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The Brooklyn Follies
- Narrated by: Paul Auster
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
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One of Auster's Best
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After losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he sees a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure who vanished from sight in 1929.
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Hmmm....
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With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age 28.
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Brilliant and enjoyable
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Really loved this novel
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A Great Listen
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One of Auster's Best
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Hmmm....
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Brilliant and enjoyable
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I only buy Paul Auster self narrated books now
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Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....
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Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, 34-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
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When his closest friend, Benjamin Sachs, accidentally blows himself up on a Wisconsin road, Peter Aaron attempts to piece together the life that led to Sachs' tragic demise and determine the reason for his death.
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Better than the "trilogy"
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It keeps you reading... but whats the point?
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Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
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Before Purchasing
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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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Anything but middle.
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
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East of Eden
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
- By Kelly on 03-25-17
By: John Steinbeck
Publisher's summary
Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man". But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others.
The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster's warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.
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Story
A shattering childhood tragedy left Quentin Fears devastated. But the wealthy, enigmatic recluse has experienced the extraordinarily unexpected: love at first sight, with Madeleine. Now he must meet his new wife's family. A bizarre, dysfunctional collection of extreme characters, they are guarding a secret both shocking and terrifying, as is Madeleine herself. And suddenly Quentin Fears must prevent his dream woman from unleashing an ageless malevolence intent on ruling the world.
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OSC at his best!!!
- By KaHef on 01-13-07
By: Orson Scott Card
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The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
- By: Sloan Wilson
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the story of Tom and Betsy Rath, a young couple with everything going for them: three healthy children, a nice home, a steady income. They have every reason to be happy, but for some reason they are not. Like so many young men of the day, Tom finds himself caught up in the corporate rat race - what he encounters there propels him on a voyage of self-discovery that will turn his world inside out.
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great read/listen
- By BBJ on 09-26-16
By: Sloan Wilson
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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All You Could Ask For
- A Novel
- By: Mike Greenberg
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Happily married Brooke discovers her loving husband has led a separate life with…another wife. Newlywed Samantha learns of her husband's cheating heart when she finds the goods on his computer. High-powered career woman Katherine works with heartbreaker Phillip, the man who hurt her early on in her career. Brooke, Samantha, and Katherine don't know one another, but their stories are about to intertwine in ways no one could have imagined. And all three are about to discover the power of friendship to conquer adversity.
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Annoyed by Hidden Theme
- By parsnip on 08-12-13
By: Mike Greenberg
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Saints for All Occasions
- A Novel
- By: J. Courtney Sullivan
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Nora and Theresa Flynn are 21 and 17 when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan - a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.
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The narration ruined it
- By Janis Reynolds on 06-12-17
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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BUtterfield 8
- By: John O'Hara, Lorin Stein - introduction
- Narrated by: Gretchen Mol
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterpiece of American fiction and a best seller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. One Sunday morning, Gloria wakes up in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress, stockings, and panties. When she steals a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she unleashes a series of events that can only end in tragedy.
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Wildly Uneven
- By David P on 08-27-15
By: John O'Hara, and others
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At Home with the Templetons
- By: Monica McInerney
- Narrated by: Ulli Birve
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Templeton family from England takes up residence in a stately home in country Australia, they set the locals talking – and with good reason. From the outside, the seven Templetons seem so bohemian, peculiar even. No one is more intrigued by the family than their neighbours, single mother Nina Donovan and her young son Tom. Before long, the two families' lives become entwined in unexpected ways.
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A dreadful mistake
- By Julie on 11-14-10
By: Monica McInerney
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In Love with a Younger Man
- By: Cheryl Robinson
- Narrated by: Nikki Amsterdam
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Olena Day’s first love died tragically, and her college boyfriend left her for nother woman. Now a successful, independent 43-year-old,she begins a passionate relationship with Matthew, a man 18 years her junior. Can a relationship finally end happily-ever-after for Olena—or will it be torn apart once again?
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A Sequel Will Be Coming From This...
- By Leejorae on 03-15-10
By: Cheryl Robinson
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Really loved this novel
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I take it all back! Love the book
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For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."
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It keeps you reading... but whats the point?
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Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next 40 years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.
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A Great Listen
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The Book of Illusions
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After losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he sees a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure who vanished from sight in 1929.
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Hmmm....
- By Gene on 10-05-04
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Really loved this novel
- By Christopher on 02-09-17
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Mr. Vertigo
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I take it all back! Love the book
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It keeps you reading... but whats the point?
