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Underworld
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
Our lives, our half century.
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.
Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.
The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.
A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.
Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times - Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.
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Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.
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Get Your Post-Colonial Gatsby ON!
- By Darwin8u on 04-13-12
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Preparation for the Next Life
- By: Atticus Lish
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.
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Incredible craftsmanship.
- By B.J. on 04-23-15
By: Atticus Lish
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Nine Lives
- Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans
- By: Dan Baum
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
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Do not miss if you're interested in New Orleans
- By Kelly on 03-22-18
By: Dan Baum
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A Nail Through The Heart
- A Poke Rafferty Thriller
- By: Timothy Hallinan
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Poke Rafferty was writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored when Bangkok stole his heart. Now the American expat is assembling a new family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and Miaow, the tiny, streetwise urchin he wants to adopt. But trouble in the guise of good intentions comes calling just when everything is beginning to work out.
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Ever been to Bangkok?
- By Richard Delman on 12-11-11
By: Timothy Hallinan
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Outside Looking In
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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Laguna Heat
- By: T. Jefferson Parker
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Laguna: a place where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violence - with a fiery vengeance - and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery. It reaches back across 40 years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past.
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Fabulous
- By Stacy on 02-24-09
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The Man in the Crooked Hat
- By: Harry Dolan
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Private investigator Jack Pellum has spent two years searching for the man he believes murdered his wife - a man he last saw wearing a peacoat and a fedora. Months of posting flyers and combing through crime records yields no leads. Then a local writer commits suicide, and he leaves a bewildering message that may be the first breadcrumb in a winding trail of unsolved murders....
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Crazy Glue'd Me To Story
- By Ted on 01-11-18
By: Harry Dolan
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
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In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
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Narrator's Monotonous Tone Ruined Book
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At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott; and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.
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Text Required but What A Treat!!!
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The Names
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Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book that began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses.
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Nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder...
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-17
By: Don DeLillo
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Falling Man
- A Novel
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: John Slattery
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In the opening scene of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked, and makes his way to the apartment of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships, reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world.
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A Reflection on Humanity
- By PSprout on 06-05-07
By: Don DeLillo
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White Noise
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When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Libra
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- Length: 18 hrs and 21 mins
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In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
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Narrator's Monotonous Tone Ruined Book
- By Dan in DC on 12-03-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Mao II
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott; and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.
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Text Required but What A Treat!!!
- By Jason on 02-07-22
By: Don DeLillo
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Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book that began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses.
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Nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder...
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-17
By: Don DeLillo
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Falling Man
- A Novel
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: John Slattery
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In the opening scene of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked, and makes his way to the apartment of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships, reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world.
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A Reflection on Humanity
- By PSprout on 06-05-07
By: Don DeLillo
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Zero K
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Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.
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Everybody wants to own the end of the world...
- By Darwin8u on 05-11-16
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Running Dog
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DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.
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"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."
- By Darwin8u on 08-18-18
By: Don DeLillo
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Point Omega
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Richard Elster was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency". We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere", in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience.
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"good read"
- By Meena on 06-22-10
By: Don DeLillo
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Underworld
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- Narrated by: Riccardo Mei
- Length: 34 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Un romanzo che fa esplodere la storia, i miti e la vita quotidiana dell'America del dopoguerra e ne ricompone i resti. In una vorticosa alternanza di epoche e figure, DeLillo costruisce un puzzle di sequenze narrative dove protagonisti e comparse hanno lo stesso spazio, dove personaggi di finzione convivono con Lenny Bruce e con J. Edgar Hoover, il potente capo dell'Fbi.
By: Don DeLillo, and others
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Americana
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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At 28, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a high-powered television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And then the dream - and the dream making - become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality.
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DeLillo's Grand First Step
- By Darwin8u on 06-29-17
By: Don DeLillo
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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The Silence
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- Unabridged
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It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.
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A waste of a good premise
- By Adam on 10-23-20
By: Don DeLillo
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Cosmopolis
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end, those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.
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My favorite book
- By Alnia Perpoz on 08-18-09
By: Don DeLillo
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Ratner's Star
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 15 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, a genius adolescent who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, and mathematical theories as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel.
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Sitting alone in a room isn't enough.
