Vineland
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Narrated by:
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Graham Winton
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By:
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Thomas Pynchon
About this listen
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in Northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter, Prairie, search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a '60s radical who ran off with a narc.
Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sports car scene in V.).
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All of 31 inches tall, Cady is a true survivor in a town where, as she says, "you can die of encouragement". Her early starring role as a lovable elf in an immensely popular American film proved a major disappointment, since moviegoers never saw the face behind the stifling rubber suit she was required to wear. Now, after a decade of hollow promises from the Industry, she is reduced to performing at birthday parties and bat mitzvahs as she waits for the miracle that will finally make her a star.
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short but good
- By Charlene on 08-06-07
By: Armistead Maupin
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A Killing in the Hills
- A Novel (Bell Elkins, Book 1)
- By: Julia Keller
- Narrated by: Shannon McManus
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s happening in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas of the country just like Acker’s Gap? Or were Dean Streeter, Shorty McClurg, and Lee Rader targeted somehow?
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A wonderful treat!
- By Joanne on 09-11-12
By: Julia Keller
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The Chronoliths
- By: Robert Charles Wilson
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past-and soon to be haunted by the future. In early 21st-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter.
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A haunting, beautiful work...
- By M. Stephenson on 11-20-09
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Book of Secrets
- By: Chris Roberson
- Narrated by: Peter Brooke
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
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It will take more than angels and demons to stop him. Reporter Spencer Finch is embroiled in the hunt for a missing book, encountering along the way cat burglars and mobsters, hackers and mysterious monks. At the same time, he's trying to make sense of the legacy left to him by his late grandfather, a chest of what appear to be pulp magazines from the golden age of fantasy fiction.
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Rating < 0
- By Sandra on 04-04-16
By: Chris Roberson
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Flood
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- By: Andrew Vachss
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
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Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.
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Noir!
- By Snoodely on 03-06-14
By: Andrew Vachss
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Kiss Her Goodbye
- A Fourth Dimension Thriller
- By: Robert Gregory Browne
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
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All ATF Agent Jack Donovan wants out of life is to do his job and work on his strained relationship with his daughter Jessie after a nasty divorce. But in a ruthless act of revenge by a charismatic madman, Jessie is kidnapped and buried alive, with barely enough oxygen to sustain her. Now the only man who can save her, the only man who knows where to find her, has just been shot dead - and the clock is ticking... So what's a father to do?
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Super supernatural thriller
- By shelley on 02-02-14
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Short Squeeze
- By: Chris Knopf
- Narrated by: Deanna Hurst
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
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Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.
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Great Listen - Good Series
- By Patricia on 02-15-10
By: Chris Knopf
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The Company You Keep
- By: Neil Gordon
- Narrated by: Donald Corren, Hillary Huber, Kirby Heyborne, and others
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
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Set against the rise and fall of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the ecstatic righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties. When Jason Sinai, one of the last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted on murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974, encounters a young newspaper reporter in search of a story, he must abandon years of safe underground life for the dangerous life of the road.
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Audiobook of the Year
- By connie on 05-13-12
By: Neil Gordon
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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
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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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brilliant!
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Fun Pynchon, don't be afraid
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brilliant!
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The River of Sewers, Stars, Life, and Death
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Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction.
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Journey down main street in the old west.
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A widow with a small army of suitors, Aurora Greenway loves the limelight. She’s got three grandchildren whom she adores (in small doses) and her son-in-law Flap, whom she’s not really crazy about. And there’s her daughter Emma. In some ways, Emma is all there ever was. Now, there’s little time left to say the things that need to be said.
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So Much Better Than The Movie
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What listeners say about Vineland
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Siobhan Ricci
- 04-19-21
Underrated Pynchon
Vineland is an insane, rollicking story, like most of Pynchon’s books but if you hang with it, the journey is thoroughly enjoyable. Thomas is the GOAT
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- Jason
- 01-18-23
Perfect Narration of Most Readable Pynchon
How was the Narrator?
