
The Dharma Bums
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Narrated by:
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Ethan Hawke
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By:
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Jack Kerouac
About this listen
Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature
First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
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Critic reviews
"In [On the Road] Kerouac's heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth...the novel often attains a beautiful dignity, and builds towards a moving climax." (The Chicago Tribune)
"In his often brilliant descriptions of nature one is aware of exhilarating power and originality...the entire cast of characters is presented with that not unrefreshing blend of naivete and sophistication that seems to be this author's forte." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Full of sparkling descritions of landscape and weather, light falling through trees, the smell of snow, the motion of animals...Jack Kerouac is a writer who cannot be charged with dullness." (The Atlantic)
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Story
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.
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Dense & Difficult But Rewarding
- By Nick O. on 02-28-22
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
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Selected Hemingway Stories
- A New Audio Collection
- By: Ernest Hemingway
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Never before on audio! All-new productions of 24 classic Ernest Hemingway stories. This brand-new audio collection from the iconic Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author is a listener’s delight. The two dozen short stories presented here have never been published on audio; these new recordings of classic stories will remind listeners of Ernest Hemingway’s incomparable mastery of the short story form.
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Masterful Story Telling
- By Amazon Customer on 08-09-20
By: Ernest Hemingway
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How Beautiful We Were
- A Novel
- By: Imbolo Mbue
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi, Janina Edwards, Dion Graham, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.
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As relevant as it is heart-wrenching
- By Anonymous User on 10-18-21
By: Imbolo Mbue
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The Buddhist Years
- Collected Writings
- By: Jack Kerouac, Charles Shuttleworth - editor
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.
By: Jack Kerouac, and others
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On the Road: The Original Scroll
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: John Ventimiglia
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him.
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A Classic Brought to Life
- By Sil A. on 11-25-16
By: Jack Kerouac
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Vanity of Duluoz
- An Adventurous Education, 1935-46
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This book presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack’s glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement—and a riot of drugs, sex, and writing.
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A brilliant read.
- By James DeYoung on 12-24-24
By: Jack Kerouac
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The Lehman Trilogy
- A Novel
- By: Stefano Massini, Richard Dixon - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning three generations and 150 years, The Lehman Trilogy is a moving epic that dares to tell the story of modern capitalism through the saga of the Lehman brothers and their descendants. Surprising and exciting, brilliant and inventive, Stefano Massini’s masterpiece - like Hamilton - is a story of immigration, ambition, and success; it is the story of America itself from a daring and original perspective.
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Astounding!
- By Lisa Scottoline on 05-04-21
By: Stefano Massini, and others
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Tristessa
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Mike Dennis
- Length: 2 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1955, novelist Jack Kerouac detoured from his cross-country American travels to Mexico City, where a group of junkie expatriates he had known from the New York City post-war scene had gone for the cheap and plentiful supply of heroin and morphine. Fellow beat writer William S. Burroughs, who had been a part of the Mexican expatriate community, had introduced Kerouac to Bill Garver (named Old Bull Gaines in the novel), a much-older, long-term addict who had in turn introduced Kerouac to Esperanza Villanueva, whom Kerouac named Tristessa in the novel.
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Gritty
- By William on 06-09-18
By: Jack Kerouac
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Valentine
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Wetmore
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Jenna Lamia
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field - an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law.
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Texas girls don’t say PEE - can
- By red raider lover on 04-16-20
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A Long Petal of the Sea
- A Novel
- By: Isabel Allende, Nick Caistor, Amanda Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires.
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Impressive
- By Jean on 05-24-20
By: Isabel Allende, and others
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Klara and the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Sura Siu
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?
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Well Worth Having Waited For!
- By otherdeb on 03-04-21
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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On the Road
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: David Carradine
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Abridged
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On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience.
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not the full book
- By Hannah on 12-11-17
By: Jack Kerouac
Always Timely If You Have the Time
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What a journey!
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Really enjoyed Ethan Hawke’s reading!
Loved revisiting this book .
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Stupendous narration!
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Oh yes, the narration made the story alive a Jack would have liked.
Blah!
A winding swirling journey to Buddhahood
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Kerouac's freewheeling novel, energetically performed
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Wonderful
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WOW. TOAL PHENOMENAL.
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A classic sorry, well told.
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I have been to these places, and Kerouac with Hawke reading brings me back.
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