her life and to bolster the memory of her not-as-great-as-she-pretends brother.
There are other stories of “improvement” throughout the book, but they’re never obviously so. Silber seems to suggest that we take a step forward and then we take one back, but as a deeply but subtly Jewish writer she seems above all to demonstrate a sense of “tikkun ha’olam,” a notion that it falls to us to try to make the world better than we found it.
This looks at times like it’s a “mess,” like it’s stories are disconnected and inelegantly concluded, but such a rhizomatic mess ultimately points the way toward the mystical promise – ever-forestalled – of mess-iah. That is, Silber reminds us that we may never improve the world to the point of perfection, but that’s not what we’re called to do. Our job, in this and every generation, is to try to make things at least a little better, to shoot not for perfection but only improvement.
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10 people found this helpful
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- zeffrey throwell
- 03-26-19
So many words, so little meaning
Well, I finished. Hoping at every chapter that the story would finally come together. Alas... It dawdles into the dawn, more like finding some old diaries rather than a novel. Save your money and watch Short Cuts by Altman instead.
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- Vwbh
- 09-27-21
An interesting story, well done, but I didn’t get the point
The ending really didn’t give any resolution , and I thought s lot of loose ends were never tied together or explained
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 02-10-22
MORAL CERTITDUE
“Improvement” is a compilation of characters in the formative years of their early adult lives. The primary character is Reyna who lives in Harlem, New York. It is a story of her life and the lives of several who are in that age group. All characters in the novel are directly or indirectly connected to Reyna. None are “movers and shakers” of the world, but each represent what life is like for many young adults in the 21st century.
This is a story of people at the bottom of America’s economic ladder but what is true for the poor is true for all humanity. Everyone’s life is affected by what happens to others. Empathy will not cure the ills of society, but knowledge of life’s interconnection offers hope for life’s “Improvement”. Silber shows how all human actions have consequence. One cannot predict the consequence of one’s actions, but Silber implies moral actions offer a chance for human “Improvement”.
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- Shopper Zanne
- 06-28-21
If you have depression steer clear.
If you don’t have depression but wish you did, have at it! Wish I had those hours back.
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- Frank
- 02-06-18
Don't Bother
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
If it was a story I was interested in.
What could Joan Silber have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
It had no plot and weak characters.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Disappointment
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2 people found this helpful