The narrator of this audio book really did a bang-up job! 1st off, they nailed all the songs which is a must for any Thomas Pynchon! Each character had a real voice and Through the clarity of the narrator's reading, the themes, motifs and such came through far easier than some other of Pynchon's audio book narrators. Bravo!
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- John Benson
- 06-28-24
Digression as the Choice Tool for Storytelling
An intimate epic about outside forces threatening familiar connections, Vineland follows an array of characters connected through intricately spun backstories that span decades. Its style is fresh, fun, and engaging, readable as a page-turner, while also challenging attention spans playfully and rewarding us for our patience. Endless character sub-arcs and hours of hilarious digressions, succinct yet complex at times, cause Vineland to both occupy and challenge traditional/period writing styles and, evoking laughs the whole way, transcend into something lofty, yet within sight and, maybe even, reachable? A+ Enjoy!!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Cassidy
- 06-07-19
a great sequel to crying of lot 49
the narrator reads wonderfully adding a lot of life to the story with different accents and voices.
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- D
- 04-07-19
A masterpiece well performed
In his 1990 review of Vineland, Salman Rushdie called it “free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with”. Refer to its Wikipedia page if you desire a plot summary before wading in. This is Pynchon’s California style in its fullest flowering. If you’re looking for an entry point to his oeuvre, this is an excellent place to start.
Graham Winton’s performance is exemplary. It only suffers by comparison to Ron McLarty’s top-shelf rendition of Inherent Vice, which is Vineland’s younger (and less ambitious) sibling. My main complaint is that Winton’s tempo is, only slighty, too fast. Pynchon is one of the supreme wordsmiths, and the reader wants to linger more over the music built into the sentences. Speaking of music, the songs are satisfactorily rendered; most of the other audio versions of Pynchon’s books have the song lyrics read, not sung, which is a loss. But Winton’s musical performance suffers, again, by comparison to McLarty’s. Nevertheless, I’d be very happy if Winton were to be the reader for V., for which, as yet, there is no audio version. Hint hint.
Audible regularly sends emails notifying me that there’s a new book by “an author I like”. Often these are for authors I’ve purchased a single book by, and didn’t review. I have all the Pynchon books Audible offers, and have written reviews of most of them, yet I received no such notification in this case. I learned this book was available, by chance, four months after its release. Strange.
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- Joe Kraus
- 04-26-19
Middle Period Pynchon Holds onto '60s Aesthetic
This is, as far as I can tell, middle-period Pynchon, maybe, excepting Mason & Dixon, the only middle-period Pynchon. There’s the late stuff, the fun genre send-ups of Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. And there’s the early stuff, V and Gravity’s Rainbow, that developed a new model of fiction and established him as a potential Nobel laureate. I haven’t read a few key ones of those, particularly Gravity’s Rainbow, but I still have a sense of where his career started and ended.
What’s new to me is the degree to which Pynchon seems committed to celebrating the aesthetics of the counter culture. You see traces in the early novels, I suppose, and in the way he famously declined the National Book Award, sending Professor Irwin Corey in his stead. They get amplified in Inherent Vice, where our middle-aged ex-hippie hero takes a turn as a private investigator.
I read Vineland around the time it came out, but I simply wasn’t mature enough to recognize how flat-out funny this is, how relentlessly it plays with the stereotypes and expectations of the late 1960s stereotype. Then, I tried to see it as a sort of sequel to V, as a novel experimenting with post-modern form. Now I see it as what reviewers of the time suggested it was: a slighter version of what Pynchon had been doing in his early novels, a book from a writer who’d seemed to resign his station as great-American-novelist in favor of over-the-top entertainer.
This is entertaining, and it does seem to be exploring the form of what I like to call the rhizomatic novel, but above all it seems to be insisting – in the middle of the Reagan era – that the ideals of the original counter culture weren’t as misplaced as contemporary opinion had it. The political revolutionaries of the time may have been sell-outs, the gurus may have “died” in some form, the rock and rollers may have turned out to be little more than lounge singers with worse haircuts and tackier suits, but something in their aesthetic remains valid.
