
Pretend I'm Dead
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Narrated by:
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Candace Thaxton
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By:
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Jen Beagin
About this listen
Miranda July meets Mary Karr in this brilliant debut novel from Jen Beagin, Whiting Award winner and "one of the freshest voices […] in years - funny, wise, whip-smart, and compassionate" (Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins), about a cleaning lady on a quest for self-acceptance after her relationship with a loveable junkie goes awry.
Jen Beagin's quirky, moving, "frank and unflinching" (Josh Ferris) debut novel introduces an unforgettable character, Mona - almost 24, emotionally adrift, and cleaning houses to get by. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient she calls Mr. Disgusting, who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways.
In search of healing, Mona decamps to Taos, New Mexico, for a fresh start, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs, all of whom have one or two things to teach her - the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers, the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances, the psychic who might really be psychic. But always lurking just beneath the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she's trying to disentangle herself, and the larger legacy of the past she left behind.
The story of Mona's journey to find her place in this working-class American world is at once hilarious and wonderfully strange, true to life and boldly human, and introduces a stunningly one-of-a-kind new voice in American fiction.
©2018 Jen Beagin (P)2018 Simon & SchusterListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Rachel is 24, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control through obsessive food rituals while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting - until her therapist encourages her to take a 90-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her.
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Funny and uncomfortable
- By Kayla on 04-01-21
By: Melissa Broder
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She's Always Hungry
- Stories
- By: Eliza Clark
- Narrated by: Kevin Shen, Sam Stafford, Natalie Simpson, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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From Eliza Clark, the author of the brilliant novels Boy Parts and Penance and one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, comes a fierce, visionary and darkly comic story collection. A woman welcomes a parasite into her body. A teenager longs for perfect skin. A scientist tends to fragile alien flora. A young man takes the night into his own hands. Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.
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Movie adaptation when?
- By Anonymous User on 05-15-25
By: Eliza Clark
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Death Valley
- A Novel
- By: Melissa Broder
- Narrated by: Melissa Broder
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike. Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door.
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Broder is the perfect narrator!
- By Barbara S on 10-22-23
By: Melissa Broder
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Nightbitch
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Yoder
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.
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If you don’t get it just say so
- By Stephanie Rzonca on 02-19-22
By: Rachel Yoder
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Perfume and Pain
- A Novel
- By: Anna Dorn
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.
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Hilarious!!
- By Marilyn on 05-22-24
By: Anna Dorn
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Very Cold People
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Manguso
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.
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A book without a plot
- By RueRue on 10-10-22
By: Sarah Manguso
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Acts of Desperation
- By: Megan Nolan
- Narrated by: Lauren Coe
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance, he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her.
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Wonderful and tortured
- By Dr Sophie Henshaw on 05-01-21
By: Megan Nolan
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Cleopatra and Frankenstein
- By: Coco Mellors
- Narrated by: Kit Griffiths
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint and the opportunity to apply for a green card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.
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Refreshing
- By Sadz on 11-22-22
By: Coco Mellors
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The Centre
- A Novel
- By: Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
- Narrated by: Balvinder Sopal
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents’ generous allowance, and discussing the “underside of life” with her best friend, Naima. Anisa’s mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.
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Hmm. Uh, yeah, sure. Okay, I guess.
- By Madison on 08-11-23
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Hot Air
- A Novel
- By: Marcy Dermansky
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.
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It was soooo bad. I had to quit midway thru.
- By malibooboo on 04-22-25
By: Marcy Dermansky
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The Imperfects
- By: Amy Meyerson
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The Millers are far from perfect. Estranged siblings Beck, Ashley, and Jake find themselves under one roof for the first time in years, forced to confront old resentments and betrayals, when their mysterious, eccentric matriarch, Helen, passes away. But their lives are about to change when they find a secret inheritance hidden among her possessions - the Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow gemstone that went missing from the Austrian Empire a century ago.
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Good read!
- By Linda Ottey on 07-20-21
By: Amy Meyerson
A lightened taste of reality
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Enjoyable but not a home run for me.
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hang out w anyone who doesn’t love this book.
Love love love
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story makes up for bad narration
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Can’t wait to read Jens next book.
I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats!
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Gritty and funny
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luster meets on all fours
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best writer
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SA warning
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The realistic storyline
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