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The Clearing
- Poems
- Narrated by: Allison Adair
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
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The Clearing
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Publisher's summary
Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing is “a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively”.
Luminous and electric from the first line to the last, Allison Adair’s debut collection navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with a singular incisiveness and a rich imagination. The women in these poems live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores, and they understand the nature of being hollowed out. From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. Here we wonder, “What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops/teeth, her own, what else does she have”?
The Clearing knows the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are “from before…from a similar injury or kiss”. There is a dark beauty in this work, and Adair is a skilled stenographer of the silences around which we orbit. Described by Henri Cole as “haunting and dirt caked”, her unromantic poems of girlhood, nature, and family linger with an uncommon, unsettling resonance.
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 132
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
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Orange World and Other Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 184
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 158
Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Wild Ride
- By Georgia on 02-07-20
By: Karen Russell
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 369
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 320
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Story4 out of 5 stars 318
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
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4 out of 5 stars
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well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
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The Shipping News
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 809
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 709
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 710
At 36, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife gets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons - and the unpredictable forces of nature and society - and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Can't Explain Why I Love This Book
- By Polly on 03-06-12
By: Annie Proulx
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The Waves
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Frances Jeater
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 188
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 173
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 174
The Waves traces the lives of six friends from childhood to old age. It was written when Virginia Woolf was at the height of her experimental powers, and she allows each character to tell their own story, through powerful, poetic monologues. By listening to these voices struggling to impose order and meaning on their lives, we are drawn into a literary journey that stunningly reproduces the complex, confusing and contradictory nature of human experience. It is read with affection and skill by Frances Jeater.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Not an easy read but worth it
- By Lena on 03-26-16
By: Virginia Woolf
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 280
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 250
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Story4 out of 5 stars 251
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Stylish modern magic realism
- By Ryan on 04-10-13
By: Karen Russell
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 135
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 119
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Story4 out of 5 stars 120
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
- By: Kij Johnson
- Narrated by: Kij Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 190
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 166
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Story4 out of 5 stars 162
Professor Vellitt Boe teaches at the prestigious Ulthar Women's College. When one of her most gifted students elopes with a dreamer from the waking world, Vellitt must retrieve her.
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3 out of 5 stars
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it took me a few trys to ger through this audio
- By Melanie on 05-13-17
By: Kij Johnson
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RipRap and Cold Mountain Poems
- By: Gary Snyder
- Narrated by: Gary Snyder
- Length: 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story5 out of 5 stars 34
By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, has been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking book that is celebrated with this new edition.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Listen to for 1000 nights and never long enough
- By Susie on 05-05-16
By: Gary Snyder
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Gods of Howl Mountain
- By: Taylor Brown
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 221
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 198
In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina. Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted 1940 Ford coupe.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Appalatia Noir
- By meanwhile on 09-18-18
By: Taylor Brown
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,087
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 940
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Story4 out of 5 stars 929
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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4 out of 5 stars
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 535
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 497
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Story4 out of 5 stars 497
In this atmospheric and profoundly moving debut, Cathy and Daniel live with their father, John, in the remote woods of Yorkshire, in a house the three of them built themselves. John is a gentle brute of a man, a former enforcer who fights for money when he has to, but who otherwise just wants to be left alone to raise his children. When a local landowner shows up on their doorstep, their precarious existence is threatened, and a series of actions is set in motion that can only end in violence.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Strains credibility
- By DM on 01-06-18
By: Fiona Mozley
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Beatlebone
- By: Kevin Barry
- Narrated by: Kevin Barry
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Story4 out of 5 stars 71
It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Nooooo way
- By James on 11-17-15
By: Kevin Barry
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Far North
- A Novel
- By: Marcel Theroux
- Narrated by: Yelena Schmulenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 280
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4 out of 5 stars 143
My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Spellbinding!
- By Joan on 01-14-10
By: Marcel Theroux
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The Ploughmen
- A Novel
- By: Kim Zupan
- Narrated by: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,305
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,189
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,176
At the center of this searing fever-dream of a novel are two men - a killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputy - sitting across fromeach other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: JohnGload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration; and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perceptive Narration
- By Abby Elvidge on 09-22-16
By: Kim Zupan