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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
- By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, Stephen King, Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Rebecca Mitchell, Michael Healy, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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Continental Drift
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Now available for the first time in audiobook format, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers. Russell Banks' Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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Give up and die
- By AI on 12-09-21
By: Russell Banks
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Fourth of July Creek
- A Novel
- By: Smith Henderson
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Jenna Lamia
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral 11-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times. But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.
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The Ghost of Tom Joad & the Wrath of Grapes
- By Mel on 06-30-14
By: Smith Henderson
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Pacific Beat
- By: T. Jefferson Parker
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Ex-cop Jim Weir thought he'd seen it all during his years on the force. That is until he saw the body of his sister Annie, brutally used by a monster in human form, then carelessly discarded. He'd never seen such grief ravage the face of his friend and brother-in-law Ray Cruz, a good cop on the Newport Beach Police Department. When Weir learns that the only witness swore the killer made his escape in a Newport Beach squad car, his disbelief turns to confusion and outrage.
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Bad, bad, bad...
- By Robert E. Orlando on 11-19-14
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Raven Stole the Moon
- A Novel
- By: Garth Stein
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Jenna Rosen returns to the place in Alaska where her young son, Bobby, disappeared without a trace two years before. Jenna is determined to lay to rest the aching mystery of his death. But ancient legends may have had a hand in Bobby’s fate, forcing Jenna to sift through her own Native American ancestry to uncover the truth.
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I love this book
- By Em mom of 3 on 08-27-18
By: Garth Stein
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American Rust
- By: Philipp Meyer
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation-as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love-that arise from its loss. From local bars to train yards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.
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A Web of Despair and Desperation
- By Darwin8u on 07-16-12
By: Philipp Meyer
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wonderful story and story teller.
- By Wkndaftrthght on 01-19-23
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Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....
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The Perfect Example
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This Boy's Life
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This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.
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Beautiful, unsentimental memoir of youth
- By Darwin8u on 04-27-13
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The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story
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In the past 50 years, the American short story has changed dramatically. New voices, forms, and mixtures of genres have brought this unique US genre a thrilling burst of energy. This rich anthology celebrates this avalanche of talent. Beginning in 1970, it culls together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including - for the first time in a literary anthology - science fiction, horror, and fantasy.
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Too dark for my taste
- By Lazy Chicken on 10-03-22
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The Rich Brother
- By: Tobias Wolff
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A classic tale of brotherly love and rivalry from short story master Tobias Wolff. Pete has always been successful. Happily married with two daughters, he lives a comfortable life in Santa Cruz. Pete is a practical, hardworking man and he enjoys life's monetary pleasures. His younger brother, Donald, is a gaunt, troubled man. Unmarried and without children, Donald earns what little money he has by occasionally painting houses. He's a religious man, unlike Pete, and has spent several years as a member of various Christian groups.
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boaring
- By iamkam on 02-13-24
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Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.
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listen to this
- By Surf on 11-18-20
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wonderful story and story teller.
- By Wkndaftrthght on 01-19-23
By: Tobias Wolff
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Bullet in the Brain
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The Perfect Example
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Beautiful, unsentimental memoir of youth
- By Darwin8u on 04-27-13
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Too dark for my taste
- By Lazy Chicken on 10-03-22
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boaring
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In Pharaoh's Army
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Whether he is evoking the blind carnage of the Tet offensive, the theatrics of his fellow Americans, or the unraveling of his own illusions, Wolff brings to this work the same uncanny eye for detail, pitiless candor, and mordant wit that made This Boy's Life a modern classic.
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Boring Waste of Time
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Liberation Day
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The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
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Extraordinary
- By REBECCA on 10-18-22
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In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
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Meticulous, funny, eccentric - Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless. The closing of Brandon College, the institution she'd spent more than fifteen years at, changes everything. Forced to find another position, Mary finds herself at an experimental college in rainy Oregon.
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Okay story
- By AnitaNotherBook on 11-15-20
By: Tobias Wolff
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A Childhood
- The Biography of a Place
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- Unabridged
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Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way.
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Story rings true
- By Greg B on 07-26-22
By: Harry Crews, and others
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- By: Raymond Carver
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- Unabridged
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In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Raymond Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark.
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Great stories, awful performance
- By Victor Capo on 02-14-19
By: Raymond Carver
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
What listeners say about Our Story Begins
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- ti
- 09-16-22
Magnificent!
Reading “The Writer’s Library”, in an interview with Richard Ford, the name of Tobias Wolfe is mentioned as one of his favorite authors. As it happened, this book was in the Plus Catalog. So this has been my first introduction to this author. I found the stories sheer and beautiful as gossamer wings, beautifully spun, wise, insightful, intimate and multilayered. Delightful.
