Leaving the Atocha Station
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Narrated by:
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Ben Lerner
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By:
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Ben Lerner
About this listen
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's 'research' becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?
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- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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History professor Ned Brummel is living happily with his partner of 12 years in small-town Maine when he receives a phone call from his estranged friend - Jack - telling him that another friend - Andy - is very ill and possibly near death. As Ned boards a plane to Chicago on his way to his friend's bedside, he embarks on another journey into memory, examining the major events and small moments that have shaped his world and his relationships with these two very different, very important men.
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To Every Season...
- By Donald on 10-01-13
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Eat the Document
- By: Dana Spiotta
- Narrated by: Rachael Warren
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker - passionate, idealistic, and in love - design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her 15-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation.
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Great ensemble piece!
- By Buyer009 on 08-08-17
By: Dana Spiotta
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If I Forget You
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Christopher Greene
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-one years after they were driven apart by circumstances beyond their control, two former lovers have a chance encounter on a Manhattan street. What follows is a tense, suspenseful exploration of the many facets of enduring love. Told from alternating points of view through time, If I Forget You tells the story of Henry Gold, a poet whose rise from poverty embodies the American dream, and Margot Fuller, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and their unlikely, star-crossed love affair.
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Good, but not great.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-01-16
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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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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Scale
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As a hopeless and struggling indie rock musician, Ray Goldman's best chance of discovering any beauty and purpose in his dysfunctional life will come only when he ceases to struggle against life itself. Scale chronicles Ray Goldman’s journey downward through the adversarial trials that sometimes prove necessary in facilitating an eventual ascent into truth and happiness. The odd chapters of the novel find Ray, now a 31-year-old guitar player, seeking fulfillment in the wake of a life-altering tragedy.
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Poor Presentation
- By mmacedonia on 04-16-19
By: Keith Buckley
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The Coincidence Makers
- A Novel
- By: Yoav Blum
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
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Story
What if the drink you just spilled, the train you just missed, or the lottery ticket you just found was not just a random occurrence? What if it's all part of a bigger plan? What if there's no such thing as a chance encounter? What if there are people we don't know determining our destiny? And what if they are even planning the fate of the world? Enter the Coincidence Makers - Guy, Emily, and Eric - three seemingly ordinary people who work for a secret organization devoted to creating and carrying out coincidences. What the rest of the world sees as random occurrences, are, in fact, carefully orchestrated events.
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Amazing!
- By Gal Wolff on 07-31-18
By: Yoav Blum
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Conversations with Friends
- A Novel
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa's world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick.
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Interesting point of view; glad I listened!
- By Amazon Customer on 08-23-17
By: Sally Rooney
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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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Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin
- A Memoir
- By: Nicole Hardy
- Narrated by: Nicole Hardy
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.
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This Book Spoke to Me
- By Allison on 04-08-14
By: Nicole Hardy
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What listeners say about Leaving the Atocha Station
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gayle Winegar
- 03-26-12
Captured the Challenge of second language
Where does Leaving the Atocha Station rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
The author wrote beautifully about that weird place of understanding enough of the language and culture to pass as fluency and then never be quite sure of what you heard, said, or took place. For any of us that have been there , it was beautifully done: did he say this or that? Was it future or past? what did I just say? A story that might be ho hum takes and humor and sadness from this perspective.
Which character – as performed by Ben Lerner – was your favorite?
I loved that the reader was the author, He made it rich with his feelings and confusion. The emotions were so heart felt.
Any additional comments?
I recommend this to anyone who has lived abroad or travelled knowing the languge just enough to get into trouble looking fluent.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Dana Garden
- 08-06-15
Disappointed
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
No, unfortunately. It’s been getting good reviews and I wanted to like it--right up my alley, a poet in Madrid--but I found the narrator to be insufferable, self-important in a passive-aggressive way and at the same time self-loathing, manipulative, self-centered, hand-to-the-forehead. The only way we see secondary characters, like women who somehow love him, is through his worry about how his lies and manipulations will affect them. I appreciate the examination of language, how it can be twisted, how we don't understand each other, specially with the added burden of translation. And the telling is perhaps bravely naked, exposing this character's most gutter self, but he is not someone I want to spend time with. I listened to the end because it was short (thank god) and I wanted to see if it then was redemptive. It wasn’t really, just grumpy and depressed.
