-
The Flame Alphabet
- Narrated by: Andy Paris
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
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Publisher's summary
In The Flame Alphabet, language is toxic to everyone but children. For adults this means no speaking, no reading, no writing, no listening - at least not without severe allergic reaction, depression or crippling pain. In telling the story, Sam, a man whose family has come apart, is literally dying a slow death. It’s poisoning him to write the words that we read. The story is set in our time, but that time has been just slightly broken open to accommodate a world where children have all of the power and where adults must shield themselves from language in any way that they can. Marcus’s narrative touches on a wide range of interests and issues, including a speculative conception of allergy science, rogue tactics of self-improvement, the trauma that surrounds aphasia, confidence games between excessively powerful children, the future of writing as a technology and cruelty within families. The novel is part satire and lament, dystopian fantasy and family tragedy.
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“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
- By Mel on 11-27-17
By: Louise Erdrich
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The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination
- Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius
- By: John Joseph Adams - editor
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Mary Robinette Kowal, Justine Eyre
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In super-hero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games, and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy, or otherwise dominate the world as we know it. It’s just not fair. So those of us who are so twisted and sick that we love mad scientists have created this guide.
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HAND DANCING
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-30-15
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The Watchers
- By: A.M. Shine
- Narrated by: Jacqueline Milne
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This forest isn't charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina's is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn't reach the bunker in time.
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Surprising and original
- By Leia Schoeck on 10-08-22
By: A.M. Shine
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Maplecroft
- The Borden Dispatches, Book 1
- By: Cherie Priest
- Narrated by: Johanna Parker, Roger Wayne
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The people of Fall River, Massachusetts, fear me. Perhaps rightfully so. I remain a suspect in the brutal deaths of my father and his second wife despite the verdict of innocence at my trial. With our inheritance, my sister, Emma, and I have taken up residence in Maplecroft, a mansion near the sea and far from gossip and scrutiny.But it is not far enough from the affliction that possessed my parents. Their characters, their very souls, were consumed from within by something that left malevolent entities in their place.
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The lengthy build up is worth the mystery.
- By DabOfDarkness on 10-25-14
By: Cherie Priest
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The Sky Is Yours
- A Novel
- By: Chandler Klang Smith
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis' last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash; are forced to flee everything they've ever known.
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a hot mess
- By Alison on 04-09-19
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
- By: Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
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Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
- By Sean on 03-05-16
By: Cory Doctorow, and others
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The Cider House Rules
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 24 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of America's most beloved and respected writers comes the classic story of Homer Wells, an orphan, and Wilbur Larch, a doctor without children of his own, who develop an extraordinary bond with one another.
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Wonderful
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 07-02-07
By: John Irving
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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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The Portable Veblen
- By: Elizabeth Mckenzie
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor. The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that's as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its words, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now.
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Not what it was cracked up to be
- By Linda on 02-03-16
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Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries listeners through his "doors" into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith's founding.
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The Gospel of Emmanuel
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A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
- By redhidari on 10-01-15
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The Buddha in the Attic
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In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of young Japanese brides, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers....
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Fascinating topic, irritating writing style
- By Lydia on 08-26-11
By: Julie Otsuka
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Train Dreams
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- By: Denis Johnson
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Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
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The Days of Abandonment
- By: Elena Ferrante
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
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An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
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D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
- By Margaret M. Cranston on 01-18-16
By: Elena Ferrante
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The Paying Guests
- By: Sarah Waters
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
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It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
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Difference of Opinion
- By Mel on 12-17-14
By: Sarah Waters
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The Kingdom
- By: Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert - translator, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 16 hrs and 25 mins
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Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries listeners through his "doors" into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith's founding.
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The Gospel of Emmanuel
- By Mark on 12-31-17
By: Emmanuel Carrère, and others
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The Argonauts
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
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Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
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A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
- By redhidari on 10-01-15
By: Maggie Nelson
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The Buddha in the Attic
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- Narrated by: Samantha Quan, Carrington MacDuffie
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In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of young Japanese brides, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers....
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Fascinating topic, irritating writing style
- By Lydia on 08-26-11
By: Julie Otsuka
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Train Dreams
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- By: Denis Johnson
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- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
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Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
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The Days of Abandonment
- By: Elena Ferrante
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
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An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
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D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
- By Margaret M. Cranston on 01-18-16
By: Elena Ferrante
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The Paying Guests
- By: Sarah Waters
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It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
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Difference of Opinion
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Z. Z. Packer's first collection of short stories is rich with unexpected turns, indelible images, and penetrating insight that belies someone so young. Her stories plunge us into the worlds of people living on the edge and to the flashpoints that make or break them, that shape their worldviews forever.
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Lousy chapter breaks
- By Gatster on 10-25-14
By: Z. Z. Packer
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Christine Falls
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It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.
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Great Listen
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By: John Banville, and others
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Phil Klay's Redeployment takes listeners to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: One of extremes and one of loss.
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A Must Read - Fantastic Heart Rendering Shorts
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By: Phil Klay
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Brother, I'm Dying
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Award-winning, best-selling author Edwidge Danticat taps her exceptional storytelling gifts for this memoir of the two men who raised her. When the author was only four years old, her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York in search of a better life, leaving their daughter in the care of her uncle Joseph. A peaceful pastor in Port-au-Prince, Joseph raised Edwidge with the love and devotion of a father, despite facing many hardships in politically turbulent Haiti.
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A Superb Reflection
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By: Edwidge Danticat
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Say Her Name
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Celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer of 2005. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body-surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura’s death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too.
