Threshold
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Narrated by:
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Alan Smyth
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By:
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Rob Doyle
About this listen
"Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." --Rachel Kushner
"Fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt." --John Boyne
"Daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny." --Geoff Dyer
"Playful, potent, lurid, moving, and fearless." --Lisa McInerney
"[A] modern day odyssey." --Teddy Wayne
"A Pilgrim's Progress for our time." --Mike McCormack
"A thrilling mutation...[Doyle's] is a journey you don't want to miss." --Chris Power
An uninhibited portrait of the artist as a perpetual drifter and truth-seeker - a funny, profound, compulsive listen that's like traveling with your wildest and most philosophical friend.
The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or "on the dole" in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.
Following Doyle from Buddhism to the brink of madness, Threshold immerses us in the club-drug communalism of the Berlin underworld, the graves of myth-chasing artists in Paris, and the shattering and world-rebuilding revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT, the so-called "spirit molecule."
Exulting in the rootlessness of the wanderer, Doyle exists in a lineage of writer-characters - W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk - deftly and subversively exploring forms between theory and autobiography. Insightful and provocative, Threshold is a darkly funny, genuinely optimistic, compulsively listenable celebration of perception and desire, of what is here and what is beyond our comprehension.
The full copyright information includes: Extracts from the following used with kind permission: True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. © 1993 by Terence McKenna. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers. The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna. © 1991 by Terence McKenna. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 by Georges Bataille. English translation © 1985 by the University of Minnesota. Originally published in George Bataille’s Oevres complets; © 1970 by Editions Gallimard. DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, M.D. published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, © 2000. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of publisher. Nadja by André Breton, translated by Richard Howard. English translation © 1960 by Grove Press. Original publication © 1928 by Librarie Gallimard. Used by permission of Grove Atlantic. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. © 1997, 2006 by Chris Kraus. Used by permission of Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Semiotext(e) (US and Canada). ‘Mirror in February’ by Thomas Kinsella. Originally published by Dolmen Press in Downstream; © 1962 by Thomas Kinsella. Used by permission of the author. George Bataille: Essential Writings by Michael Richardson. © 1998 by Michael Richardson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Sage Publishing and Grasset. Robert Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations compiled and translated by Melville House Publishing. ‘The Last Interview’ originally published by Playboy Mexico; © 2003 by Monica Maristain. Used by permission of Melville House Publishing. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. © 1965, 1966 by Thomas Pynchon. Used by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency. Tres by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy, © 2000 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño, translation © 2011 by Laura Healy. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Tres by Roberto Bolaño. © The Estate of Roberto Bolaño, 2000, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited. ‘The Sea Close By’ in ‘Summer’, 1954 by Albert Camus, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy © 1970, used by permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US) and the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited on behalf of the Camus estate. Lyrical and Critical Essays © 1950, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1963 by Editions Gallimard.
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Story
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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Brodmaw Bay
- By: F.G. Cottam
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Brodmaw Bay seems to be the perfect refuge for James Greer and his family. When his son is the victim of a brutal mugging, Greer wants to leave London - the sooner the better - for the charming old-fashioned fishing port he has just discovered. But was finding Brodmaw Bay more than a happy accident? What is the connection between the village and his beautiful wife? When his friendly new neighbours say they'd welcome some new blood - in a village where the same families seem to have lived for generations - are they telling the whole truth?
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Not Quite The Equal Of Its Promise
- By Flavius Krakdaddius on 08-23-12
By: F.G. Cottam
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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Simple Passion
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
- By Kimberly on 10-17-22
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions
- Auntie Poldi, Book 1
- By: Mario Giordano
- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Auntie Poldi can think of no finer place to wait for death than Sicily. All she asks is a sea view, fine wine (and plenty of it), and her family close around. When death instead takes her handsome young friend Valentino - and under mysterious circumstances at that - Poldi will not take it lying down. Perhaps it's in her blood, but Auntie Poldi's hunting instincts have never felt more alive. Justice must be served - if it's the last thing she does....
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More fun and murder in Sicily!
- By MolllyT on 02-19-18
By: Mario Giordano
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
What listeners say about Threshold
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joselo
- 04-23-20
Behold
Irish author Rob Doyle wanders the world and consumes a variety of different drugs (ketamine, psilocybin, ayahuasca/DMT, etc.) in search of mystical experiences to write about. An artist friend of his once told him that he painted "not so much to solve the mystery, but to deepen it" and I believe the same is true of Doyle's writing. His autobiographical novel walks a fine line between the comical and the solemn, the absurd and the profound, as he follows hedonistic impulses and is sometimes brought to terrified reverence by his journeys into the unknown. At some point, Doyle quotes the words of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño from an interview in Playboy magazine:
What are the kinds of things that make you laugh?
My own and other people’s misfortunes.
What sort of things make you weep?
The same: my own and other people’s misfortunes.
While visiting the town near Barcelona where Bolaño spent his last years, Doyle imagines himself as a character dreamed up by the Chilean: "It might have been a Bolaño story, one of those faintly hallucinatory narratives about a drifter who turns up in some town, has an inconclusive encounter or two and moves on, having learned nothing and finished up more lost than when he started out." I guess you could sum up Threshold like that. I enjoyed Doyle's poetic observations about life, about the characters that he encounters along the way and the surrealist writers in whose works he finds inspiration.
About Alan Smyth's narration, I'll say that I found most of it brilliant and I wish I could give him five stars. However, his pronunciation of all things foreign is ghastly. I can't believe that Doyle wouldn't be able to pronounce correctly the names of the writers that he's so fascinated with. It's just painful to hear. Otherwise, Smyth's performance is great.
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- Babak
- 04-29-22
Self indulgent, banal, self important
I hated the narrator of this book. I hate when I get a book and every observation is portrayed as unique and interesting and somewhat profound, but is in fact fairly banal...
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