• The Burnt Orange Heresy

  • A Novel
  • By: Charles Willeford
  • Narrated by: Adam Verner
  • Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (28 ratings)

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The Burnt Orange Heresy  By  cover art

The Burnt Orange Heresy

By: Charles Willeford
Narrated by: Adam Verner
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Publisher's summary

This is the classic neo-noir novel acclaimed as Charles Willeford's best and the basis for a 2020 major motion picture.

Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing, and fiercely ambitious art critic James Figueras will do anything - blackmail, burglary, and beyond - to make a name for himself. When an unscrupulous collector offers Figueras a career-making chance to interview Jacques Debierue, the greatest living - and most reclusive - artist, the critic must decide how far he will go to become the art-world celebrity he hungers to be. Will Figueras stop at the opportunity to skim some cream for himself or push beyond morality's limits to a bigger payoff?

Crossing the art world with the underworld, Willeford creates a novel of dark hue and high aesthetic polish. The Burnt Orange Heresy - the 1970s crime classic now back in print - has lost none of its savage delights as it re-creates the making of a murderer, calmly and with exquisite tension, while satirizing the workings of the art world as the ultimate con.

©1971 by Charles Willeford (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing

What listeners say about The Burnt Orange Heresy

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Excellent


It’s good story with amazing vocabulary. The story has Well developed characters and the state of Florida. A great deal of information about art and the profession of an art critic.

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Portrait of an Artist as a Immobilized Hero

“No pido nunca a nadie is a good summary of the code Debierue’s lived by all his life. Translated, it means, ‘I never ask nobody for nothing.’” ~ Willeford, Charles. The Burnt Orange Heresy: A Novel

Debierue, the Nihilistic Surrealistic painter at the heart of this story, is a perfect example of Willeford's "Immobilized Hero." When we meet him he is a reclusive old man producing fictional paintings that reveal a hidden truth about art and the weird and sometimes twisted world of art critics and collectors.

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Do it!!! This is Charles Willeford at his best.

Do it!!! This is Charles Willeford at his best. Surprise ending and fantastic nihilistic tone.

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1 person found this helpful