Pity the Beast
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Narrated by:
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Dion Graham
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By:
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Robin McLean
About this listen
"I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men." (Alden Jones)
Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory.
With detours through time, space, and myth, not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules, Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West, masculinity, good and evil, and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads, with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew - if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.
©2021 Robin McLean (P)2021 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Paulette Jiles
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To a God Unknown
- By: John Steinbeck, Robert DeMott - introduction
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in familiar Steinbeck territory, To a God Unknown is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God.
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My Favorite Steinbeck; Terrible and Beautiful
- By Michael on 04-28-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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The Long Valley
- By: John Steinbeck, John H. Timmerman - introduction
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.
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Generally Good Stories, Some are Great
- By Michael on 06-18-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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Far North
- A Novel
- By: Marcel Theroux
- Narrated by: Yelena Schmulenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
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Spellbinding!
- By Joan on 01-14-10
By: Marcel Theroux
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Black Sheep, White Crow and Other Windmill Tales
- Stories from Navajo Country
- By: Jim Kristofic
- Narrated by: Jim Kristofic
- Length: 2 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When Kameron moves to his grandma’s sheep camp on the Navajo Reservation, he leaves behind his cell phone reception and his friends. The young boy’s world becomes even stranger when Kameron takes the sheep out to the local windmill and meets an old storyteller. As the seasons turn, the old man weaves eight tales that teach the deeper story of the Diné country and the Diné people.
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I love it
- By jaynell on 06-13-21
By: Jim Kristofic
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The Legend of Bass Reeves
- Being the True and Fictional Account of the Most Valiant Marshal in the West
- By: Gary Paulsen
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Cowboy stories and movies about the Wild West are full of amazing characters. Yet many of the lawmen we think of as heroes were anything but - some were violent scoundrels and outlaws themselves. Among all the lawmen of the frontier, one man stands out as a true hero: Bass Reeves. In his day, Bass Reeves was the most successful federal marshal in the United States. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew his gun first. He rounded up hundreds of outlaws and was shot at countless times but was never hit. Bass Reeves was born into slavery.
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Real hero of the Wild West
- By Michael Wood on 02-11-15
By: Gary Paulsen
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Hell at the Breech
- By: Tom Franklin
- Narrated by: Larry Pine
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends - mostly poor cotton farmers - form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.
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Pull up them breeches, son
- By W Perry Hall on 02-04-14
By: Tom Franklin
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Bearstone
- By: Will Hobbs
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up without parents and without schooling, 14-year-old Cloyd is trouble - trouble to himself and everyone else. Sent by his tribe to a home for Indian boys, he is alone and half-wild in remote Utah canyons. As his feeling of isolation turns to desperation, he runs away to find even more trouble. When Cloyd is found and taken to live with an old rancher, he begins to explore the countryside.
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Too much swearing
- By C. M. on 05-15-23
By: Will Hobbs
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Green Hills of Africa
- By: Ernest Hemingway
- Narrated by: Josh Lucas
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.
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The Pleasures of Place, People, and Persuit
- By Darwin8u on 10-25-16
By: Ernest Hemingway
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Once a Marshal
- A Sheriff Ben Stillman Western
- By: Peter Brandvold
- Narrated by: Francis G. Kearney
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The Classic Sheriff Ben Stillman Series Begins...Playing poker, smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey - retirement was treacherous business for ex-lawman Ben Stillman. The best of life seemed to be past, but then the past came looking for him. The son of an old friend rides into Ben's life with a plea for justice and a mind for revenge. Up on the Hi-Line in Montana, a rich Englishman is rustling ranchers out of their livelihoods...and their lives. The boy suspects these rustlers have murdered his father, Milk River Bill Harmon, and the law is too crooked to get any straight answers.
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Good book.
- By carmen burris on 09-15-20
By: Peter Brandvold
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Reservation Restless
- By: Jim Kristofic
- Narrated by: Jim Kristofic
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo society and the future it has created.
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It is a gift to see the world through Jim's eyes
- By Josh Boyle on 06-23-21
By: Jim Kristofic
What listeners say about Pity the Beast
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-23-22
Beautiful and incoherent
There is a beautiful rhythm to this book, it feels original and colourful. It is so full or characters and shifting perspectives and time that it seems it struggle to contain. I wanted to love it and at moments i did, but it was exhausting trying to keep up and i lost track of who was speaking or what was happening at times. I found it impossible to concentrate constantly, which i thought would be necessary to truly appreciate this book. Even when it was very annoying, it was beautiful enough to stick with it. I lts just not very reader-friendly. Definitely notable, just wish it was somehow … less. Wonderful narration.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Cathy Beaudoin
- 01-19-22
Loved It!
Back in 2016, I read Robin McLean’s book of short stories, Reptile House, and fell in love with her writing style, unfiltered, edgy with a purpose, and funny. Robin’s writing reflects the fact that she has lived in the kind of rural places that require a keen awareness of one’s surroundings. You can feel this in her work, where such an awareness results in writing with a razor’s edge.
For me, I appreciate this style of writing. It’s why I read, to be exposed to people, places, and ways of thinking I’d otherwise never experience That’s what Pity the Beast is, a world I’d otherwise never see.
Though the story is classified as a Western, I view it more like a story about the relationship between people and each other, people and animals, and people and the land. In order to explore these three relations, it makes sense to place these characters in a rural setting, and ultimately, the American West.
Pity the Beast is far from a “feel good” story. At its heart, the story explores the fine line between good and bad in people. And though serious to its core, there is a lot of wry humor throughout, especially male cowboy humor. My favorite character, Granny, also has a lot of dry wit, and uses it to deliver her own bits of wisdom throughout the story.
Without a doubt, this book has a strong sense of place and characters, a strong story arc and plot, and Robin uses every word available to her when describing the range of emotions her characters feel. I definitely felt like I was right with these people, and cringed at the choices they made. And while this is ultimately a simple “chase” story. In the end, defining the beast is not so simple. In the end, Robin challenges the reader to understand how the beast is in all of us.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Joy
- 03-23-23
first of all speed up the narration to about 1.5 s
so the first time I tried to listen to this and by the way I'm only on chapter 2 I just want it to give a review because I almost returned this book moving forward I started the book over I sped up the narration to 1.5 and now it's great or it's a little bit better to understand it was way too slow for me in the beginning and I had mine set on one point zero the narrator is amazing I have listened to him throughout several different genres and this is a new one for me and so I do want to see what Mr Dion Graham has in store I plan on giving an update when I actually finish the book
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