
Stoner
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Narrated by:
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Robin Field
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By:
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John Williams
About this listen
William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
©1965 John Williams (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Featured Article: The top 100 classics of all time
Before we whipped out our old high school syllabi and dug deep into our libraries to start selecting contenders for this list, we first had to answer the question, "How do we define a classic?" The answer isn’t as straightforward as you might guess, though there’s a lot to be said for the old adage, "You know it when you see it" (or, in this case, hear it). Of course, most critically, each of our picks had to be fabulous in audio. So dust off your aspirational listening list—we have some amazing additions you don’t want to miss.
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Story
Washington Square tells the poignant and gently comic story of Catherine Sloper, a sweet and unassuming young heiress, and her fortune-seeking suitor Morris Townsend. Set in New York City during the 1840s, the story follows Ms. Sloper's conflicts with her concerned father, who attempts to thwart Mr. Townsend, and her busybody aunt, who encourages the attachment. But amid all the duplicity and folly, Ms. Sloper slowly grows towards independence and maturity, and begins to make her own decisions.
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if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
- By Darwin8u on 03-31-19
By: Henry James
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East of Eden
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
- By Kelly on 03-25-17
By: John Steinbeck
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A Maze of Death
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: John Skelley
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only 14 citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it. And the mysterious building in the distance draws all the colonists to it, but when they get there each sees a different motto on the front.
By: Philip K. Dick
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On the Irrawaddy, A Story of the First Burmese War
- Svenska Ljud Classica
- By: G. A. Henty
- Narrated by: Mike Harris
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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With the exception of the terrible retreat from Afghanistan, none of England's many little wars have been so fatal in proportion to the number of those engaged as our first expedition to Burma. The Burman policy of carrying off every boat on the river, laying waste the whole country, and driving away the inhabitants and the herds, maintained our army as prisoners in Rangoon through the first wet season; and caused the loss of half the white officers and men first sent there.
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Great story! Great reading. Editor - not so much
- By David on 11-03-17
By: G. A. Henty
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The Secret History
- A Novel
- By: Donna Tartt
- Narrated by: Donna Tartt
- Length: 22 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
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Horrible narration
- By M. Cardoso on 07-23-23
By: Donna Tartt
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Johnny Got His Gun
- By: Dalton Trumbo
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. This is no ordinary novel. This is the story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I - he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact.
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READ THE INTRODUCTION LAST
- By Carollynn7 on 11-27-11
By: Dalton Trumbo
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Hard Rain Falling
- By: Don Carpenter
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary connement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class - married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But they will meet again....
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A Well Read, American Noir Novel from The 1960s
- By Frank Donnelly on 01-19-20
By: Don Carpenter
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The Book of Disquiet
- By: Fernando Pessoa
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
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The book that saved my life
- By Hutchinson on 03-09-21
By: Fernando Pessoa
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Butcher's Crossing
- By: John Williams
- Narrated by: Jesper Bøllehuus
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Året er 1873, og Will Andrews opgiver sine universitetsstudier ved Harvard og drager vestpå. Han ender i Butcher's Crossing, en lille, gudsforladt flaekke i Kansas. Butcher's Crossing er fuld af rastløse maend, der kun taenker på at tjene hurtige penge og bruge dem lige så hurtigt, blandt dem Miller. Han og Andrews bliver venner, og Andrews fascineres af Millers historie om en enorm bisonflok, der kun venter på at blive nedslagtet, godt gemt af vejen i en smuk dal i Rocky Mountains i Colorado.
By: John Williams
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The Way of All Flesh
- By: Samuel Butler
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth "in the bosom of a Christian family." With irony, wit, and sometimes rancor, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.
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poor narrator
- By Marjorie on 08-11-12
By: Samuel Butler
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The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
- By: Michael Ondaatje
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 2 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid", killed his first man when he was 12. By the time he was 21 he had, by his own reckoning, slain 19 more. In the intervening years, he had become "Billy the Kid", bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint.
Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country.
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Horrible!
- By John and Elizabeth Geiges on 10-22-20
By: Michael Ondaatje
Any additional comments?
"I thought I could do it quietly without upsetting anyone."How much of life do you lose if you never impose on anyone else? How much selfishness should you indulge in, drag others into? Can you ever really be alive by always being polite, never being a bother, letting life carry you along like driftwood? These were some of the questions, and hard truths I had to face while reading this remarkable novel. And I use the word remarkable not because I want to toss a superlative around, but because the book is remarkable. In fact I think a case could be made for this almost forgotten novel to be considered in the conversation of Great American Novels.
Stoner is a unique literary 'hero'. He is an American mid-western farm boy from a hardworking, moral farm family. In a Steinbeck novel the Stoner's would be backdrop, the sort of family he'd mention in passing as being one of the unspoken for millions America is made up of: the hard working, quiet, self sufficient, good and decent Americans who are the salt of the earth. Yet William Stoner is different; he's a man apart. Though he knows farm life, he's not particularly attracted to or interested in it, he only does it because life has, until yet, not offered him anything else. But when he's given the chance to go to college he discovers he has a passion you wouldn't normally attribute to the farm: a love of literature. He discovers he is not a man meant to bend his back all day, but to use his mind instead.
This discovery occurs suddenly, without warning and from a man long dead. It is William Shakespeare who almost literally speaks to him. "Do you hear him?" Professor Sloane asks him in class. Shakespeare speaks to you across three centuries. Shakespeare has imposed himself on Stoner, has grabbed hold of him, and changed his life.
But this is not the story of a man necessarily bettered by the experience of discovering education and art. Though Stoner decides to pursue a life of education and teaching, you sometimes wonder what his life would have been like had he not made this discovery. Would he have wound up like his parents, perhaps, but when WW1 broke out he may have gone over to France and not come back, or come back a changed man. There's a lot of potential 'what ifs' at the beginning of one's life.
