
The Lost Steps
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Narrated by:
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Caleb Summers
About this listen
“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.”—Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
The best-known book by Cuba’s most important twentieth-century novelist, in its first new English translation in more than sixty years and featuring a new introduction by Leonardo Padura
A Penguin Classic
Dissatisfied with his empty, Sisyphus-like existence in New York City, where he has abandoned his creative dreams for a job in corporate advertising, a highly cultured aspiring composer wants nothing more than to tear his life up from the root. He soon finds his escape hatch: a university-sponsored mission to South America to look for indigenous musical instruments in one of the few areas of the world not yet touched by civilization. Retracing the steps of time, he voyages with his lover into a land that feels outside of history, searching not just for music but ultimately for himself, and turning away from modernity toward the very heart of what makes us human.
For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
©2023 Alejo Carpentier (P)2023 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Penguin Classics has recently published sensational new translations of two of Carpentier’s novels, The Lost Steps (1953) and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). . . . What made them influential, and makes them so dazzlingly readable still, is their style. . . . Needless to say, this marriage of style and subject would be illegible to English-language readers without a first-rate translator, and in Adrian Nathan West, Penguin Classics has found their man.”—The Wall Street Journal
“An erudite yet absorbing adventure story . . . A book full of riches—stylistic, sensory, visual.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Carpentier’s novels are full of luscious descriptions of nature. . . . His descriptions of food and drink are exquisite. . . . The mannered intensity of Carpentier’s language—maintained at fever pitch by West—propels the reader. . . . Every sentence in the novel [is] freighted with learning and a passion for high art. . . . What the reader takes away overall from West’s translation is a freshness and bite and aesthetic ambition that match Carpentier’s.”—Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
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Nostalgia in Nashville
- By Kalee Barbis on 07-11-24
By: Liz Riggs
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The Slaughterman's Daughter
- A Novel
- By: Yaniv Iczkovits
- Narrated by: Tovah Feldshuh
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement - certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession, Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg.
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The narration - why?????
- By agarista on 07-20-21
By: Yaniv Iczkovits
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The Ancients
- A Novel
- By: John Larison
- Narrated by: Dani Martineck
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people. Down the coast, raiders deliver the children's mother, along with the rest of their human cargo, to the last port city of a waning empire. Determined to reunite with her family, she plots her escape—while her fellow captives plan open revolt.
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Sociological SF — imaginative and deeply intelligent
- By AlishaKJ on 10-26-24
By: John Larison
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The Incorrigibles
- A Novel
- By: Meredith Jaeger
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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1890, San Francisco. Seduced by her employer’s nephew, Annie Gilmurray, an Irish maid, is accused of stealing the ring he promised her. Sentenced to one year in San Quentin, Annie is heartbroken and frightened among the inmates of the women’s ward: prostitutes, murderers, and pickpockets. But Annie finds beauty and friendship in a brutal place, where the women look out for one another, dreaming of a better life after release. But their world inside San Quentin's walls is a dangerous one, and when the unthinkable happens, Annie makes a choice that will alter the course of her future forever.
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A page-turner following strong women finding their agency imbued with rich, local SF history
- By S. Brett on 06-04-24
By: Meredith Jaeger
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Native Speaker
- By: Chang-rae Lee
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Henry Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy.
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Great novel. Strange narrator choice.
- By Andy P on 08-10-22
By: Chang-rae Lee
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In the Upper Country
- A Novel
- By: Kai Thomas
- Narrated by: Milton Barnes, Tymika Tafari, Wesley French
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The fates of two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act—intertwine in this sweeping, deeply researched debut set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad. In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.
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good story
- By Leo Garofalo on 04-14-24
By: Kai Thomas
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The Mother Act
- A Novel
- By: Heidi Reimer
- Narrated by: Beth Hicks, Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Sadie Jones, a larger-than-life actress and controversial feminist, never wanted to be a mother. No one feels this more deeply than Jude, the daughter Sadie left behind. While Jude spent her childhood touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, desperate for validation from the mother she barely knew, Sadie catapulted to fame on the wings of The Mother Act—a scathing one-woman show about motherhood. Two decades later, Jude is a talented actress in her own right, and her fraught relationship with Sadie has come to a scandalous head.
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Emotions
- By Amazon Customer on 10-17-24
By: Heidi Reimer
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Mount Misery
- A Novel
- By: Samuel Shem
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient.
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Not as good as The House Of God
- By Thomas C. Kelley on 02-03-23
By: Samuel Shem
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The Magic Kingdom
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.
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Dry account of a shaker love story
- By Sylvia Pinegar on 01-02-23
By: Russell Banks
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White Noise
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Ninth City Burning
- By: J. Patrick Black
- Narrated by: Suzanne Elise Freeman, Lincoln Hoppe, Ryan Gesell, and others
- Length: 21 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it - until we discovered we could wield the power, too. Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines.
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Really Tuff Read/Listen
- By Art Simmons on 10-05-16
By: J. Patrick Black
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Mercury Pictures Presents
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Marra
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
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As the NYT review says, a gorgeous book
- By fmg on 08-14-22
By: Anthony Marra
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And Then She Fell
- A Novel
- By: Alicia Elliott
- Narrated by: Cheri Maracle, Jenna Clause
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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On the surface, Alice is exactly where she thinks she should be: She’s just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve—a white academic whose area of study is conveniently her own Mohawk culture—is nothing but supportive; and they’ve moved into a new home in a posh Toronto neighborhood. But Alice could not feel like more of an impostor. She isn’t connecting with her daughter, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from Steve and their ever-watchful neighbors.
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hau day own day!
- By Karli on 11-06-23
By: Alicia Elliott
A journey to parts unknown
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