The Counterlife
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Narrated by:
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Malcolm Hillgartner
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By:
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Philip Roth
About this listen
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.
Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, a church in London's West End, or a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.
©2016 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. A ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes.
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Great read
- By Lee Crowe on 07-27-15
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The Heart's Invisible Furies
- A Novel
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
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Outstanding. A Must listen.
- By Keith G on 09-04-17
By: John Boyne
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The Blood Doctor
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
By: Barbara Vine
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Because I Come from a Crazy Family
- The Making of a Psychiatrist
- By: Edward M. Hallowell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Treasure Box
- By: Orson Scott Card
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A shattering childhood tragedy left Quentin Fears devastated. But the wealthy, enigmatic recluse has experienced the extraordinarily unexpected: love at first sight, with Madeleine. Now he must meet his new wife's family. A bizarre, dysfunctional collection of extreme characters, they are guarding a secret both shocking and terrifying, as is Madeleine herself. And suddenly Quentin Fears must prevent his dream woman from unleashing an ageless malevolence intent on ruling the world.
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OSC at his best!!!
- By KaHef on 01-13-07
By: Orson Scott Card
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The Book of Air and Shadows
- A Novel
- By: Michael Gruber
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 18 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Jake Mishkin's seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer (or killers) unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for 400 years.
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Not your average story.
- By Nicholas Winn on 06-02-07
By: Michael Gruber
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The Lost
- A Search for Six of Six Million
- By: Daniel Mendelsohn
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates.
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Exquisite Narration, Breathtakingly Heartfelt Book
- By Gillian on 08-14-16
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
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It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America—a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
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Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
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Something to think about
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Deception
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With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned.
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
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Something to think about
- By Michael Beilenson on 08-01-24
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Deception
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Patrimony
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Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.
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You must not forget anything
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My Life as a Man
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A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Philip Roth’s most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it.
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As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself “a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that “ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time”—Village Voice.
By: Philip Roth
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The Great American Novel
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Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it’s because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
By: Philip Roth
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Seize the Day
- By: Saul Bellow
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- Unabridged
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Story
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess.
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Why?
- By Ashraf Abaza on 05-16-19
By: Saul Bellow
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Goodbye, Columbus
- And Five Short Stories
- By: Philip Roth
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- Unabridged
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Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
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A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
What listeners say about The Counterlife
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lisa Fuentes
- 07-21-22
Malcolm Hillgartner performance
Malcolm Hillgartner delivers a pitch-perfect performance of a book that deserves to be more widely appreciated. Brilliant.
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- G. Benett
- 10-03-19
Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
When I told a Catholic girlfriend that I was reading and loving Philip Roth's The Counterlife, she said, "Of course you are. You're a Jewish man." As obliquely hostile as some of the dialogue between Roth's men & women, this comment is also roughly as accurate. The Counterlife repeats in five variations a story about a Jewish man in early middle age weighing life, sex, identity, and the imaginary of love. I find Roth's female voices to be intellectual simulacra of what men might want or need women to say in order to carry on their stories. (This isn't a compliment.) By contrast, I feel completely at home in the interiority and dialogue of Roth's men, here the author Nathan Zuckerman and his dentist brother. Ok, but why then five stars? Why not lose some, in view of the artificiality of The Counterlife's female voices? Could it be because, as was pointed out to me, I am a Jewish man and like hearing versions of myself echoed in fiction? Sure. But more, it's because the way men tell stories about themselves to construct their identities is the essence of this masterwork of metafiction. That is what we all do all day long, and The Counterlife is a telling and retelling that, beyond plot and character, highlights the tricky ways men tell others, and, crucially, themselves, who and what they are. Beautifully narrated in this Audible edition by Malcolm Hilgartner, who captures the egoism, humor, and rage of Roth's men. His female characters sound less real. They sound like men reading women, which is very much the point.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-07-18
The Counterlife- how deep can you get?
In his writings, Philip Roth unearths and describes human emotions in an epic narrative of reality. This book is both immensely jarring and immensely insightful at the same time. An amazing experience that can render one’s self-perception of uniqueness as something quite pedestrian.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Mihal Ceittin
- 03-03-21
One of Roth's Most Philosophical Novels
If you haven't read/listened to Roth before this might not be the best one to start with. Nevertheless it is a moebius strip/fun house mirror of a novel that digs deep into identity and conflict: Jew vs. Jew, Jew vs. Gentile, Man vs. Woman, Fact vs. Fiction, Brother vs. Brother, Author vs. Character....It is also a deep dive into the moral responsibility of an author: How much can one derive from real life for material? Are characters in fiction deserving of any ethical treatment or are they just to be used and manipulated? You get the sense that the mature Roth struggled with all of these issues and he skillfully lays them out here with his usual blend of wit, sarcasm, irony and psychological insight. Why this guy never got the Nobel Prize is beyond me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- reader
- 01-22-21
humour and humanity
Listening to this marvellous humanist was an unadulterated joy. It provides an optimistic hiatus for the possibility of a fine person becoming the most powerful political leader while retaining humour and humanity.
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1 person found this helpful
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- rachel murane
- 01-01-24
Roth is brilliant
the performance was particularly top tier.
riveting. Roth's intertwining of identities real, identities created is simply stunning
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- Anonymous User
- 09-24-20
excellent performance
As a non native speaker I can really appreciate when an actor’s reading is so clear and well paced and nuanced that I can appreciate this amazing novel in all its complexity
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2 people found this helpful
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- lenore scendo
- 06-05-21
Roth’s obsessions
This book would be better in print because of the confusing shifting narrators and points of view. Some brilliant stretches.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Adina Remz
- 06-20-18
Brilliant
Intricately, ingeniously constructed plot with interesting characters, outrageous and hilarious the story was situations, and struggle for inner truths. And identity and meaningful relationships.
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3 people found this helpful
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- alan
- 07-04-18
classic Roth
not necessarily the book of Roth to start with but the dialogues are classic roth
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2 people found this helpful