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The Dog of the South
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
Charles Portis has drawn widespread critical acclaim for his inventive prose. In The Dog of the South, Ray Midge is on the trail of his wife, Norma, who’s headed for Mexico with her ex-husband. On the way Ray meets the eccentric Dr. Reo Symes, a man with more get-rich-quick schemes than common sense. Together, they’ll have to overcome tropical storms, grifters, and plenty of car trouble en route to their destination—wherever that may be.
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- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man while inside a nightmarish prison. Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation.
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Unsettling and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 01-21-13
By: John Cheever
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Time Out of Joint
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he’s never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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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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The Wayward Bus
- By: John Steinbeck, Gary Schamhorst - introduction
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.
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Steinbeck always touches the heart, makes you feel
- By Kelly on 05-08-17
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Burn What Will Burn
- By: C. B. McKenzie
- Narrated by: Bon Shaw
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Bob Reynolds doesn't recognize the body in the creek, but he does recognize the danger of it. He's a newcomer to town, not entirely welcome and not entirely on good footing with the sheriff. So far he's kept his head down, mostly over the bar at the Crow's Nest. But he has interests other than drinking and spending his inheritance, including one that goes by the name Tammy Fay Smith and who may have caught the sheriff's eye as well.
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An Author to Check Out
- By L. O. Pardue on 07-24-16
By: C. B. McKenzie
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That Old Ace in the Hole
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
By: Annie Proulx
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Cannery Row
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Jerry Farden
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack and his boys, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and most poignant works.
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Five stars with a Caveat
- By Bette on 04-23-12
By: John Steinbeck
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Confessions of a Crap Artist
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Jack Isidore doesn’t see the world like most people. According to his brother-in-law, Charley, he’s a crap artist, obsessed with his own bizarre theories and ideas, which he fanatically records in his many notebooks. He is so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But while Fay and Charley Hume put on a happy face for the world, they prove to be just as sealed off from reality, in thrall to obsessions that are slightly more acceptable than Jack’s but a great deal uglier.
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The moods of the mass can't be fathomed...
- By Darwin8u on 05-21-18
By: Philip K. Dick
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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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a heartbreaking coming of age story
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So worth it!
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Chris, en eksperimenterende filminstruktør på næsten 40, forelsker sig øjeblikkeligt og uopretteligt i sin 56-årige akademikermands yngre kollega Dick. Chris indvier manden Sylvère i sin voldsomme betagelse, og idéen om en slags kunstprojekt med Dick i centrum opstår. Fra hver sin position går parret sammen i gang med at skrive kærlighedsbreve til objektet Dick. Chris er i sin erotiske besættelse kreativt forløst som aldrig før, men pludselig befinder hun sig i spidsen af et altopslugende trekantsdrama.
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What listeners say about The Dog of the South
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 03-21-16
America's Gogol
I tell you I can't answer questions like that. You see me as a can-do guy from the States, but I don't have all the answers. I'm white and I don't dance but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
Charles Portis isn't God. But I believe he can do no wrong and can walk on water when I read his books. In fact, while reading his novels, the exact feeling I get can only be described as eating an overcooked eucharist; some crunchy, holy, wafer of truth that has been burnt by the absurdity of the modern world. I open the world-weary pages of a Portis novel and suddenly I am taken-up in a vision that contains the body and the blood of all that is great with American Fiction. He reminds me of some unholy combination of Cormac McCarthy and Walker Percy -- with a bit of Saul Bellow thrown in for flavor.
Let's get out of the way: the truth. This is the same dude from Arkansas that wrote True Grit. Great book. Fantastic novel and both movies were fantastic. Great. Good. Hallelujah! Now let's put that away. There is so much more to Charles Portis than just one amazing book. This isn't some one-hit wonder novelist. This guy is the real deal. Serious, put him next to Flannery O'Connor. Yes, he is that fantastic. OK, perhaps, we can't get ahead of ourselves. So, put him close to Flannery, looking up at her, but not with a craned neck. Roy Blount, Jr. has posited that "No one should die without having read [The Dog of the South]". Ron Rosenbaum thinks Charles Portis is America's Gogol. I shit you not.
Basically, the story is about a man's search for his runaway wife. She has run off with her ex-husband to Mexico and Belize and the narrator, Ray Midge, is going to track them down. This is a world where cars don't run well, the pelicans get struck by lightening, and people and fabricators, are either running to something or away from something. This is a book that is as much about figuring out where one is and where one belongs. It reminds me of that space which exists for a brief second between sleep and wake, after a crazy dream, where one is unsure about which side of the fog is real; and question gets begged which side of the fog one really belongs.
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31 people found this helpful
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- Rick
- 02-05-15
A Gem that Defies Description
Reviewers typically give up when it comes to the work of Charles Portis, saying in one way or another that it simply can’t be described. That’s just how I feel after hearing “A Dog of the South” and learning of him for the first time, long after I should have. It is a rambling little yarn of the Deep South in the 1970s—so Deep that it rambles into Belize. The characters are a tattered, mismatched bunch of shifty failures, grifters, evangelists, shallow dreamers and a couple of weird children, all of whom, for some reason, are easily imagined as shadowy figures in the dim light of a bare bulb in some rundown hotel.