Has Leaving the Atocha Station turned you off from other books in this genre?
No!
Would you be willing to try another one of Ben Lerner’s performances?
Ben Lerner's performance worsened my reaction to his book, as he reads a lot of the prose in the dreaded Poet Voice, intoning rather than with natural speech inflections. It's possible the book might have been livelier, funnier in places, and less inescapable if I had read it. Maybe a different reader would lend the narrator more inflected variation.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Syd K.
- 05-20-22
A classic
Perhaps my favorite novel ever. Just the absolute best. Come for the prose, stay for the ending.
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- Casey
- 05-10-24
What an insufferable twat
I am not sure if he’s lying to us or to himself. ADHD and emotionally immature person who is just a mask of himself. Not sure what reality is but he’s def got a lot of social anxiety and doesn’t know which way is up. Def recommend lol
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- D. Witscher
- 06-02-15
intriguing study of modern man
Is there anything you would change about this book?
Do not allow the author to read this book. He ruins what is an interesting and intelligent and surprising story. What is it about professional writers that make them think they are the only one who can do justice to their novel ? Let the professional readers read and the writers write.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Leaving the Atocha Station?
The drowning in Mexico
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
no it is all psychological
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3 people found this helpful
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- Daniel Olivieri
- 11-06-18
Hate the Narrator, Love the Novel
At various points the narrator of this book—an immature and just plain annoying young poet squandering his year on a Fullbright in Madrid—considers killing himself by taking all his medications at once. I found myself hoping he wouldn’t kill himself not because I had any sympathy or care for him but because if he died then the novel would be over and I wouldn’t be able to hear any more of his clever/interesting/vaguely profound insights. Good book once you get past hating the narrator.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rochelle
- 12-09-14
Insightful, beautiful
I loved this book & I’m not sure why. I think part of it is the language (the author is a poet), the other part is how believable the main character is as a human being.
Adam has a serious case of imposter syndrome, and his way of dealing with this is sometimes to lie, try to look or sound mysterious (I'm not sure how well that actually works for him), or pop anxiety pills. His lies are painful not least because he’s absolute rubbish at remembering that he lied at all. He’s terrified the people around him will see him as a fraud. He’s uncomfortable, we’re uncomfortable but the people around him in the book seem to be completely fine with it all, although he ascribes to them a higher wisdom than is likely. He thinks he's a fraud as a person & as a poet & neither of these seem likely. He certainly puts too much meaning in to his interactions with others & overthinks things.
A lot of this book is us spending time in Adam's head. His perspective is definitely warped though so we see some things he doesn't. He's a painful character (in the sense of cringeworthy) but he's incredibly human & like cellophane - at times we see right through.
The narration is excellent. Initially I was bothered by the monotone of the author's voice, the flattened affect, but getting further into the book this is the perfect voice for Adam.
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9 people found this helpful
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- rachel murane
- 12-14-20
brilliant
This is one of those necessary books. A forever book. Stunning. And read beautifully, simply.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Eljaycee
- 04-16-24
Interesting book marred by monotone reading
The title says it all. The story of an extremely insecure young man and promising poet is absorbing and relatable. But, perhaps intentionally to mimic the character’s insecurity, the author reads it in a deadly monotone. Consider reading it yourself!
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- Buyer009
- 06-15-16
The words in our heads
Once again I'm reminded of all the things that writing can do that's difficult for film to achieve. Lerner's painting of unverbalized intentions, beyond those revealed via internal monologue is a beautiful portrayal of the real human mind.
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3 people found this helpful