- By Darwin8u on 12-25-20
By: Don DeLillo
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End Zone
- By: Don Delillo
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At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course.
By: Don Delillo
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Sabbath’s Theater
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: John Turturro
- Length: 18 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.
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The worst audiobook I’ve ever listened to
- By Jerome D. Blake on 12-13-23
By: Philip Roth
What listeners say about Underworld
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Warren Wave
- 03-07-21
one of the greatest novels ever. the nyc bible
best delillo book i've read. prophetic and sublime, the books captures urban life like nothing else.
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- Stephen
- 10-16-13
Will be looked at as a classic in time
What made the experience of listening to Underworld the most enjoyable?
Great story with an excellent reader. DeLillo takes a simple concept (in the path taken by the Bobby Thompson home run ball) and twists into an incredibly detailed and interesting story about the many lives the ball affected in the subsequent years.
What did you like best about this story?
It engaged me from the beginning. DeLillo is a great author and knows what it takes to write a captivating story with many hidden meanings that I'm sure will be debated for years to come.
Have you listened to any of Richard Poe’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
N/A
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Not one particular moment. The way the author creates an intersection of each characters life is captivating on its' own.
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- steve schwartz
- 02-28-19
Hallucinating author
Beautiful writing with interesting insights. Multiple storylines the don’t really add up to any coherent conclusion. Y’all either find it mindbending or completely ridiculous.
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- ryan
- 06-19-22
I didn’t want it to end.
I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot. I encourage you to do the same.
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- Tracy Green
- 11-14-23
A masterwork of lyrical yet cynical characters.
I already know I’ll read this again. A Truly deep and idiosyncratic world fleshed out superbly in ascending levels of human conversation .
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- Anonymous User
- 01-23-24
Depressing, asymmetrical, overwrought. A masterpiece.
This book, however stilted and disagreeable, is one of the most thorough anthropological statements about the 20th century there could ever be.
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- Taylor Stein
- 04-01-24
Underworld epic
I read this book when it first came out expecting a gangster tale. I was surprised at the book I read. Listening to it years later reminded me why I consider it a favorite .
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- Jefferson
- 02-22-16
"How rare it was to see what it was before you"
Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) is a large sprawling novel tightly focused around a set of intertwining themes about waste, weapons, memory, language, perception, relationships, life, and death. It's set mostly during and after the Cold War in America, especially NYC. The tone, style, and concerns of the novel are established by the Prologue, a tour de force account of the deciding game of the 1951 pennant playoff between the NY Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, won by the Giants on the legendary sayonara homerun hit by Bobby Thomson off Ralph Branca, immediately being named "the shot heard round the world" while occurring at about the same time as a Soviet atomic bomb test. DeLillo writes the points of view of various people, e.g., Cotter Martin, the young black teen who flamboyantly sneaks into the game; Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer who enters baseball lore in calling the homerun; J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who is attending the game with Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason; and Nick Shay, teen Dodgers fan who is devastated after listening to the game on his radio on the roof of his Bronx apartment building.
The novel itself opens in 1992 with 57-year old Nick driving through the desert to see Klara Sax, a famous 72-year old cast off object artist working on an epic project involving 230 retired Cold War B-52s. Forty years ago, it develops, Nick had a brief affair with Klara when she was married to his science teacher who was also his little brother's chess mentor. Now Nick works for a big waste management firm headquartered in a bronze tower in Phoenix and often feels unreal.
Although Nick is the protagonist of the novel (his is the only first person narration), DeLillo inhabits an impressive variety of characters at different stages in their lives, among them Nick's wife Marian (trying to make a self while married to a "demon husband"), his mother Rosemary (supporting her sons by herself), his brother Matt (deciding to quit doing bomb risk analysis work), Manx Martin (comically attempting to sell the Thomson homerun baseball), Marvin Lundy (epically searching for it), Klara Sax (enjoying life in NYC as an artist), her first husband Albert Bronzini (walking musing and schmoozing about the Bronx), J. Edgar Hoover and his aide/companion Clyde "Junior" Tolson (safeguarding the nation against "insurgents" of every stripe), Sister Edgar (doing good works with extreme cleanliness), stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce (riffing on the Cuban Missile Crisis), advertising account exec Charles Wainright (firing people and dispensing wisdom like "whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world"), his failure son Chuckie (on another bombing mission over Vietnam). The many point of view characters reveal how different people perceive and construct the world, life, and meaning: young and old, male and female, white and black, anointed and powerless, heroes and goats, believers and faithless, educated and ignorant, artists and scientists, marketers and consumers, entertainers and audiences, parents and children, siblings and friends, spouses and adulterers, geniuses and fools. . . Humanity in all its permutations.
