Norwood
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Narrated by:
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David Aaron Baker
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By:
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Charles Portis
About this listen
An American literary treasure, Charles Portis penned the Western classic True Grit. Set in the 1960s, Norwood is a picaresque romp taking audiences on a journey from Texas to New York and back again. An ex-marine, troubadour Norwood Pratt is on a mission to recover money he once loaned to a buddy in the service. Along the way, he gets into all manner of trouble involving stolen cars, beautiful women, and a chicken with a college education.
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Hap Collins looks like a good ol’ boy. But even in his misspent youth, his best pal is Leonard Pine, who is Black, gay, and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard climb into the boxing ring, visit their families, get in bar fights, and just go fishing - all the while confronting racists, righting wrongs, and eating a whole lot of delicious food.
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Wringing every last drop
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 04-08-23
By: Kathleen Kent - introduction, and others
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Cannery Row
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Jerry Farden
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack and his boys, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and most poignant works.
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Five stars with a Caveat
- By Bette on 04-23-12
By: John Steinbeck
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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
- Stories
- By: Raymond Carver
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became both the recognized master of the form and one of our best-loved fiction writers. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.
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Humanity at the Breaking Point
- By Darwin8u on 03-31-19
By: Raymond Carver
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This Side of the Sky
- By: Elyse Singleton
- Narrated by: Myra Taylor, Sharon Washington, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
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A Breath of Fresh Air
- By Adina Andreu on 07-19-12
By: Elyse Singleton
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The Last Detail
- A Novel
- By: Darryl Ponicsan
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws its police force from the ranks as temporary duty - Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving audiobook set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia - Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall - are assigned to escort 18-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize the injustice of the sentence and are oddly affected by the naive innocence of their young prisoner.
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Surprising ending
- By bella on 09-11-20
By: Darryl Ponicsan
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Post Office
- A Novel
- By: Charles Bukowski
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.
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Not his best, but still Bukowski
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 02-05-18
By: Charles Bukowski
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That Old Ace in the Hole
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
By: Annie Proulx
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The Missing
- By: Tim Gautreaux
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 15 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this spellbinder by critically acclaimed author Tim Gautreaux, Sam Simoneaux returns from World War I to rebuild his life. But when a girl is snatched from the New Orleans department store where he's working, he hops aboard a Mississippi steamboat to find her - and dredges up ghosts from his painful past.
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The Missing
- By Michael L. Wintory on 07-11-09
By: Tim Gautreaux
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Last Ride to Graceland
- By: Kim Wright
- Narrated by: Cassandra Morris
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Blues musician Cory Ainsworth is barely scraping by after her mother's death when she discovers a priceless piece of rock 'n' roll memorabilia hidden away in a shed out back of the family's coastal South Carolina home: Elvis Presley's Stutz Blackhawk, its interior a time capsule of the singer's last day on earth. A backup singer for the King, Cory's mother, Honey, was at Graceland the day Elvis died.
By: Kim Wright
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Time Out of Joint
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he’s never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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The Postman Always Rings Twice
- By: James M. Cain
- Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
- Length: 2 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one, grisly solution; a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.
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Tucci's performance of "Postman" is exquisite!
- By Christopher on 06-25-12
By: James M. Cain
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Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray’s cards, shotgun, and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they’ve gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple’s spending as far as Mexico.
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Best known for his glorious comic novels, Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction, memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja, Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas.
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So worth it!
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Too Brainy for me.
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Too Brainy for me.
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What listeners say about Norwood
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- R. Klein
- 10-15-24
Liked it much more than I thought I would
It's certainly an odd story. A nice, but sort of bungling fellow goes chasing after $70 that an old buddy from the Marines owes him. We follow his adventures as he traverses much of the country in pursuit. He meets some interesting characters and gets into some pretty curious predicaments.
Turned out to be a fun trip – for the listener, anyway. Not sure if it was fun for our hero, Norwood.
I think it was the chicken with the college education that drew me into this one, and I'm glad I went along for the ride!
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- Mary J.
- 10-15-23
Great narration
Narrator did a great job. Glad it was a short book. That’s all I can say.
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- squishy
- 06-04-23
Enjoyable listen
Great old fashion story telling. To me the sign of a good author is being able to put you in the story and making it come alive. I felt I was there with each character. They all just came alive. Especially in New York, with just a few words I could feel, smell and experience the city as he did. What a fun journey. This is a story I could listen to again.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Heather
- 06-07-17
A great American road trip
This book evokes memories I never made. But if Id lived in Ralph decades ago, I hope I would have had the kind of character Norwood displayed. Sometimes being plain spoken makes life feel more true. Enjoy this summer adventure!
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- Lolly
- 08-14-24
Perfect
This slim volume is a crisply crafted story. Each scene, each sentence falls perfectly in place.
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- Rick
- 03-30-17
Oddball Odyssey
Here’s another eccentric adventure from Charles Portis and another perfect read by David Aaron Baker.
On his odyssey, up and out of the South to New York City and back, a small-town Texan named Norwood sees a lot of things.
“He saw himself on television at Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not Auditorium, and looked at all the curios downstairs, believing most of them, but not believing the one about Marshall W. M. Pittman of Wharton, Texas, shooting a bullet right into a crook’s gun in 1932. Still, there was the gun, and why would they make it up?”
And that may be Charles Portis in a nutshell. He makes it up because it’s a compelling sketch, and not because it goes anywhere in particular. If there are any great life’s lessons to be learned here, they are well concealed.
He defines his characters through their experiences, and they are often a sensory feast. The sound of an empty peach can, rattling on the pavement after a departing car, is so sharp, you’ll swear you heard it yourself.
Of a woman he meets on a Trailways bus: “Her husband had disappeared two years before, and was subsequently found working as an able seaman on a sulfur boat, through a rude postcard he had foolishly sent her from Algiers, Louisiana. He was back home now, but living in the garage, and drinking.”
Where does he get this stuff?
And at the terminal: “A dozen or so Marines in limp khakis and with ruined shoeshines were hanging about the station waiting for the last liberty bus back. Fatigue and unhappiness were in their faces, as of young men whose shorts are bunching up.”
Most of the characters are rather eloquently befuddled by life, and the swindlers who prey on them only slightly sharper. In a battle of wits, as the old saying goes, their opponents have come unarmed. But there is something about naïve personalities that makes them interesting. In Portis’ world, they engage more fully with everything around them. They are more deeply affected.
Will Norwood reach his destination safely? Will he achieve his vague ambitions, whatever they may be? The best thing is, it really doesn’t matter. The journey, stitched together in a hundred hilarious, often bewildering little scenes, is far more important than the journey’s end.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Dr. Joe de Beauchamp
- 08-29-21
True Grit
I found this author again hitting the mark with this book called Norwood. Excellent book on the 1930s and how people suffered through the Great depression.
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- Geometro
- 05-26-23
Feels like a first novel
Portis's wit is on display here, and his ear for funny dialogue and characters that obsess over the dumbest little things, but it feels very much like a first novel or something extended from a short story, the edges are a little rougher than they'd be later.
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- Planser
- 08-05-15
Very entertaining
I read Norwood about a year ago and liked it fine. Listening to it was better. David Baker made the story come alive.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Joshua
- 01-25-18
pretty good Portis
this story reads like a collection of ideas instead of a novel. The titular character doesn't really have an arc so much as a series of events. it's a little like As I Lay Dying accept nowhere near as good. Portis went on to do much better things, but this is enjoyable enough.
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