The more I read, the more I got the sense of Pynchon seeing himself in some perverse way as a kind of “Milton of the Movement,” a true-believer (though in this case a true believer in a kind of studied nonsense rather than in Protestant predestination) who set out to write enduring literature within the aesthetic of the cause.
In other words, I think that’s what Pynchon’s middle career means – an abandonment of his early literary ambition but a renewed claim on the legacy of the 1960s rock-and-roll moment. I reserve the right to change that opinion if I ever do read Mason & Dixon or Against the Day, but that’s what stands out to me here: an unironic embrace of Zoyd as the stoner-innocent, a gesture of affection if not quite respect for what must have seemed the wave of tomorrow when he was a young man trying to find his own voice.
It doesn’t bother me that this one is a mess, not when it’s as funny line by line as it is, but I am somewhat bothered by the easy sexism of making Frenesi, the angel of the early movement, a woman who can’t resist the cruel sexuality of a jack-booted government agent. (And, to make things worse, [SPOILER] that her daughter Prairie ends the novel discovering the same shameful impulse.) Zoyd gets to carry the banner of the better-the-world-through-rock-and-dope belief, but the women in his world fall short of that.
So, yeah, this is enormous fun, but it feels dated too. Pynchon was better when he was younger, and I think he was probably less restrained in his later years. Here in his transition, he mostly got it right, but I think he’s also learned something since this as well.
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7 people found this helpful
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- J. Larson
- 08-12-19
Absolutely Great Narration...Totally Entertaining
Pynchon is not the easiest writer to get through, but Graham Winton's narration makes experiencing this book a really joyful activity. I hope he does the narration for Pynchon's V and also for BLEEDING EDGE (Ms. Berlin's narration is abysmal.) Come on, Graham, do the rest of the Pynchon books and a redo of BLEEDING EDGE.
You're missing a real treat with this combination of Pynchon and Winton.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Peter Giordano
- 06-20-20
Excellent rendering
If you're looking for audio Pynchon then it's a safe bet that you understand the challenges of reading aloud Pynchonean text; the multiple character, flashbacks and flashforwards in mid-sentence, the songs. This reader does it all with panache
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 04-18-19
..everybody's a hero at least once...
"...everybody's a hero at least once, maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."
- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
I first read Vineland about 25+ years. It was my sophomore year in college. I was idealistic and I met this guy in the college bookstore named Thomas Pynchon. Since it was my FIRST (or was The Crying of Lot 49 my first?) Pynchon, I think I missed way more than I gained (except for the desire for MORE Pynchon). Looking back now, Pynchon for me starts to divide into his BIG GREAT novels and his funny, shorter novels.
In my brain, Vineland fits with Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, V., and The Crying of Lot 49. On the otherside of my Pynchon index card sits Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Obviously, there are no perfect systems here. But that is how Vineland sits for me. It was VERY good, just not GENIUS Pynchon. The slimmer, more linear, suffer/pot noir stuff seems more likely to be finished and read. But his bigger, Maximalist, juggernauts are waves that if you can catch and ride, will float you to Nirvana. The bigger the Pynchon risk, the better your chance for seeing God (or at least splitting a sub with her).
Vineland basically tells the story of how the hippies of the 60s sold out (in various ways) and moved from rejecting Nixon in the 60s to embracing Reagan in the 80s. Like most of Pynchon's novels, this one is filled to overflow with Pynchon's humor, caricatured characters with absurd names, pop culture, paranoia, and weed. I enjoyed it and if I was going to rank it against most writers it would rank high. But it is on the lower end of the Pynchon heap.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Jake Johnson
- 09-09-23
This book is not for me
Narration is very slow. I recommend you turn the speed up 10-15%. Other than that the performance was good. Story really not for me.
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