Each short story-like chapter interweaves vignettes from the 1950s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, and 90s. Even as DeLillo captures Cold War and post-Cold War American culture in appalling and hilarious detail, he universalizes his novel by linking 20th-century USA and Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. That's why he writes so many scenes at shows, parties, baseball games, demonstrations, etc. until even "private" scenes between lovers seem to occur in a crowd. But although the novel references Bruegel's painting and Pluto's Hades and sets Lenny Bruce to crying, "We're all gonna die!" and deals with war, Plutonium, murder, disease, aging, dying, and so on, it also shows how people create, educate, learn, love, see, remember, joke, communicate, know, and believe in that context. And it ends with a paean to peace.
The book is fresh and vivid in its depiction of the world, apt for a novel about looking carefully and bravely. For DeLillo, that kind of seeing is dependent on language: "You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look and you don't how to look because you don't know the names." Thus Nick seeks the exact names of things, and DeLillo wields language precisely and plays with etymologies.
One thing he wants us to see is "the best kept secret in the world," waste, the origin of civilization, "a religious thing," for "It is necessary to respect what we discard," lest "What we secrete comes back to consume us." Thus Nick and his colleagues believe that "We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations," while "crafting the future" from "every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire."
Like waste, weapons "reflect the soul of the maker," and DeLillo is the bard of the bomb: "the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud, arranged split-secondly on the shock disk, sort of primly, place centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the Biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms, and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn."
Yes, the language of Underworld is rich and lyrical and ranges from the numinous to the comedic:
--"He has been to one night game in his life, coming down from the bluff with his oldest brother and walking into a bowl of painted light. He thought there was an unknown energy flaring down out of the light towers, some intenser working of the earth, and it isolated the players and the grass and the chalk-rolled lines from anything he'd ever seen or imagined. They had the glow of first-time things."
--"She had a European accent slashed and burned by long term residency in New York, and her hair had the retouched gloss of a dead crow mounted on a stick."
I love DeLillo's use of -ed to make new adjectives (not unlike Klara making art from B-52s): mermaided, roman-collared, unsheveled, eyelinered, scatterhanded, spindle-shanked, Buddha-headed, etc.
The fine reader of the audiobook, Richard Poe, nails all the nuances and pauses and emphases and accents and clearly relishes reading DeLillo's wonderful prose.
If there is a flaw, it's that after a while the many different lyrical, philosophical, and witty people start sounding like DeLillo. Or that reading the constant rich language becomes like dining only on juicy steak and dark chocolate mousse for a week. But this book is so funny and life-affirming, and is so packed with vivid and original descriptions and metaphors, and has such an ironic and sympathetic eye for human folly and mortality, and hosts such a large and interesting cast of characters, that it seems churlish to pick at such things.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Robert Mule
- 04-18-12
Great Writing
Which scene was your favorite?
The book opens with a lengthy description of the "Shot Heard Round the World," Bobby Thompson's home run that gave the New York Giants the 1951 American League Pennant. This may be some of the best writing in American literature. Seriously.
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- Kenneth Albright
- 05-12-16
"What A Long Strange Trip It's Been...."
This was my first engagement with the works of, Don DeLillo. It was at first a challenge to find rhythm but not for long.
DeLillo paints a portrait here more than telling a story. He makes sure the reader/listener is right in the center of each scene from the types of paper floating around in an October ballgame to the night movements and works of a master graffiti artist to the smell and vision of massive waste dumps to the detonation of atomic bombs, you are an insider not a consumer of this masterpiece. You smell, hear, see, feel the sweat, tension, passion, fear and desperation of a nation railing toward collapse.
The writer presents his material as a sociologist, psychologist, cultural anthropologist, artist, conversationalist and certainly as a master of his craft.
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