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Narrated by:
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Christopher Hurt
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By:
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Walker Percy
About this listen
Binx's life floats casually along until one fateful Mardi Gras week, when a bizarre series of events leads him to his unlikely salvation. In his half-brother Lonnie, who is confined to a wheelchair and soon to die, and his stepcousin Kate, whose predicament is even more ominous, Binx begins to find the sort of "certified reality" that had eluded him everywhere but at the movies.
©1961 Walker Percy (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
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Performance
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Story
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale, and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.
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Recommend this version
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Performance
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Beautiful 1950s Great Expectations-like Novel
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The fictionalized account of Louisiana's colorful and notorious governor, Huey Pierce Long, All the King's Men follows the startling rise and fall of Willie Stark, a country lawyer in the Deep South of the 1930s. Beset by political enemies, Stark seeks aid from his right-hand man Jack Burden, who will bear witness to the cataclysmic unfolding of this very American tragedy.
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Beautifully presented
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East of Eden
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Performance
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
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Critic reviews
"Clothed in originality, intelligence, and a fierce regard for man's fate....Percy has a rare talent for making his people look and sound as though they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone." ( Time)
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Story
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.
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Love Carver, But Dietz Ruins It With Reading
- By Noirbat on 05-10-18
By: Raymond Carver
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Herzog
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.
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Grows Within You
- By Chris Reich on 08-06-11
By: Saul Bellow
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The Day of the Locust
- By: Nathanael West
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the best 100 English-language novels by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song "Day of the Locusts" in homage, and Matt Groening's Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes-actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles.
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great writing, bleak story
- By Amazon Customer on 06-08-21
By: Nathanael West
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The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
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White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
- By: Anthony Powell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
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Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
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It is no good being a beauty alone...
- By Darwin8u on 02-24-16
By: Anthony Powell
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The Betrothed
- By: Alessandro Manzoni
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 24 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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After the jealous tyrant Don Rodrigo foils their wedding, young Lombardian peasants Lucia and Lorenzo must separate and flee for their safety. Their difficult path to matrimony takes place against the turbulent backdrop of the Thirty Years War, where lawlessness and exploitation are at their height. Lucia takes refuge in a convent, where she is later abducted and taken on a nightmarish journey to a sinister castle, while Lorenzo goes to Milan, where he witnesses famine, riots, and plague - all evoked through meticulous description and with stunning immediacy.
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Fantastic reading of a great work of literature
- By Pia Crosby on 03-25-19
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The Betrothed
- A Novel
- By: Alessandro Manzoni, Michael F. Moore - translator, Jhumpa Lahiri - afterword
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos, Susan Vinciotti Bonito
- Length: 22 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The Betrothed is a cornerstone of Italian culture, language, and literature. Published in its final form in 1842, The Betrothed has inspired generations of Italian readers and writers. Giuseppe Verdi composed his majestic Requiem Mass in honor of Manzoni. Italo Calvino called the novel “a classic that has never ceased shaping reality in Italy” while Umberto Eco praised its author as a “most subtle critic and analyst of languages.”
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How to ruin a masterpiece
- By McMurrab on 10-31-22
By: Alessandro Manzoni, and others
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Possession
- By: A. S. Byatt
- Narrated by: Virginia Leishman
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.
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Absolutely Excellent
- By Loujujoe on 05-12-09
By: A. S. Byatt
Percy's antagonist, Binx, is a genteel southern dandy, from big southern money, who walks the comfortable streets of his home town, narrating the scenery, mixed with a little free association and personal stories from his 30 years. He observes the day to day world, detached and unable to live outside his head. His relationships, both his dalliances with his secretaries and his family interactions, also have an observed quality void of connection since he returned from the Korean war . The novel revolves around Binx's day to day observations and his disconnect rather than any plot. It is in the days after that last page that this novel, and its project, crystallizes in the reader. Not every reader enjoys the thoughtful effort necessary to understand this enigmatic novel; The Moviegoer requires the readers participation in the creative process and some deep thinking--the legacy of Walker Percy's Christian existential philosophies, and truly great writing. To write a review that does this one justice, I'll have to read again and do some deep thinking (a little slow on the grasp)--looking forward to it.
The Moral Project
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novel or philosophy?
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I found the book to be a sort of Southern existentialist novel that is fairly hum-drum as Binx Bolling searches for something more.
I was disappointed. Perhaps I should search for something more; I must have missed something because I didn't get the source of the acclaim or notoriety this book received after its publication.
It's worth your time if you're from New Orleans or you're considering marrying someone who is manic-depressive. Otherwise... Well, maybe the best way to put it is to say that if I knew before purchasing this, what I now know, I would have taken a pass.
The narration was as ho-hum as the book, or maybe this was why I thought the book was so mundane. I cannot give the performance more than 3 stars.
poignant search to fill spiritual hole in soul
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While reading the book, I happened to inquire of my retired librarian mother-in-law if she had ever heard of the book. in her 90's but sharp as a tack, she immediately recalled the book, author Walker Percy and all his other books which she read over the years. I was taken with her face of nostalgia as she recalled how Percy had been one of her favorite writers as a young women who herself grew up in the South as a progressive women enraptured with the crop of New South writers documenting a slowly evolving South in the shadow of both Jim Crow and the nascent Civil Rights Movement. The book won the U.S. #nationalbookawardforfiction .
Christopher Hurt's performance on Audible really brought the work to life and I will be looking for more of his projects as well as more Percy I'm the future.
#americanliterature #readtheworld #readtheworldchallenge #globalreadingchallenge #neworleans
On the verge of everything new in old New Orleans
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philosophy literature
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He's too much of an observer--a Moviegoer.
A 'Modern' Classic
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Brilliant writer and storyteller!
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A lot of existentialism and less narrative
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I have never heard of this book but found it on several best of lists. The writing is excellent and perhaps at the time (1961) was a bit groundbreaking as a mild southern poetic exploration of existentialist ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but given much existentialist water under the bridge, I did not find it the essential read I hope for.
It is short, with little action and little character evolution, the writing is light, slow, and poetic.
If you are not at all familiar with existentialist angst this is among the easiest of light introductions.
The narration was perfect, clear and engaging with excellent slow, repressed emotionality.
Nice but not Essential
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A Defining Without Explaining
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