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- Ted
- 03-10-22
Mostly unsatisfying, but one absolute gem
The gem, I think, is a haunting little story, just three or four pages long, called “Bullet in the Brain.” When it appeared in the New Yorker many years ago, a friend – a professional fiction editor – phoned me and excitedly urged me to read it. It’s a beauty. However, to be honest, it probably works better in print than read aloud, even though Anthony Heald (you remember him as the smarmy prison psychiatrist in “The Silence of the Lambs”) does his usual brilliant job.
And now, from here on, SPOILER ALERT!
The rest of this collection was, for me, pretty unsatisfying. I’m aware Woolf is a highly respected writer (and teacher of writing), but all his stories seemed typical of the sort of work that comes out of college fiction classes: You know in advance that their view of humanity will be a sour one, that they’re going to end a little too soon, on a note of incompleteness and ambiguity, and that before the tale ends, someone is going to be revealed as weak or duplicitous or cruel.
And they also seem a little dated. The first story, for example, pretentiously titled “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” features some ridiculously caricatured academics, and it's so off the mark, or at least so out of date, that the main character, a woman professor interviewing for a job at another college, learns to her disappointment that the hiring committee has already decided that only a man is actually going to be considered, and that she is merely the token woman. I don’t think that was remotely true even fifty years ago.
The second selection, “Next Door,” recounts the narrator’s puzzlingly mild, low-key reaction to some brutal, noisy, drunken neighbors who, among other things, beat their dog almost to death. In the third, “Hunters in the Snow,” a dog is shot dead, and the hunters of the title are revealed to be so absurdly selfish and callous that two of them stop for coffee in a roadside snack bar and chat about a love affair while their wounded companion lies outside freezing to death. You get the feeling that these tales are deliberately unpleasant, and they don't even have the virtue of ringing true.
“The Rich Brother” presents two brothers being nasty to each other on a long road trip, one a naive screwup, the other successful and somewhat protective but also possessed of a cruel streak. It’s not bad, but then they pick up a hitchhiking con man whose obvious tall tale – about a Peruvian gold mine – seems annoyingly cartoonish and cliched. The next story, “Leviathan,” is just a catty conversation, over wine and drugs, among two couples, all four faintly objectionable and not very nice to one another.
“Desert Breakdown, 1968,” as in many a movie, offers us a dusty nondescript gas station down an empty desert road, with four guys in cowboy hats sitting around outside, and you know immediately that they're going to be menacing, threatening, and unfriendly to a couple who drive up, unlike actual human beings in Arizona or pretty much anywhere. (One even flicks a cigarette butt at the car.) This sort of thing is fine in a genre story -- horror, crime, whatever; you expect it. But in mainstream fiction, it just feels tiresomely fake.
One story, “The Chain” – in which yet another dog is shot! – starts out fairly intriguingly, but by the end it has turned into a preachy parable about racial injustice. “Two Boys and a Girl” is about the betrayal of a friend, as well as disappointment in love. I could go on, but you’ve already gotten the idea: Aside from the admirable “Bullet in the Brain,” this collection gave me barely a moment’s pleasure.
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- Amy Morales-Knight
- 02-12-21
Story titles missing.
Good book but the lack of chapter titles is a big problem. A lot of audible books do this but it’s a bigger irritation here because each chapter is another short story.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Addicted to Audible
- 10-07-20
excellent writing, but the reality too grim
The writing, and the narration were excellent, but the grimes of the stories were to much, didn't finish.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. Dillman
- 09-29-22
Quick transitions
My complaint about this audio book is that each of these stories has absolutely no pause between them. The listener will be unaware that one story has ended and the next begun unless one pays extra attention or is utterly confused.
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- Thomas S.
- 01-23-21
5 minute walk
Wolf can make a five minute walk last 30 minutes and each step an adventure.
This book is like reading the leftovers of a prolific author where even the cast-off is mesmerizing. Some stories leave you hungry. But, so does life.
A perfect reader for his work.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Stone Circle
- 09-19-10
Wonderful stories and a good reader
I loved this book. My only complaint is that they should have included five or ten second gaps between the stories. One story ends and then you immediately hear the title for the next story.
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10 people found this helpful
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- David B Weiding
- 06-21-21
Glance into Real Life with Wolff
Tobias Wolff's stories are always interesting, often a little strange. But, at least to me, they feel real, like covert peaks at the real lives people are living underneath pretense and costume. The characters are never noble or enviable, but they are enticing and likeable. They feel like people you almost know, or maybe the true selves under the people you think you know .
Great book.
David
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- Carolyn motello
- 10-05-20
amazed at his skill witb words
He can craft a life experience with a few well chosen words that can take you to another world
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- chris
- 04-11-08
Great
I have very little experience reading Tobias Wolfe. I tried "Old School" a few years back, but got bored with it. However I gave this collection of short stories a shot and am glad I did. What amazes me is how different each story is. Its almost as if a different person wrote each story. They are all very engrossing and have strong characters. I enjoyed this audio and will definitely listen to it again in the future
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29 people found this helpful