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Say her name...but not that way
- By Pamela Harvey on 06-18-11
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Veronica
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
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Genome
- The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Original Recording
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Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers - questions that will profoundly impact the way we think about disease, about longevity, and about free will. Questions that will affect the rest of your life. Matt Ridley here probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome.
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Still useful today.
- By Gary on 05-21-12
By: Matt Ridley
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Pity the Beast
- By: Robin McLean
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
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- Unabridged
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Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory.
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Loved It!
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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
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Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
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A Conflicted Response
- By Cariola on 09-24-13
By: Anthony Marra
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Hurricane Season
- By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
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Wow
- By Anonymous User on 11-20-20
By: Fernanda Melchor, and others
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The Worst Hard Time
- The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes.
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Excellent history ruined by Egan's bias & cynicism
- By Nathan on 03-21-23
By: Timothy Egan
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
- Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- By: Katherine Boo
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.
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An Antidote for Shantaram
- By Dr. on 06-14-12
By: Katherine Boo
What listeners say about The Flame Alphabet
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darryl
- 06-24-12
Good idea, but...
I like the idea behind this apocalyptic story, but I think the novel is a bit misconstructed, taking too long after backing up to get back to where it starts, and then there is a very strange element that just doesn't work involving a network of tunnels and secret Jewish/Hebrew underground. Trim that out, and concentrate on the ideas beginning to develop in the 2nd half of the story and it could have been great. I kept thinking of Saramago's Blindness, which is excellent though a bit long in the middle, and this could have been very much like that, exploring the consequences of the situation more, but as is, i have to say near miss.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jennifer
- 02-20-12
Be warned
What disappointed you about The Flame Alphabet?
This book is about a Jewish family and how they deal with their intelligent, logic based, sullen teenage daughter. The disease is almost secondary. I wish I had known that before purchasing.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Eric
- 03-04-13
Great, if confusing, story
I don't mean that this story was confusing, just for the sake of confusion. It's rather the novel kept me in a constant state of confusion about how I felt about the narrator, the mother, the daughter, and the situation itself. I spent most of the book wondering how the narrator was going to survive and make it through the spread of the language virus, while also hoping that perhaps he'd die and I'd finally be able to hear the daughter or the mother's side of things. Given the theme of the book, I think this response is the exact one that Marcus intended for us.
I've read other reviews that didn't like the beauty of the language. I did. And, I enjoyed the dark, sick humor that would occur at the most unexpected of places.
Overall, I'm glad that I read this book and it makes me want to know more of Marcus and his work.
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- Matthew
- 06-15-13
Hopes Dashed
What disappointed you about The Flame Alphabet?
I thought the premise was interesting. The early chapters were promising, but as the story progresses it all sinks into a sludge of alienation that would probably even bum Kafka out. Lots of dreary descriptions of the sick getting sicker but not dying too fast and civilization crumbling but not quite coming to an end. The protagonist struggles to make sense of it all, but gets nowhere as he and his family literally and figuratively fall apart. Nearly all the characters stop speaking to each other, per the major plot point of the novel, so the reader is mostly left with the protagonist's/narrator's lengthy ruminations about existing in a world in which language - written or spoken - is deadly poison (irony?). In the end, I didn't care about anyone or anything in the novel. I simply felt, alienated. Was that Marcus's goal?
What do you think your next listen will be?
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?
There are a few moments of gallows humor in the novel that Andy Paris handles well. At these moments, the text gives him an opportunity to use his voice to express the narrator's bitter frustration. This element might be the only thing that buoyed me through the story.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
I was disappointed that such a promising concept could be rendered as such a dud.
Any additional comments?
If you are depressed when you start reading this book, it will only make you more depressed.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Nate
- 03-09-12
A Brilliant Concept, Executed to Perfection
For a book detailing the slow and macabre proliferation of disease and dissolution of language, this reads like a methodical and ominously gorgeous work of prose. It wasn't without its flaws, but still earned its 5 stars (maybe 4.5) through its descriptions, analyses of familial relationships and religion, and execution of a great concept without going Hollywood Thriller. I keep turning parts of it over in my head and continue to draw out more about culture, spirituality, and of course language itself.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Salley
- 02-27-23
I tried to like this
I tried to like this but became frustrated by the lack of character development. Very painful to listen to someone beating themselves over the head for so long.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-04-12
Dont waste a credit
I couldn't get through this one. I didn't make it past 2 hours. Maybe I will give it another shot on paper so I can get through it faster. I felt it was a waste to listen. Nothing really happened in the first 2 hours. Maybe other listeners got far in enough to get to the story, I didn't have the patience.
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- avoidthelloyd
- 04-12-12
MISSING ESSENTIALS
Not worth a credit knowing what I know now. I have almost 50 books in my library and this is in the worst 5. This book attracted me with the synopsis because it was an interesting idea (might be enjoyable to someone who studies languages and communication), but the entire story is problematic and missing some essential ingredients to make an enjoyable read. 1) The main theme is pain from verbal communication. Do you realize what that does? It eliminates the primary foundation for meaningful relationships. Do you what a story without meaningful relationships is? That's right, boring! The main character goes 11 long hours without any meaningful connection with any other character in the book! That results in 2) You don't care about the characters. The lack of meaningful relationships between characters means you don't care what happens to any of them, thus there is no tense climax that you are so anticipating that you remove all distractions so you can't miss! 3) there is no solution or closure at the end of the book. 4) There is no antagonist that must be overcome. Please avoid this book.
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