Preview
  • Wet Places at Noon

  • Iowa Short Fiction Award
  • By: Lee K. Abbott
  • Narrated by: Ken Krauss
  • Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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Wet Places at Noon

By: Lee K. Abbott
Narrated by: Ken Krauss
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Publisher's summary

Abbott's community is pure Americana, a wild world inhabited by gloriously street-smart smartasses: overeducated, underemployed men mourning for the confident women who have left them - or have they? - but knowing that equally confident women are just around the corner-or are they? His urgent, maximalist style allows their exhilarating voices to be heard and remembered.

©1997 Lee Abbott (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks
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Critic reviews

“Lee Abbott is a significant American writer, one of our culture's more compelling stylist, an acrobat of the word. Abbott's voice has the familarity of a front-porch storyteller, the voice of the guy in every picture of every high-school prom who has what he wrongly thinks is a firm grip on life and love and from that point thereafter disappears into an unkind world.” (Bob Shacochis)
“Abbott writes like a fallen angel. These are wild, vibrant stories, caustic and sardonic, wildly funny and bitter as grief, full of passion and perfidy. As his characters crash through burnt-over landscapes and tune into 'the talk talked by worms,' they bring us an odd kind of hope.” (Andrea Barret)

What listeners say about Wet Places at Noon

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Buckle your seatbelt...

Abbott's voice sweeps you up, enfolds you in a bearhug and carries you breathlessly along on a roller coaster ride of wonderful, treacherous, very human emotions. If you are lucky--as some of his characters are--you will also find moments of true enlightenment.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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Masterful Writing Well Read!!

Any additional comments?

I don't know why I haven't heard of Lee K. Abbott before. He is a master wordsmith weaving unlikely, sometimes laugh-out-loud stories about ordinary people. I was so taken with this that I listened to it practically in a single day. Ken Krauss has a cadence that matches the authors rhythms well. He knows how to stay out of the way and let the story unfold. A perfect approach to this masterful work. The author touches on a myriad of issues in this collection of short stories, including: relationships between broken people, the Vietnam war, and Aliens in Roswell. I think men particularly will find themselves represented truthfully in all their complexity. I highly recommend it!

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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Narration is off

I love Abbott's storytelling. But I had difficulty overlooking the narrator's mispronunciation of Spanish which even the local redneck gringos get right. Disappointingly marred the narrative.

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