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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
- Narrated by: Emily Janice Card
- Length: 21 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
After a childhood spent moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge. And she is quite the cineaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah's friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide - or misguide - her.
Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class, Pessl's debut novel is complex yet compelling, erudite yet accessible. It combines the suspense of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt with a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl's own.
Critic reviews
“The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low darts and dives of Pessl’s tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring.... This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“Gripping and dark, funny and poignant ... Pessl’s talent for verbal acrobatics keeps the pages flipping.” (USA Today)
“Witty and exuberant ... Pessl’s pyrotechnics place her alongside young, eclectic talents like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith.” (Vogue)
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No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best. The characters in Then We Came to an End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
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Hilarious in book form, not so much for audio...
- By Jas on 01-07-09
By: Joshua Ferris
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If We Were Villains
- A Novel
- By: M. L. Rio
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Marks has just served 10 years in jail - for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.
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Fake deep with a side of bland
- By Amazon Customer on 06-14-18
By: M. L. Rio
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Freedom
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: David LeDoux
- Length: 24 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.
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Believe the Hype
- By L. Kerr on 09-07-10
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Wakenhyrst
- By: Michelle Paver
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen - and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past.
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Strangely compelling
- By B. Coleman on 02-23-20
By: Michelle Paver
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People Like Us
- By: Dana Mele
- Narrated by: Erin Spencer
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Kay Donovan has skeletons in her closet, but who doesn't? The past is the past, and now Kay's a star soccer player whose group of gorgeous, pedigreed friends run their private school with effortless popularity and acerbic wit. But when a girl's body is found in the lake, Kay's carefully constructed life begins to topple. The dead girl has left a memento, a computer-coded scavenger hunt, which, as it unravels, begins to implicate each of Kay's friends, until Kay herself is in the crosshairs of the murder investigation.
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Couldn't stop listening
- By Ruthi on 03-01-18
By: Dana Mele
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The Death of Vivek Oji
- A Novel
- By: Akwaeke Emezi
- Narrated by: Yetide Badaki, Chukwudi Iwuji
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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One afternoon, in a town in Southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings.
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an emotional story
- By Barbara S on 08-22-20
By: Akwaeke Emezi
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Night Boat to Tangier
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Barry
- Narrated by: Kevin Barry
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen - Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs - sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles.
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Two Spooky Guys Waiting…
- By David on 12-06-19
By: Kevin Barry
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The Doors of Eden
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor. Only one came back. Lee thought she'd lost Mal, but now she's miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal's reappearance hasn't gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn't the only one with questions. Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human.
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Boring
- By Kindle Customer on 08-23-20
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Disorientation
- A Novel
- By: Elaine Hsieh Chou
- Narrated by: Jennifer Kim
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about “Chinese-y” things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are a junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, it looks like her ticket out of academic hell.
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Exceptional
- By Zach Chitwood on 05-12-22
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Mayflower
- A Story of Courage, Community, and War
- By: Nathaniel Philbrick
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
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Fascinating book about a little-understood time
- By John M on 02-04-07
What listeners say about Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bluebird
- 06-14-17
outstanding
Wow what a story. It takes about the strangest of turns about half way through. Completely captivating and original.
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- Beth Anne
- 11-19-14
surprisingly complex for a coming of age story
i am surprised at some of the low ratings on this book. i found it really complex, well written and thoroughly enjoyable. i was, from page 1, enthralled by the characters and the story. however precocious (what is the teenage equivalent of precocious? erudite??) Blue is, she's a likable narrator with quite a unique and extremely amusing voice. and as likable as she was, the rest of the cast of characters (from Hannah to Gareth to Jade) are as unlikeable...and that lent even more interest and, i found, humor to the story. Pessl really got into the heads of teenagers and showed how horrible and embarrassing and hard to navigate that time period can be. then she added a thrilling mystery to it and, well, duh, of course i loved it.
I am also a sucker for a book setup stylistically. i enjoyed the way Pessl broke each chapter into a mandatory read on a syllabus. i thrived on all the old film and film star references, the book quotes, the comparisons to things that only someone in the know (i happened to be in the know most of the time) would enjoy.
i loved the ending of this book. it took me to a place i really didn't expect it to go. i don't mind being tricked by a book, in fact, i welcome it. and this book really did it.
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- HRMusic
- 04-08-23
Enjoyed This Book, but
It was a fun book, a little too pretentious with the endless references, but glad I listened.
I almost gave up early when our protagonist cliche-ed that someone was as flat as East Texas plains.
Everyone knows East Texas has hills and piney woods, the plains are in West Texas. Kinda made me wonder if there were other errors, but it’s a novel! Not a text book.
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- Linda C
- 04-13-15
Slow to start fascinating story
Well crafted novel, prose is almost brilliant but fall short and even trips in itself in some patches. Characters well described, but it is plot driven and it took too.long to get moving. . Great fodder for book clubs.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Gjemm
- 04-06-16
hard to get into, but improved toward the end
story maybe could have been shaved by at least 10%. It took forever to get to the heart of the matter, although character development was crucial, and that sometimes takes time. when stuff does begin to happen, it's all very enjoyable and Blue, the main character, becomes more and more likable.
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- R
- 03-20-15
Not excellent writing but strangely gripping story
Pessl is a bit of a sloppy writer, as some here have pointed out. Her writing at times falls flat, is unsuccessful and even downright silly, but she did succeed in creating an odd story with an unreal atmosphere, in an odd place and time with characters slightly askew, and for this, I liked the book and found myself unable to stop listening. I was very interested to find out how this strange tale unfolded (and indeed haven't, since I have four hours left).
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- A. Compton
- 09-25-13
Way too meandering
Is there anything you would change about this book?
This author doesn't just take the scenic route in this novel, she parks at the first curve for 75% of it. I will admit that once you wade through the superfluous text, there is a pretty good story with some pretty interesting characters to be found. But it's an awful lot of work for not that great a reward. By that, I am NOT referring to the open ending - that was the one part I liked, because it's not like an Agatha Christi where the answer is in the story - there is no right answer, and it is still a good story. But it's not a great story, and the endless, looping, rambling, unnecessarily distracting prose, and the whole schtick of the 'bibliography as a story line' were just hard work that only served to further demonstrate that the actual story wasn't really good enough to either outweigh all that negative, or serve as a reward for all the hard work we readers had to put in to get to it.
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4 people found this helpful
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- CYNTHIA
- 09-17-13
confusing!!
I don't recommend this book in audible form...the constant "see this" stuff is BEYOND confusing and distracting. Story was intriguing and kept me wanting more, but DANG if the "see" references completely threw me off.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lauren
- 10-14-07
Surprisingly Entertaining
I think I bought this book when it was on sale because it was long... It turned out to be really quite riveting. I loved it and I look forward to more from this author. (I think this book would have driven me completely nuts in print since it is heavily footnoted; the narrator managed to make that amusing instead of annoying.)
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2 people found this helpful
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- David Prater
- 03-16-16
Left a lot untold
The finally was rushed and unsubstantiated for the most part, but great academic undertones and storytelling.
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