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The Book of Illusions
- Narrated by: Paul Auster
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
Presumed dead for 60 years, Hector Mann was a comic genius who had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future. Then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again.
Zimmer's research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector's films. Upon publication the following year, a letter turns up bearing a return address from New Mexico, supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision from him, changing his life forever.
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Critic reviews
"One of Auster's best." (Publishers Weekly)
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"Auster's signature fascination with the capriciousness of fate and adept use of the classic story-within-the-story motif are writ larger than ever in his brilliant, sage, and suspenseful tenth novel." (Booklist)
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- Unabridged
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A brutal, psychopathic murderer is released from prison - and stalks his prey with intent to kill.
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Hour of the Hunter
- By Marion Burke on 03-01-08
By: J. A. Jance
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Play Dead
- By: Harlan Coben
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Theirs was a marriage made in tabloid heaven, but no sooner had supermodel Laura Ayars and Celtics star David Baskin said “I do” than tragedy struck. While honeymooning on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, David went out for a swim - and never returned. Now widowed and grieving, Laura has a thousand questions and no answers. Her search for the truth will draw her into a web of lies and deception that stretches back thirty years - while on the court at the Boston Garden, a rookie phenom makes his spectacular debut....
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I love Harlan Coben, but...
- By Debbie Woodruff on 10-20-10
By: Harlan Coben
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Burn
- By: Ted Dekker, Erin Healy
- Narrated by: Ann Harrison
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Years ago, the Gypsy Kumpania where Janeal Mikkado lived was attacked by outsiders. With her best friend about to be consumed by a fire, Janeal had two options: try to save her friend—at serious risk to her own life—or disappear with the million dollars that she had just discovered. But the past is quickly coming back to haunt her. Both the best friend and the boyfriend that she was sure were dead have reappeared in her life, as has someone who knows about the money. There's a debt to be paid for the money she found, but there's an even greater debt she must face.
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Riveting
- By Jen on 03-21-18
By: Ted Dekker, and others
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Desert Heat
- By: J. A. Jance
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A cop lies dying beneath the blistering Arizona sun - a local lawman who may well have become the next sheriff of Cochise County. The police brass claim that Andy Brady was dirty, and that his shooting was a suicide attempt. Joanna Brady, his devoted wife and mother of their nine-year-old daughter, knows a cover-up when she hears one...and murder when she sees it.
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How happy was that??!!
- By karen on 03-09-15
By: J. A. Jance
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Dreams Underfoot
- The Newford Collection
- By: Charles de Lint
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
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Welcome to Newford: to the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the gray harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost.
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Too Much Urban Fantasy Wears Thin
- By Jefferson on 06-15-13
By: Charles de Lint
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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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The Man from Primrose Lane
- By: James Renner
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
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A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.
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Good read, despite, not because of sci fi twist
- By Lulu W. on 07-18-12
By: James Renner
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Peyton Place
- By: Grace Metalious
- Narrated by: Tim O'Connor
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1956, when this novel was first published, communities all over New England snapped up copies to see if they were the town portrayed in the book. Peyton Place is the story of a repressive New England town known for its high standards of public morality, and the steamy sexual activities that take place behind its bedroom doors.
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Best book I've read to date!
- By Crusader on 11-07-11
By: Grace Metalious
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Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next 40 years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.
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Perhaps more interesting than important
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When his closest friend, Benjamin Sachs, accidentally blows himself up on a Wisconsin road, Peter Aaron attempts to piece together the life that led to Sachs' tragic demise and determine the reason for his death.
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Perhaps more interesting than important
- By Darwin8u on 10-04-13
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Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, 34-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
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The Master Speaks
- By Dean on 09-20-05
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Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore, a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York".
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Brooklyn IS Still the World
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For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."
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It keeps you reading... but whats the point?
- By James on 10-02-10
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An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.
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Lovely book
- By paula on 02-27-11
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Facing his 63rd winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations - both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.
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Memorable
- By Diane on 09-02-12
By: Paul Auster
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Mr. Vertigo
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It is the late 1920's, the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and Walt is a Saint Louis orphan rescued from the streets by the mysterious Hungarian Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. The vaudeville act that results from Walt's marvelous new abiltiy takes them across a vast and vibrant country, where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob.
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I take it all back! Love the book
- By Chris Reich on 07-24-15
By: Paul Auster
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Report from the Interior
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Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date. In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts…Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior.
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Paul Austers største, mest hjerteskærende og overbevisende roman. En overvældende og overraskende fortælling om arv og miljø, om kærlighed og livet selv. Den 3. marts 1947 bliver Archibald Isaac Ferguson født på hospitalet i New Jersey. Fra det øjeblik han kommer til verden, tager familiens liv fire samtidige og uafhængige retninger. Hver af de fire versioner af Ferguson bliver tryllebundet af den skønne og mageløse Amy Schneiderman, og hver af de fire Ferguson'er får hver deres egen helt enestående relation til hende. Som læser følger man alle fire i medgang og modgang. Forskellige liv og dog det samme.
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If only I could understand Danish!!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-07-18
By: Paul Auster
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In the Country of Last Things
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From a life of ease and comfort, Anna Blume embarks on a search for her missing brother. Soon she finds herself trapped in a city obsessed with last things—with the means and manner of death. In this culture of doom, the masses are homeless, theft has ceased to be a crime, production has ceased, and the only growth industries are dying and disassembly.
By: Paul Auster
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Burning Boy
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With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age 28.
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Brilliant and enjoyable
- By Alvin Marcetti on 01-08-23
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Man in the Dark
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"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness." So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating tale about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife's recent death and the murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend.
