World's Fair
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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John Rubinstein
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By:
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E.L. Doctorow
About this listen
The astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair...
©2014 E.L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Marvelous... You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.” (The New York Times)
“World’s Fair is better than a time capsule; it’s an actual slice of a long-ago world, and we emerge from it as dazed as those visitors standing on the corner of the future.” (Anne Tyler)
“Doctorow has managed to regain the awed perspective of a child in this novel of rare warmth and intimacy.... Stony indeed in the heart that cannot be moved by this book.” (People)
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From the author of When We Lost Our Heads, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans - in love with each other since they can remember - whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future. The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins.
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IMPECCABLE BEAUTIFUL Writing, Interesting Story
- By Jordyn on 05-24-17
By: Heather O'Neill
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The Bell Jar
- By: Sylvia Plath
- Narrated by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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A must-read for every woman
- By Julie W. Capell on 05-06-16
By: Sylvia Plath
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Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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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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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
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Caramelo
- By: Sandra Cisneros
- Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
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Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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The Magician's Assistant
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Karen Ziemba
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.
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Patchett Has It
- By Pamela Harvey on 06-10-08
By: Ann Patchett
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What listeners say about World's Fair
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andrew Z. Tennenbaum
- 03-03-23
Magnificent
This book had been recommended to me by my grandmother, who grew up in the same time and place as EL Doctorow in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. She told me it perfectly captures what it was like. Nevertheless I had no idea what a treat I was in for.
It delivers a child’s eye view of what it was like, but with the rich prose and articulate insight Doctorow is famous for.
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- Nick G.
- 12-17-18
A Wonderful Trip To Another Time & Place
The text version came out in 1985 but I somehow missed even hearing about it. I'm glad I did because this presentation was fantastic. As a maniacal student of the decade of the 1930's and the NYWF of 39/40 I know the era and fair very well. Doctorow's novel was spot on accurate in his descriptions, events, the fair, everything. It truely is more like an autobiographical set of essays about a lot of everyday events in the life of child growing up in NYC in the 1930's. It ends with a very accurate and real account of the World's Fair and a boy moving forward to a new chapter. It's really metaphorical for the end of the an era in America and the start of a new one.
I will admit the book was a bit drawn out to start with but once you get the idea of what the author is doing, it's great! I really enjjoyed this book as if it were a good movie or play. I want to hear it again.
The narrator, John Rubinstein, did an excellent job. He sounds the part, reads the part as if he really is Edgar and makes you believe the story. It reminded me of Woody Allen in Radio Days. So believable, as if you were right there "in" the book.
I will definitely recommend this book to others who enjoy similar subjects.
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- Trudy Owens
- 06-13-19
interesting all through, but then a let down
A coming of age book that starts with the rise of Hitler after WW1 and culminates in the World's Fair sometime in the 30's, this tells of a young boy of Russian Jewish heritage, his much older brother, his two volatile parents and their difficult relationship. There is too much focus on pre-pubescent thoughts about women's bodies. The book does present a very good picture of life in the Bronx at that time, and is mildly interesting all the way through, although the title barely comes into play except at the end, and is important-ish to the struggling family, but not worth all those hours to get there. I guess I missed something since this won the National Book Award, but I wouldn't really recommend it.
Great narration!
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1 person found this helpful
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- John
- 10-19-21
Too tedious
I spent one hour and four and a half chapters trying to find a reason to continue. the story is a tedious rehashing of a very ordinary family with almost no redeeming anecdotes. I do not suggest wasting time on this book
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- Bigfoot
- 06-08-22
awful
Hard to say which was worse, the story or the reading. For a book entitled World's Fair, you'd think the actual fair would be mentioned before chapter 27. Before that, it's a lot of inane nostalgia about everyday life but read by an actor who seems to marveled at everything...overjoyed he had a peanut butter sandwich kind of stuff and unable to pronounce the tetter "r". So it was finguhs, buttuh, etc. Annoying.
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