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Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next 40 years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.
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A Great Listen
- By Amazon Customer on 11-17-23
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Hmmm....
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Facing his 63rd winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations - both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.
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Memorable
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When his closest friend, Benjamin Sachs, accidentally blows himself up on a Wisconsin road, Peter Aaron attempts to piece together the life that led to Sachs' tragic demise and determine the reason for his death.
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Better than the "trilogy"
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Burning Boy
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With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age 28.
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Brilliant and enjoyable
- By Alvin Marcetti on 01-08-23
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Moon Palace
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Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan searching for love, his father, and the key to the riddle of his origin and fate.
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Moon Palace
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Oracle Night
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Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, 34-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
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The Master Speaks
- By Dean on 09-20-05
By: Paul Auster
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Invisible
- By: Paul Auster
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- Unabridged
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Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.
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One of Auster's Best
- By David and Shoshana Cooper on 02-06-10
By: Paul Auster
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Sunset Park
- By: Paul Auster
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- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.
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Lovely book
- By paula on 02-27-11
By: Paul Auster
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Man in the Dark
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"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness." So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating tale about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife's recent death and the murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend.
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I only buy Paul Auster self narrated books now
- By lynn on 04-23-11
By: Paul Auster
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Timbuktu
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Mr. Bones, the canine hero of this astonishing book, is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant and troubled homeless man from Brooklyn. As Willy's body slowly expires, he sets off with Mr. Bones for Baltimore in search of his high-school English teacher and a new home for his companion. Mr. Bones is our witness during their journey, and out of his thoughts, Paul Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in American fiction.
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Should I Have Said Gehrig?
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By: Paul Auster
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Here and Now
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Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....
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Euridite Bromance
- By Dale C. on 08-08-24
By: Paul Auster, and others
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4 3 2 1 [Danish Edition]
- By: Paul Auster
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- Unabridged
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Paul Austers største, mest hjerteskærende og overbevisende roman. En overvældende og overraskende fortælling om arv og miljø, om kærlighed og livet selv. Den 3. marts 1947 bliver Archibald Isaac Ferguson født på hospitalet i New Jersey. Fra det øjeblik han kommer til verden, tager familiens liv fire samtidige og uafhængige retninger. Hver af de fire versioner af Ferguson bliver tryllebundet af den skønne og mageløse Amy Schneiderman, og hver af de fire Ferguson'er får hver deres egen helt enestående relation til hende. Som læser følger man alle fire i medgang og modgang. Forskellige liv og dog det samme.
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If only I could understand Danish!!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-07-18
By: Paul Auster
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In the Country of Last Things
- By: Paul Auster
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Abridged
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From a life of ease and comfort, Anna Blume embarks on a search for her missing brother. Soon she finds herself trapped in a city obsessed with last things—with the means and manner of death. In this culture of doom, the masses are homeless, theft has ceased to be a crime, production has ceased, and the only growth industries are dying and disassembly.
By: Paul Auster
What listeners say about The Brooklyn Follies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Everett Leiter
- 02-13-06
5 stars are not enough
This is a fast-moving, engrossing, and thoroughly enjoyable novel. It starts as Nathan moves to Brooklyn, supposedly to die. He is rather alone in the world, ashamed of his failed marriage and of his estrangement from his daughter. As the story progresses, a vivid cast of characters is introduced, inluding Nathan's long-lost nephew and niece, his grand niece, an eccentric rare book dealer with a criminal past, and various other characters from the Brooklyn neighborhood. Nathan's involvement in their lives gives meaning to his own, and through unpredictable twists of plot, he is transformed into someone with a more positive outlook on life. Beautifully written and well narrated by the author.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Peregrine
- 11-15-09
Parts are great but it's an uneven book
Long sections of this book are compelling and thought-provoking. Auster is the rare writer whose narration is just right for his prose. I don't want to spoil the plot for anyone, but big parts of the story are simply implausible, and that takes away from the whole.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer S. Leblanc
- 06-30-15
Genuine funny honest well plotted tale
The book is full of characters to appreciate admire or hate and all of them have stories that end in a satisfying way that is occasionally outrageous but never contrived.
I appreciated the story of a man who came to writing later in life. I believe this part of the story most of all.
The narration was good and lent to the value of the story. This is a great lighthearted title for audio. I loved it and believe I will listen to it again in the future.
