
Wise Blood
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
About this listen
Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate 15-year-old daughter.
In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with “wise blood,” who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel’s existential struggles.
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
©1990 The Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor (P)2010 Blackstone AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Featured Article: 35+ Quotes About Hard Work to Keep You Motivated and Moving Forward
The things most worth doing require the most from us—it takes hard work to accomplish important tasks, achieve major goals, and realize your dreams. Commitment, sweat, exhaustion, frustration, and a willingness to fail are all necessary parts of taking on challenges. When you’re in the middle of a difficult project, there will be times when you’re tempted to simply give up. In such moments, look to these quotes about hard work to keep you going.
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As I Lay Dying
- By: William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward - introduction
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman, Robertson Dean, Lina Patel, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
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Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review
- By Kristina on 11-12-08
By: William Faulkner, and others
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Child of God
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
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And HE has sent me here?
- By Darwin8u on 04-14-13
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Fools Crow
- By: James Welch, Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation.
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Great book
- By matt on 06-26-21
By: James Welch, and others
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Journey to the End of the Night
- By: Louis-Ferdinand Celine
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America.
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Miserable Ride with Cynic Supreme
- By W Perry Hall on 03-15-17
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Outer Dark
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
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Throwing chert boulders at the dark center
- By Darwin8u on 04-22-13
By: Cormac McCarthy
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- By: Carson McCullers
- Narrated by: Cherry Jones
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Carson McCullers was all of 23 when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her "the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced." The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells an unforgettable tale of moral isolation in a small southern mill town in the 1930s.
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Do yourself a favor
- By Barbara on 06-08-05
By: Carson McCullers
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The Crying of Lot 49
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy.
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Good book, Average recording
- By James on 08-12-07
By: Thomas Pynchon
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A Confederacy of Dunces
- By: John Kennedy Toole
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pultizer Prize–winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, an obese, self-absorbed, hapless Don Quixote of the French Quarter, whose half-hearted attempts at employment lead to a series of wacky adventures among the lower denizens of New Orleans.
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Well Done
- By Jon on 09-18-05
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
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Highly recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 07-23-18
By: Haruki Murakami
Overall, Quite Good.
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First experience with Flannery
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perfect
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Southern Gothic rubbish
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Great book. Dislike reader
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Wise Blood’s pacing is brisk. Even through the more contemplative sections in which characters spend time in observation and meditation, the story continually feels propelled toward a purposeful end.
There are perspective shifts across a few chapters which muddle the timeline a bit for me in the early sections of those chapters, but this sense of time-confusion never lasts very long; once the perspective character catches up with another and dialogue begins, it becomes clear exactly what has transpired between them.
The world within Wise Blood is harsh, where time moves without consideration and leaves behind anyone or any place that struggles to keep up. Members of the society depicted within Taulkinham are largely callous and apathetic toward each other, or are uneducated and under-cared-for by the powers that be. Taulkinham and the surrounding areas are filled with dilapidated farmhouses, inhospitable city streets and vast swaths of remote countryside. The narrative’s placement within time is directly following World War 2, and there remains a large amount of mistrust of authority alongside rampant xenophobia.
The relations between the characters are never straightforward; for example, Hazel and Sabbath Lily start off hostile with one another before developing into something more complex, and even then their individual motivations for interacting with one another are never purely intentioned. Meanwhile, Enoch expresses enthusiasm for his efforts in assisting with the formation of the Church without Christ, but harbors resentment and aggression which oscillates between Hazel, society, and his responsibilities. Even Asa's attitude toward Sabbath Lily is not one of unconditional fatherly care.
Each character has severe flaws, which range in their source between governmental failures, internalized aggression and societal alienation. These flaws lead the characters to act in ways that are increasingly extreme in measures of violence and irrationality, to levels that transcend into absurdity, and in this way require me to suspend my longing for behavioral order.
As the characters continue their journeys, some evolve, some devolve, and some meet their fate before they have a chance to do either. Along the way, O'Connor's portrayal of humanity fluctuates between brutally realistic and comically exaggerated.
These contradictions are one of the main strengths here; by creating characters who feel so human in their flaws, and by driving them through unreasonable, criminal, and unrealistic actions, O'Connor allows herself plenty of room to explore some of the most important aspects of the human psyche such as mistrust of authority and of others, self-doubt, questioning of morality and the stressors of surviving day-to-day in a world that can feel very large and inhospitable.
Another main strength is O'Connor's mastery of prose. She utilizes sardonic humor to keep her disturbing imagery palatable, and very frequently utilizes intriguing connections to get her point across. There are moments that, through the voice of an author with a less acutely-tuned eye for detail and logical connections, would feel mundane, but O'Connor displays her mastery of impactfully poetic language in absolute droves, and the result for me is a nearly constant head-slapping reflection; “How could anyone possibly connect those two dots?” but she always makes her connections make sense.
The mastery continues in O'Connor's situational descriptors. She chooses words that fit the content the way onomatopoeic words fit their meaning. It leaves a powerful and long-lasting impression, one that makes me restless to explore more of her work.
Overall, I find Wise Blood to be completely deserving of its genre-masterpiece status. It is a Southern Gothic guiding star, and should serve as a how-to reference for any writer whose goal is to increase the poetry and visceral impact of their writing. It will most likely be effective for readers with some prior understanding of the historical societal dynamics of the American South, or of anyone in a state of moral or theological reflection. For me, it is an easy favorite and I give it a 5/5
Southern Gothic Guiding Star
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Thanks Audible...
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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I would, if they like Flannery O'Connor or Southern Gothic literature. The performance is fantastic but the story is definitely strange.What did you like best about this story?
I loved the ending because it's really dark. I enjoyed O'Connor's dark sense of humor and her ability to describe really grotesque scenes with aplomb.What about Bronson Pinchot’s performance did you like?
He brought out every comedic line to its full potential.Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It made me laugh out loud more than once!We are all going to hell for laughing at this
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Strangely wonderful
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Great story.
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