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The Last Thing He Wanted
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Release date: 05-07-13
- Language: English
- Publisher: Audible Studios
- Whispersync for Voice-ready
Regular price: $17.96
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Throughout the 10 stories in You Think It, I'll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided. With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittenfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life. Indeed, she writes what we're all thinking - if only we could express it with the wit of a master satirist, the storytelling gifts of an old-fashioned raconteur, and the vision of an American original.
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Stories of people thinking and acting horribly towards each other
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
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Miami
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It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.
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Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.
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Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Narrative of a Girl Diver
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Florida
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 95
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Over a decade ago, Groff moved to her adopted home state of Florida. The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida - its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind - becomes its gravitational center. Storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional, and psychological nature. Groff's evocative storytelling and knife-sharp intelligence first transport the listener, then jolt us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty....
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2 out of 5 stars
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Don't buy the audiobook
- By Ethan Gouveia on 06-16-18
Publisher's Summary
The legendary author of Play It As It Lays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem here trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.
In that latter year, Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.
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