The Material
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Megan Tusing
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By:
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Camille Bordas
About this listen
A single momentous day transforms the lives of students and professors at a school for stand-up comedy in a novel that “[brims] with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs” (The Wall Street Journal)
“Insightful, compassionate, biting and honest.”—The Washington Post
“Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James and The Trees
Longlisted for the New American Voices Award
Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade.
Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there’s a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to be one.
They’re all afraid to be one.
Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.
Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.
Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh and the longing to make others laugh even harder.
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Critic reviews
“Bordas seamlessly weaves together the neuroses, insecurities, and egos of her characters, yielding a novel that both skewers the comic impulse to turn everything into ‘material,’ and manages to live up to the humor of its subject.”—Bustle
“With an emotional pendulum that can swing between pathos and bathos, [The Material] a high-wire act and masterclass in tone, observation and the beneath-the-surface substance.”—Style Weekly
“Brimming with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs. . . Bordas makes a case that [emotion and comedy can] coexist.”—The Wall Street Journal
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Get ready!
- By C Schoeneck on 03-27-24
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Green Frog
- Stories
- By: Gina Chung
- Narrated by: Jeena Yi, Sue Jean Kim, Hannah Choi
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.
By: Gina Chung
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How to Behave in a Crowd
- A Novel
- By: Camille Bordas
- Narrated by: Adam Alexi-Malle
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Isidore Mazal is 11 years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them - if he doesn't run away from home first.
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Charming and Moving
- By David P on 11-21-19
By: Camille Bordas
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Hombrecito
- A Novel
- By: Santiago Jose Sanchez
- Narrated by: André Santana
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami. In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss.
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Seems like the story of a sick young man
- By John Who on 09-27-24
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Craft
- Stories I Wrote for the Devil
- By: Ananda Lima
- Narrated by: Taylor Harvey
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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With a singular voice in the narrative-bending tradition of Kafka, Cortázar, and Bulgakov, Lima speaks to Brazilian-American immigrant experiences—of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home—with equal parts warmth and agitation. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a powerful experience: once listened to, you’re as much a part of the stories as they’re a part of you.
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Fantastic Narration
- By maria on 06-24-24
By: Ananda Lima
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Airplane Mode
- An Irreverent History of Travel
- By: Shahnaz Habib
- Narrated by: Deepa Samuel
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The color of one's skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.
By: Shahnaz Habib
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A Great Country
- A Novel
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.
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Get ready!
- By C Schoeneck on 03-27-24
-
Green Frog
- Stories
- By: Gina Chung
- Narrated by: Jeena Yi, Sue Jean Kim, Hannah Choi
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.
By: Gina Chung
What listeners say about The Material
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-22-24
Ran87507
I was really hoping to like it, but it went nowhere. It became a little boring for me
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