And this book is all about potential.
That's why it's so startling at the end of the novel when he realizes he's 60 years old. Though we've lived his life through the course of the novel through all his failures, and modest successes, we are hit with the cold reality that there is just not anymore time left. He's made all his choices and, as he keeps repeating "What did you expect?"
Yet this is not a cynical or angry novel. Even in moments of quiet, suffocating despair, of years of a failed marriage, failed relationships, failed career opportunities, this is not a book about a man who is just a sad case for us to pity. William Stoner is like so many very real people, he's a person trying to get by in the world, trying to do some good, but not quite able to bridge the gap between his own internal passions and heat with other people's heart and their warmth. He's closed off, he lives in his own mind, and he always looks for reasons why he can't act, why he shouldn't say or do a thing because he doesn't feel it's right, or his place to do so. He is not a bold man, but rather a man who works hard, does the best he can with what he has, and then, in the end, must accept those choices.
Artistically the novel is a marvel. From the sparse and clear writing, to the near meta-fictional exploration of how literature and books can help us explore the human condition while at the same time needing to withdraw from humanity to experience these books. In the end he holds his own book in his hands and though the contents of that book might not paint a clear picture of the author, it does, as least, offer proof that he existed and contributed even just a little bit to the human species. Or in the dedication of Katherine's book, the initials W.S. are all that is left between the two of them, a fragment, but at least something.
There is continually subtle word play, the use of a line such as "He felt a distant closeness to her", distant closeness in opposition but right next to each other, or him describing his marriage as a stalemate, is he the mate who is stale, is she, are they both? There is the repeated imagery of masks and mask like faces, which in less talented hands would have been a bit heavy handed, but here fits the characters and the tone. Even when the novel pushes the boundaries of imagery, such as with his description of the poignancy of a lone grave enhanced by the vastness of a desert, it never feels out of place or forced. Every word is necessary.
And structurally the novel is near perfect in that this is a first person account written in the third person. We are close to Stoner but never too close, we are always kept at a distance. The narrator is most likely Stoner himself since only twice do we ever get a POV shift, both times with his wife in acts of self discovery, as if their will and imposition spills over into the narration and forces us to have to come to terms with another human being.
This is the true art of the novel, the life we live with Stoner, the slow wearing down upon him, his reasoning for acting, or more often not acting, and the understanding we get of this person who to an outsider would seem a cantankerous and impossible man to know. We learn a little about what it means to be William Stoner, and perhaps, to better see the world through the intentions of the people around us.
The novel is sad but never pessimistic - it's realistic in the best possible use of the word. This is the sort of book a writer like Raymond Carver would immediately relate to and even write about. William Stoner is a sort of mythical American every-man, a man of the earth who is also educated, a man of many faces whose expression never changes, a man never quite sure of his place in the world but is willing to work damn hard to keep what he does have. Stoner was remarkable in that he was completely unremarkable.
We even get in the end the book's, and perhaps our own culture's unspoken philosophy about the meaning of life when he is with the doctor, "it was foolishness, he knew, but he did not protest, it would have been unkind for him to do so."
Stoner is very much a book that will appeal to people who love books and love book learning, however, there is a warning here I believe, and that is the more we learn, the more we try to know, the more we will discover how little we actually known and understand and that there will never be enough time to read and to learn all we need to know because the rabbit hole never ends. Perhaps we would be better off putting the books down and going outside and imposing ourselves on the world. Perhaps Stoner could be read as the great anti-book, or, at least in a meta sense, a slight nod towards American anti-intellectualism; too much knowledge could be bad for you.
At the very least, the book is pretty clear about never being able to ever understand another human being by just reading books about them. Stoner read his whole life away and barely made an impression on any human he ever met aside from his wife, Finch, Lomax, and Katherine Driscoll. Perhaps if he'd found a place to put down his cap and gown from his college graduation he might have lived more.
Yet in the end these are the choices of his life and we are reminded of our own choices, our own mortality and our potential. It would be easy to feel a bit defeated at the end of the novel, to think life is just sort of pointless and full of misery, and in a way it is, but it isn't, too. In the final pages we watch Stoner hearing the teenagers laughing as they walk across his lawn, barely touching the ground, and we long to be with them, not him. We long to live better, but we also understand our limitations.
A distant closeness
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Deeply Moving
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The writing is exquisite and crisp. Stoner's inner thoughts, reactions, wishes, emotions were insightful and felt so real.
Worth reading
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Life is tough, then you die
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Would you consider the audio edition of Stoner to be better than the print version?
Not necessarily.What did you like best about this story?
The almost haunting narration of a man's life, in the style of the American literary naturalists of that era, yet not without compassion. That tone--at once distanced, yet not without compassion--I found compelling.Which character – as performed by Robin Field – was your favorite?
There really is only one character in this novel--Stoner.Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No.Any additional comments?
It's understandable, to me, why this novel has been historically overlooked. While it is a remarkable piece of fiction, it is going to be vastly more interesting to me, a man who also spent his life teaching literature. English majors--some of them at least--would love this old 1930's novel.Remarkable period piece
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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes. The author's skill permeates every line of it.What did you like best about this story?
The few characters progress truthfully and despite their small number, the book is never boring. It has so much to teach us.What does Robin Field bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Robin Field's tone suits the book perfectly - a bit monotonous, even bored at times, dragging his voice - to get the story through to us. All the while it was very easy to listen to and I got through most of it while driving around the city.Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Not a particular moment. The entire book is an event in itself.Any additional comments?
If you like stories that move you deeply in their own way, go ahead!Masterfully written!
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a great American novel, a great American audiobook
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Ok story
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Very touching
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melancholy and the sadness of a finite life
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