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Some Trick
- Thirteen Stories
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell, Emily Sutton-Smith, James Langton, Karen Cass
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
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Publisher's summary
Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”
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A striking new collection of ten short stories and two novellas that explores the idea of property in every meaning of the word, from the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author of the National Book Award finalist So Much for That and the international best seller We Need to Talk About Kevin.
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Painful and drawn out
- By JR on 06-27-18
By: Lionel Shriver
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44 Scotland Street
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The brilliant Alexander McCall Smith became an international sensation with his New York Times best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. His award-winning wit, made famous through that series, is fully on display in 44 Scotland Street.
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Smith's answer to Maupin
- By Amazon Customer on 10-23-05
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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Us: A Novel
- By: David Nicholls
- Narrated by: David Haig
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that seduces beautiful Connie into a second date...and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades later, they live more or less happily in the London suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn’t be worse. Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie. Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger.
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Great novel - my favorite in years
- By Mark on 07-21-15
By: David Nicholls
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How to Be Famous
- A Novel
- By: Caitlin Moran
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A hilarious, heartfelt sequel to How to Build a Girl, the breakout novel from feminist sensation Caitlin Moran who the New York Times called, "rowdy and fearless... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways." You can’t have your best friend be famous if you’re not famous. It doesn’t work. You’re emotional pen-friends. You can send each other letters - but you’re not doing anything together. You live in different countries.
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AMAZING , but not for the faint of heart
- By Knitme23 on 07-23-18
By: Caitlin Moran
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Baltimore Blues
- Tess Monaghan, Book 1
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Deborah Hazlett
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent—including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety—and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée—make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence could prove costly to Tess.
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I'm on #8 - This series is almost unique
- By connie on 02-19-12
By: Laura Lippman
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I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
- By: Alan Partridge
- Narrated by: Alan Partridge
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder – Alan Partridge – a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future. Gregarious and popular, yet Alan’s never happier than when relaxing in his own five-bedroom, south-built house with three acres of land and access to a private stream. But who is this mysterious enigma? Alan Gordon Partridge is the best – and best-loved – radio presenter in the region. Born into a changing world of rationing, Teddy Boys, apes in space and the launch of ITV, Alan’s broadcasting career began as chief DJ of Radio Smile....
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An Anglican giant among pygmies
- By John on 06-20-12
By: Alan Partridge
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Paris to the Moon
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 4 hrs and 44 mins
- Abridged
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Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner: in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans.
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Wish this wasn't abridged!!
- By Sarah D. on 03-25-17
By: Adam Gopnik
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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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The Forgery of Venus
- By: Michael Gruber
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Chaz Wilmot makes his living cranking out old-master parodies for ads and magazine covers. When he's offered a job restoring a Venetian palace fresco, he is at first, skeptical - he immediately sees it is more a forgery than a restoration. But he is soon seduced by the challenge and throws himself into the work, doing the job brilliantly.
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More fun with Gruber
- By IVAL on 02-06-13
By: Michael Gruber
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Schadenfreude, a Love Story
- Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For
- By: Rebecca Schuman
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Schadenfreude is the story of a teenage Jewish intellectual who falls in love - in love with a boy (who breaks her heart), a language (that's nearly impossible to master), a culture (that's nihilistic but punctual), and a landscape (that's breathtaking when there's not a wall in the way). Rebecca is an everyday, misunderstood '90s teenager with a passion for Pearl Jam and Ethan Hawke circa Reality Bites until two men walk into her high school civics class: Dylan Gellner and Franz Kafka, hitching a ride in Dylan's backpack.
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A humorous, delectable read
- By Amazon Customer on 07-13-17
By: Rebecca Schuman
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Language Arts
- By: Stephanie Kallos
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space.
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The beauty of the broken
- By SJ Evans on 04-27-18
By: Stephanie Kallos
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What listeners say about Some Trick
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Billye Kay
- 02-15-20
Down the Rabbit Hole
Some Trick Thirteen Stories by Helen Dewitt
Helen Dewitt is known for being a brilliant, witty writer. A few of these stories verify that and many of them do not. Some Trick is more of a collection of notes and ideas. I hope that a few of them will become more fully actualized-perhaps even be made into films. “Brutto” and “On the Town” are both great. I also liked, “My Heart Belongs to Bertie”. I am happy that I chose the Audible edition and listened to this book. The performances are brilliant, all of the dialogue is brilliant, and the writing is clever and wonderfully weird. However, I cannot recommend this book because the quality of the writing is too uneven and because many of the selections are not developed enough to be called stories. If you are willing to listen for more than 6 hours in order to receive a few flashes of brilliance, then this book is for you.
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- Gonçalo
- 11-19-21
Quite pretentious
I might be impressed had the book been written by an algorithm. Expensive, shallow sophistication.
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- Adam Kay
- 05-18-19
A truly rare writer
Helen DeWitt is one of the most intelligent writers out there. Her work is marked by genuine cultural sophistication, something so rare as to be almost indecipherable to the common reader. The depth of her knowledge the different cultures where the stories of this book are placed is very impressive. Her tone and dialect is always spot on, and her characters talk like real people. As such DeWitt avoids the trap of making British (for example) characters speak in the most obvious dialect, so as to signal to the reader that the writer *most definitely* knows British culture.
Also, the performance of these stories in the audio version is superb. The readers are capable of accents, and clearly a lot of thought went into selecting the variety of readers for the various stories, alternating between male and female of various English dialects.
Those acquainted with DeWitt’s brilliant, monolithic novel The Last Samurai will recognize DeWitt’s deep knowledge and urbanity on display here. Some Trick is a rare gem. The stories are marvelous. It is a joy to interface with a real mind, genuinely concerned with the modes and practices of cultural production.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-18-20
Prose perfect
Uncommon skill and understanding of words and literature . She forges new paths in story telling . Mostly I love that my wife hated it and didn’t get it. So thank you MS. DeWitt
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