The Benefits of Breathing
And Other Stories
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Narrated by:
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Lonnie Lardner
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Bill Perry
About this listen
As Roderick Clark says in the foreword, “It’s all about love, isn’t it?”
In The Benefits of Breathing, Christopher Meeks’ third collection of short stories, Meeks dives again into the human condition, particularly within relationships.
In this volume, “A Dog Story” captures a crumbled marriage and the love of a dog named Scrappy. “Joni Paredes” shows the birth of a new relationship that starts at a daughter’s wedding. “Nestor by the Numbers” follows one man’s often hilarious online dating experiences after he finally accepts his wife is gone. “Jerry with a Twist” shows an actor on an audition while his pregnant girlfriend helps him through a crisis. These and seven other stories will bring you into the special world of Meeks.
As reviewer Grady Harp notes, if you’ve previously “discovered the idiosyncrasies of Meeks's writing style and content, rest assured that this new collection not only will not disappoint, but also it will provide further proof that we have a superior writer of the genre in our presence.”
“If you like Raymond Carver,” said author David Scott Milton, “you’ll love Meeks.”
©2020 Christopher Meeks (P)2020 Christopher MeeksListeners also enjoyed...
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Really more of a YA novel...
- By Faith W. on 09-04-20
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Something She's Not Telling Us
- A Novel
- By: Darcey Bell
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny, Carly Robins, Pete Simonelli, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte has everything in life that she ever could have hoped for: a doting, artistic husband, a small-but-thriving flower shop, and her sweet, smart five-year-old daughter, Daisy. Her relationship with her mother might be strained, but the distance between them helps. And her younger brother Rocco may have horrible taste in women, but when he introduces his new girlfriend to Charlotte and her family, they are cautiously optimistic that she could be The One. Daisy seems to love Ruth, and she can’t be any worse than the klepto Rocco brought home the last time.
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Should be "Something Almost Happened"
- By Kimberly Wasilewski on 05-03-20
By: Darcey Bell
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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The Last Post
- By: Renée Carlino
- Narrated by: Avery Caris, Stephen Dexter
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Laya Marston’s husband, Cameron, a daredevil enthusiast, was the complete opposite of her, ready and willing to dive off a cliff-face or parachute across a canyon - and Laya loved him for it. But she was different: pragmatic, regimented, devoted to her career and to supporting Cameron from the sidelines of his death-defying feats. Opposites attract, right? But when Cameron dies tragically, Laya becomes lost in denial, living in the delusion that Cameron will come back to her.
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I really wanted to like this
- By Amazon Customer on 12-21-21
By: Renée Carlino
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Wish You Were Here
- A Novel
- By: Renée Carlino
- Narrated by: Ava Lucas
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte has spent her 20s adrift, searching for a spark to jump-start her life and give her a sense of purpose. She’s had as many jobs as she’s had bad relationships, and now she’s feeling especially lost in her less-than-glamorous gig at a pie-and-fry joint in Los Angeles, where the uniforms are bad and the tips are even worse. Then she collides - literally - with Adam, an intriguing, handsome, and mysterious painter.
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language within first 2 minutes
- By kay on 04-11-20
By: Renée Carlino
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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
- By: Danielle Evans
- Narrated by: Daniel Deadwyler, Jeanette Illidge, Je Nie Fleming, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one's sense of identity and the choices one makes.
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things we do to oursekves
- By Jamintel on 02-06-23
By: Danielle Evans
What listeners say about The Benefits of Breathing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- avid kindler
- 02-03-21
A haunting, life affirming, collection of stories
This is a really beautiful book of short stories. They are each very different, but all of them bring characters of such solidity that I didn’t want to let them go – I would have read a full novel about any of them.
I say this, even though this is a book populated largely by prosperous academics and artsy people from wealthy California, which in the ordinary way would put me off a book – all that unthinking privilege, all that entitlement, how can I love these characters?
But I went on anyway: the beautiful writing kept me hooked despite my prim little European frown, and as the stories unfolded, all the peripheral unfamiliar things – the casual wealth and the American culture and the unfamiliar norms of dating and the curious tastes in coffee – all that became a simply a random backdrop. These people could have been Inuit or Arabs for all that it mattered. So they were Californians? Well they had to come from somewhere. They could have come from my village.
These are not stories about the material circumstances of their characters' lives. These are stories about their inner world, and their need for connection, for relationship, for love. It’s a bravely honest and sensitive look at how that need for connection plays out in so many different moments, as our lives change, as we age, as we grow.
The stories are beautifully crafted. At times they are very funny, at times very poignant. All the way through they are perceptive and quietly wise. There are no real saints or villains here, only flawed, tough, fragile people. There are no happily ever afters, either, but despite that, it’s a deeply life affirming book.
I listened to the book first as an audiobook and later read it on the page. On the page, one is more aware of the literary beauty of the writing. As words whispered in the ears it is different, but no less haunting. Some of the stories worked even better heard than on the page. The narration is so perfect that one is barely conscious of it - as if the narrators were the voices in one's own mind. Beautifully done, and worthy of a very special book.
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