
The Night Listener
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Narrated by:
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Armistead Maupin
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By:
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Armistead Maupin
Gabriel Noone is a fabulist, a writer whose late-night radio tales have brought him into the homes of millions. In the midst of a painful, unwanted separation from his longtime love, Gabriel reads the extraordinary memoir of Pete Lomax, an ailing 13-year-old boy who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his parents. Pete is not only a gifted diarist but also a devoted listener of Gabriel's show. And thus begins an extraordinary phone friendship.
Then, out of the blue, troubling new questions arise, exploding Gabriel's comfortable assumptions and causing his ordered existence to spin wildly out of control. As he walks a vertiginous line between truth and illusion, he is finally forced to confront all his relationships - familial, romantic, and erotic.
This unprecedented audio project is as thought-provoking as it is mesmeric. The Night Listener is a meditation on the power of voices and the faith we place in them, and an extraordinary audio experience from an American literary icon.
©2000 Literary Bent LLC (P)2000 HarperCollins Publishers Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Filled with twists and turns that rival The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, Maupin's new novel is a deceptively simple page-turner perfectly suited for the audio format....Not only is it a book that listeners will want to discuss with friends, but once finished and all is revealed, it's likely people will want to listen to it again with a fresh ear to hear the clues that have been planted along the way....Audio is the perfect medium for this born storyteller." (Publishers Weekly)
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Beautifully read & written; story frustrating
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Review of The Night Listener
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Of course, that is also the main theme of the book itself: Is what is happening fact or fiction? Is it really happening, or is it just an imagining? Are our lives really happening as we believe them to be happening, or are they something else altogether?
Even so, there is still something unsatisfying about the final product. The characters waver between the two- and three-dimensional and then plump down firmly on the side of the former. This is annoying, because it is amply clear that Maupin has it in him to make them not three- but multi-dimensional.
Somehow I just don't buy the literary artifice of the open ending. I have nothing against open endings, but this one doesn't wash. My suspicion is that Maupin got stuck or bored or bogged down and simply stopped being really committed to the project when he was around two thirds of the way through. This is where the book starts to dissolve and lose its initial promise, and the prose starts to read more like a chore than a pleasure.
I still wanted to give it five stars because of the magnificent way it started, but I finally decided on three for the book we actually have. The five-star book is there, and it is truly stunning, Maupin just needs to sit down and write it. If he wants to, of course...
Unfinished, but still 5 stars
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OOOPS
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Was Expecting More
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The narration was great but the audio skipped here and there.
Night Napper... Snooze On
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Maupin's narration, while not delineating or differentiating characters as many readers do, is immediate, engrossing, and real.
Excellent
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Not Tales of the City
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Programming criticism: Maupin's voice and style are without peer, but this long reading suffers badly from silent "page breaks" so long I thought the batteries had died or the file failed on several occasions. There is incidental music between chapters but this dies out and dead air fills the room for interminable periods.
You'll question your own existence by the end...
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Excellent book
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