The Sunlight Dialogues
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Narrated by:
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Michael Butler Murray
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By:
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John Gardner
About this listen
John Gardner's sweeping portrait of the collision of opposing philosophical perspectives in 1960s America, centering on the appearance of a mysterious stranger in a small upstate New York town.
One summer day, a countercultural drifter known only as the Sunlight Man appears in Batavia, New York. Jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, the Sunlight Man encounters Fred Clumly, a 64-year-old town sheriff. Throughout the course of this impressive narrative, the dialogue between these two men becomes a microcosm of the social unrest that epitomized America during this significant historical period - and culminates in an unforgettable ending.
Beautifully expansive and imbued with exceptional social insight, The Sunlight Dialogues is John Gardner's most ambitious work and established him as one of the most important fiction writers in post-World War II America.
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Best book I've read to date!
- By Crusader on 11-07-11
By: Grace Metalious
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The Last Ballad
- A Novel
- By: Wiley Cash
- Narrated by: Karen White, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve times a week, 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. Two in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill's owners - the newly arrived Goldberg brothers - white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May's best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for 72 hours of work each week, it's the only opportunity she has.
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Dryer than a popcorn fart
- By Scott Wilson on 02-11-18
By: Wiley Cash
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Shadow Show
- All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
- By: Sam Weller - editor, Mort Castle - editor
- Narrated by: George Takei, Edward Herrmann, Kate Mulgrew, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT RAY BRADBURY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-27-17
By: Sam Weller - editor, and others
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Killing Critics
- By: Carol O'Connell
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory - computer genius, street fighter, provocative waif, peerless investigator, manipulative beauty - is the gorgeous, near-sociopathic heroine of this knife-edged suspense novel. Along with old pals, Ricker, Coffey, and faithful admirer Charles Butler, Mallory is determined to solve the brutal "art as death" murder of an untalented but highly touted artist-critic.
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2 Stars is generous
- By P. Chavez on 10-14-12
By: Carol O'Connell
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Another Country
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. Another Country is a work that is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago - and expertly narrated by Dion Graham.
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Powerful and sad
- By Kenneth on 04-10-09
By: James Baldwin
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Good book, but quoted passages are in Old English
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Annoying narration style
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Two for the price of one
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Good book, but quoted passages are in Old English
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What listeners say about The Sunlight Dialogues
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- Peter Taormina
- 01-13-21
a deep consideration of the human condition
timely in our present circumstance, centered on a small town, illustrative of our deep struggles with race, purpose and identity.
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- Tad Davis
- 05-01-14
Many, many layers
Gardner has done three things here. First, he's written a good old-fashioned American novel in the Faulkner tradition. The story is loaded with people and places, mostly focusing on one family (doomed, of course): the Hodges from the small town of Batavia in western New York. Everybody has a story to tell, and Gardner coaxes it out of them.
Second, he's tunneled through this would-be placid scene and mined the book with robberies, murders, seductions, deadly fires, and horrific accidents.
Third, he's layered on top of this a series of fascinating and bizarre debates about free will and determinism, using a contrast between supposed Judaeo-Christian values and the ancient Babylonian mindset. The antagonists in these debates are Fred Clumly, chief of Batavia's police force, and the Sunlight Man, a scarred and possibly insane man who is also a philosopher and brilliant vaudeville-style magician. The Sunlight Man is a kind of cross between Jean Paul Sartre, Penn Gillette, and Monty Python.
It's all brilliantly done, with sometimes extravagant language and a deep, deep compassion for all the characters. And for the most part, Michael Butler Murray carries it off with energy and humor. There are a couple of words, like "recalcitrant," that he consistently mispronounces. But all in all it was such an enjoyable ride I was willing to forgive him the occasional lapse.
You should know that in places the book is quite slow. Gardner seems to have squeezed in every detail of backstory he came up with in the planning stages. And a couple of the subplots, interesting as they are in themselves, aren't very well integrated with the main story. But listen to it patiently. The ending sweeps up all the emotions that preceded it in a spectacular moment of triumph.
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17 people found this helpful