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I only buy Paul Auster self narrated books now
- By lynn on 04-23-11
By: Paul Auster
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Timbuktu
- By: Paul Auster
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Mr. Bones, the canine hero of this astonishing book, is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant and troubled homeless man from Brooklyn. As Willy's body slowly expires, he sets off with Mr. Bones for Baltimore in search of his high-school English teacher and a new home for his companion. Mr. Bones is our witness during their journey, and out of his thoughts, Paul Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in American fiction.
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Should I Have Said Gehrig?
- By Dubi on 11-10-14
By: Paul Auster
What listeners say about The Book of Illusions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Eleazar Rodriguez
- 02-24-21
The book is amazing and I love to hear Paul Auster reading it.
I love to hear Paul Auster reading his own work. He does so in a perfect way. I recommend this audiobook 100%.
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Overall
- Peregrine
- 11-29-09
Compelling Narrative, ending is hard to take
Without giving too much away, I will say that although the story is compelling and Auster's reading is perfect, it's an extremely nihilistic work. Auster is essentially telling us that life itself is a waste of time!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- SFort
- 08-25-06
Excellent writing, extraordinarily depressing
First, the good: the author is a superb writer. He is so good that even his descriptions of mundane actions and scenes are fascinating to read. Also, the concept behind the book is unique, and being a lover of old silent movies, I was hypnotized by the first few chapters. Now, the bad: this is the most depressing book I have ever read. The book tells you almost from page one that the narrator's wife and children were killed in a plane accident, the rest of the book occuring after that fact. So you'd think things would get better from that point, but they actually manage to get worse. There's an endless spiral of bleakness and crushed hopes in this book. In the last few paragraphs of the final chapter, the narrator calls the book his "compilation of sorrows." That it is. Do not entertain any hopes once you start this book. All hope is lost here.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Glenn A Miller
- 05-23-05
Odd but compelling
This is the second Auster work I've been through. I didn't feel the anger of the primary character, nor the sadness. I just wasn't sold.
The plot, however, is so completely unique that I think you will listen hour after hour to see where it is all headed.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Gene
- 10-05-04
Hmmm....
I'm new to the Paul Auster universe, but this book won't be my last brush. There are many surprises here, but not the vulgar surprises of empty and meaningless complexity, something deeper and closer to the core of life's real mystery. We follow a fictitious actor from the silent era into several secret lives. If you are looking for a thriller, look elsewhere. If you are looking for a sober sort of entertainment mixed with despair, this is more like it.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Thomas Massnick
- 11-11-11
One of Auster's best
Mr. Auster did a fantastic job with the narration. His precise, rich voice matches his prose style better than the other narrators of his other books could do. I will say, however, that books like Timbuktu do well to have a different voice actor because of the main character's odd tone. Auster does not have the range of a professional actor, and cannot perform many distinct characters, but for this book his voice was perfect.
The story itself was fascinating and devastating. Auster does a great job of portraying a sane and calm person at the end of his rope. The only thing I did not like about the book was its title--it is somewhat forgettable.
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Overall
- David A
- 01-11-05
wonderful book, wonderful story
this was the first audio book that i listened to. i absolutely loved it and am looking forward to reading/listening to most of his work. there are two major strengths of this audio book. first, it is read by the author. for the audio books that i have listened to, the ones actually read by the author are so much richer and more expressive than those read by actors. the author, obviously, knew what s/he intened as the subtext of any particular passage and can convey that subtext through their voice. in addition, auster has an extremely pleasant voice and it was enjoyable to listen to him read it. the second strength of the book is the numerous intertwining plot-lines that are weaved together so well. in many ways, this is not simply a single story, but a richly told tapestry of stories spanning many years and several lives. to me, this made the book extremely enjoyable because each component of the overall plot was compelling, interesting, and well-told.
the only con of the book is that it had a bit of a downer for an ending, though this is just personal perference. the ending was not bad, but i was hoping for a happier ending.
in short, i cannot say enough to recommend this book. it will be well-worth your time and money.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Wrightaway
- 11-17-11
A book men will love, ladies...
I'm not familiar with Paul Auster or his other works, but when I asked my boyfriend to recommend a book, this is what he told me to read. I can see why it would appeal to him. I knew a few pages in this particular book would appeal to a man more than a woman, but as a person who loves almost all genres, I gave it a try.
The story is depressing but we listeners know this from the start - anything that starts with what this guy has gone through will have a somber tone. For that matter, the reader was spot on for this tone, but the recording sounded a bit off (maybe aged?).
Personally it didn't really appeal to me but the story was intriguing so I stuck through to the end. Ladies, you may want to really think before getting this one. Guys, you may just like it. Silent movie fans, you will LOVE it.
If I were a man I might have given it 4 stars.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Austin Sailsbury
- 11-14-20
A Great “On-ramp” for Auster
I’ve tried to read several other Auster novels and could never get to the end - either I didn’t care for the narrator and / or the plot was too “meta” for my taste. BUT this book is fantastic. Great plot, interesting characters, and lovely writing. Surprised this hasn’t become a film yet, it’s ripe for a movie adaptation.
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Overall
- Amber
- 10-21-10
Good, then boring, then depressing.
This story was dark, dark, dark. At first it was a kind of engaging mystery, and I was totally enthralled for the first third or so. Then things go from bad, to worse, to Shakespearean tragedy of epic porportions. I found all of the long back story about Hector boring, and the ending was bizarre. Not my cup of tea.
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1 person found this helpful