Ray Midge’s friend has stolen his wife and his car and headed to Mexico and beyond, and Ray goes after them—to retrieve his car. The people and puzzlements he encounters are beyond imagining. The plot is a barely-necessary device to support the author’s hilarious and inventive prose. For example, he arrives at the steamy, seedy Fair Play Hotel in Belize and meets the night clerk:
“She woke a small Negro boy named Webster Spooner, who slept in a box in the foyer. It was a pretty good wooden box, with bedding in it. I knew his name because he had written it on a piece of paper and taped it to his box. At the foot of his makeshift bed, there was a tomato plant growing in an old Texaco grease bucket.“
The first sentence would be plenty good by itself, but Portis piles on unexpected details that yield rich and riveting descriptions of an exceedingly strange world. It is deliciously funny.
As I said, it can’t be described. The soft Southern accent of David Aaron Baker provides the perfect first-person voice for Ray Midge—a decent fellow with good intentions and vague ambitions you know he will never realize. But listening to his zany adventure unfold is an excellent way to spend eight hours. You won’t regret it.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 07-11-18
A highlight of my long life of reading
This is one of the most enjoyable books I have read/heard in 50 years of reading. With his startling and hilarious combination of sagacity and cluelessness, the narrator/main character Ray Midge puts me in mind of A Confederacy of Dunces (absent the gravitas). I was smiling all the way through, except when I was laughing out loud.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Richard G. Reinis
- 04-07-16
A Perfect Match of Reader and Writer
What did you love best about The Dog of the South?
David Aaron Baker deserves an Oscar (whatever the appropriate equivalent might be) for his performance. He demonstrates a complete grasp of the written work and an impeccable sense of timing and delivery as he brings the characters of this charming work alive. Charles Portis must listen to this and marvel at how Raymond and Dr. Symes and the British Hondurans come alive in his novel. Confederacy of Dunces is the only equivalent I have encountered.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Dog of the South?
The interaction of Raymond and the cast of characters he encounters is wonderful. But any reader will recognize that Portis' ear for dialogue is uncanny. A reader who can make those encounters echo two adversaries, without the benefit of a writer's use of the printed page to identify speakers, is one of a kind. Baker is in rare form.
Have you listened to any of David Aaron Baker’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Not sure.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Laugh. Wonder. Learn.
Any additional comments?
One of a kind.
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- Thomas
- 04-09-15
Long end good start.
The end dragged on and on...which is saying something for such a short book. Not a bad listen though.
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- Dylan
- 04-08-15
Wow!
Perfect! Waiting for the Coen brothers movie. Ray Midge and Reo will be with me for life. I would heartily recommend
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- Jorge F. Garcia
- 02-20-19
Well written but ultimately unfulfilling
I bought this book on account of the reviews saying how funny it is. And I suppose that it is that, funny. Although I never did laugh out loud while listening. The reader is an outstanding match for the personality of the narrator. There is a sort of great adventure. But for my money, I like a story with proper heroic heroes and villanous villains. The cast of this story are none of these things.
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- John O
- 07-13-20
The Odyssey of an Everyman
Poignant and funny tale of a seemingly ordinary and somewhat misbegotten soul who pursues a former coworker who has absconded with his wife, car, and credit card. Naturally, there's more to it, with deep insights into the nature and nurture of the human psyche. Twainesque humor and an all around most enjoyable story. Didn't want it to end.
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- ZL
- 10-30-19
I really wanted to like this but just couldn’t get into it
I heard about this book in one of my car mags as a hilarious laugh out loud road trip epic and...it just wasn’t there for me. The main character/narrator is painfully awkward in a Richard from Silicon Valley kind of way which, in itself, should be ripe for hilarity. The general storyline was also juicy and set up for success. But for me the supporting cast and tiring dialogue let it down. The Colonel Sanders-meme sidekick and his mother - whose significance to the plot I still couldn’t figure out at the point that I quit - repeatedly spouted nonsensical grandparent gibberish for 5-10 minutes at a time in each of the later chapters. While it was moderately entertaining at first, the smiles eventually faded without a laugh out loud payoff. In other words it got old fast. At about 6 hours in, those two had sucked up what felt like 2 hours of accumulated airtime. Between them and the painful impotence of the narrator I just couldn’t take it any more and threw in the towel. Maybe it’s a generational humor gap but it just didn’t resonate. To its credit, the story’s excellent imagery and great audio performances kept me in it for far longer than I otherwise would have stayed. Maybe I’ll go back and finish it eventually...
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- Beowulf
- 01-11-19
The Funniest Book Ever Written
I know that this title sets up expectations that are hard to fulfill, but Dog of the South is one of those books that people read and then reread and buy used copies of to force upon their friends. The audio is excellent--the narrator perfectly captures Ray Midge's cadences and anxietites.
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