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- Kazuhiko
- 07-24-15
Tremendously entertaining
I read Paul Auster's Timbuktu and really enjoyed it. So I tried this book, and now I am a fan of this author. Auster is a genius in depicting irony of human lives that are tragedy and comedy at the same time. All the characters in this story are so real. The story happens to take place in Brooklyn, but I think it can happen in any U.S. city.
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- Kathy in CA
- 09-19-15
Relationships and Life Are Thriving in Brooklyn
This is quite an unusual book. Trying to summarize, it is about an almost 60 year old male, recuperating from cancer, an ugly divorce, and alienation from his daughter. He relocates to Brooklyn, which he left at the age of three. He has decided that Brooklyn is a good place to await his death. While he may not be physically dying, he is emotionally stagnating under a heavy fog of grief and regret for his unrealized, unhappy existence.
Nathan, shortly after his relocation, runs into his nephew, who also seems to be living an unfulfilled life, working as a lowly clerk in a bookstore that specializes in rare antiquities. Nathan resumes his relationship with his nephew and befriends the bookstore owner, the nephew's boss. From here, Nathan's life takes unexpected turns and twists and gradually he realizes he is no longer awaiting his end but starting a whole new beginning.
This book is all about RELATIONSHIPS. It is a gentle but compelling story that grabbed me from the start and didn't ever let go, despite its slow, easygoing pace. Author, Paul Auster, is a master of relationships. This book was a rare find for me, the type of story that lopes along gently, a slice of life story, heartwarming and satisfying.
Auster narrates his own book, which is often risky, but not in this case. When I first heard his voice, not realizing he was the author, I said to myself, "I really liked this narrator's voice and style." It matched the story perfectly.
So, over all, this book was a great find for me, and I recommend it if you are looking for a well-written, gentle story.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Alan
- 01-28-06
As Surprised as I Am
One never knows. Confession: Considering myself literate, I have, nevertheless never "read" anything by Auster. Heard of him, but never read him. Wanted to get around to it, but not until now. Raised in Park Slope until I was eight, I hoped this tale would be the perfect introduction to Auster --a way to relate to him, to test him, to guage his worthiness. I'm hooked now.
Not because of the Brooklyn connection but because of his communicativeness, his intelligence, and his effortless conversational story telling. (He's not a bad reader either.) He's neither afraid of the cliche nor the sublime (nor the crude either.) And the book is chock full of informational tid-bits, particularly of the literary ilk. Wonderful returns to Kafka and Cervantes, et al. (Although I was disappointed not to hear him include D. M. Thomas on his list of writers who died much too early.)
Auster's characters are real and likable. (Even when improbable.) His sudden shifts from person to person, from unexpected incident to unpredictable result drive the story merrily along. It would be excellent to meet Nate again, to see who else he might come across, as his and Tom's lives continue on into the future. This is a story line that still has life in it.
Who knows what Auster's other, earlier books may bring, but this here story sure is sending me to them. I can't wait to listen to another.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- CH Kaufman
- 08-03-08
great book!
Ordered this almost at random, because it was on sale and I needed a listen.
Great book, well written, well narrated. Highly recommend.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Lynda
- 07-03-15
what a delightful surprise
I bought The Brooklyn Follies written and narrated by PaulAuster on a sale pack from audible. What an interesting group of people entered my life. The story is narrated by the author in a sort of matter of fact manner, lulling the listener into the expectation of a "little" tale of this divored man, estranged from his daughter and disconnected from life.
Dont be fooled by the apparent blandness. His forced retirement due to the hapless fate of a non- smoker with lung cancer, he tetreats from life. Bu pure coincidence, he encpunters his long lost nephew Tom, the only son of his deceased sister. Tom, the former family star is a mess. Nathan, the main character is Tom's uncle and his alarm at the decline of the now underemployed Tom sparks a renewed interest in engaging with life.
Nathan is an excellent observer of what he calls the "human condition". Eventually these observations and errant thoughts accumulatr, are meticulessly sorted and develop into the Follies. We are introduced to characters so real in his telling, they take on lives of their own. We care about them, just as Nathan does and now cant help but miss this cast of misfits who slowly through their spmetimes mundane lives work their way to your heart.
i highly recommend this book to readers who enjoy quiet little books that become big memories.
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- sarabellem
- 08-12-15
Excellent!
Really enjoyed my first Auster read that I got on a daily deal. Great narrator (the author) and a tight read. Look forward to more by Auster.
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- Rich Tanguy
- 06-15-17
"Just a sad old man with nothing to live for"
This was a pleasant story that starts with the general attitude as above and finds that life has more for him than he expected. There are many twists and turns but in general, it turns out well.
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