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Fresh Complaint
- Stories
- Narrated by: Jeffrey Eugenides, Ari Fliakos, Cynthia Nixon
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
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Publisher's Summary
The first collection of short fiction from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot.
Jeffrey Eugenides's best selling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times.
The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich and intriguing territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of "Baster" to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler's search for enlightenment in "Air Mail" (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Fresh Complaint," a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist.
Narratively compelling, beautifully worded, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American author.
Critic Reviews
"It's not a surprise that Cynthia Nixon would be a good audiobook reader. It's surprising that she isn't hired to read every audiobook...Fliakos is endlessly entertaining while never letting theatrics outshine the characters on the page. This collection, Eugenides' first, includes 10 stories spanning three decades of the author's work. Hearing them read in a variety of voices emphasizes the changes in style and point of view that Eugenides has played with throughout his career." (Booklist)
"The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word 'fresh.' Jeffrey Eugenides's fresh writing...showcases his originality and - since he also narrates it - his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities." (AudioFile)
"Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
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What listeners say about Fresh Complaint
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cynthia C. Stellar
- 11-13-17
You’ll love this book if you love hearing about bodily fluids on a regular basis.
Middlesexand and The Marriage Plot we’re excellent books. So, with that I mind, I️ thought I’d try Fresh Complaint. I️ had to return it. Maybe I’m getting old and I’ve always been a bit of a prude, but I️ just couldn’t take the delving into detail talk of bodily fluids. I️ listened to the first three stories and was a few minutes into the fourth, when up came more bodily fluid discussion. I️ couldn’t take it and had to let it go. So, let the buyer beware! The stories were interesting, but the bodily fluid descriptions ruined them for me.
12 people found this helpful
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- JLB
- 01-31-18
Skip the first story, but the rest are incredible!!
Jeffrey Eugenides is one of those authors who doesn't seem to write without throwing himself into the depths of research on characters, careers, cities, relationships, entire ways of life and all of the accompanying nuances. His stories are brilliant windows gleaming with details showcasing the banality and pain of not getting what we want out of life... but in a beautiful and charmingly light way. My only warning is that the first story is a depressing bore and I nearly returned the book midway thru it, but beyond that its full of gems.
Also, make sure you read The Marriage Plot first!!! It makes the story of Mitchell and Larry a lot more colorful. :)
8 people found this helpful
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- Ouida Touchon
- 03-15-18
Quirky characters and compelling narrative.
I enjoyed the stream of short stories about complex and somewhat flawed characters. if there was continuity in the stories and repeated characters, I didn't sense it... maybe a hard copy would be easier to figure that out. otherwise, I love his writing style.
2 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 10-05-22
Very engaging some what depressing
But that’s what life like the variety of the scenarios particularly things that I was very familiar with some of them were spot on
Jeffrey Eugenides gets into your head
1 person found this helpful
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- Book Group Leader
- 09-09-22
Audible version needs demarcations
I listened to the Audible version and my only criticism is the short stories melded into each other without the narrator taking a breath. Each transition took me a few beats to realize they were onto a different story, requiring me to rewind and find the start. Eugenides’s characters and nuanced writing always satisfies. Especially enjoyed Cynthia Nixon narration. But a music interlude between sections would have allowed a bit of reflection rather than abruptly realizing “wait, that was the end?”
1 person found this helpful
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- Jane
- 07-27-22
Loved every one of these stories!
Excellent character development. Every one of them was relatable in some way.. their struggles were ordinary and their solutions were understandable…. I cared about them!
1 person found this helpful
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- M.KIPNIS
- 03-01-18
blah. not enuf tension. characters plots incomplet
not his best book. characters in completely developed. narration at a monotone. never hooked me
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Story
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backward, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
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“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
- By Mel on 11-27-17
By: Louise Erdrich
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Commonwealth
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Hope Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
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Patchett and Me--In-sympatico
- By Mel on 09-18-16
By: Ann Patchett
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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
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Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth
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The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
- By: Karen Joy Fowler
- Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee”, she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister”. As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.
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This was totally worth the credit.
- By Amber on 10-04-13
By: Karen Joy Fowler
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Toad
- A Novel
- By: Katherine Dunn, Molly Crabapple - foreword
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college.
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Performance is bad
- By kelly on 01-12-23
By: Katherine Dunn, and others
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They're Going to Love You
- A Novel
- By: Meg Howrey
- Narrated by: Meg Howrey
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Throughout her childhood, Carlisle Martin got to see her father, Robert, for only a few precious weeks a year when she visited the brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village he shared with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gave Carlisle an education in all that he held dear in life—literature, music, and, most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and hoping to follow in the footsteps of her mother—a former Balanchine ballerina—Carlisle’s aspiration to become a professional ballet dancer bloomed.
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Love you
- By Susan Carson on 01-16-23
By: Meg Howrey
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Moonglow
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.
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Wonderful novel, terrible narrator
- By Joyce M. Bernheim on 12-30-16
By: Michael Chabon
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Nightcrawling
- A Novel
- By: Leila Mottley
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are barely scraping by in a squalid East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.
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Metaphors - getcher Metaphors
- By Nicole Del Sesto on 08-09-22
By: Leila Mottley
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Giovanni's Room
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dan Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the 1950’s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Baldwin: sensational. Butler: great. One caveat.
- By Music Man on 06-28-14
By: James Baldwin
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The Sea, the Sea
- By: Iris Murdoch, Mary Kinzie - introduction
- Narrated by: Simon Vance, Kimberly Farr
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
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Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years.
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Murdoch Amazes
- By Sara on 08-30-17
By: Iris Murdoch, and others