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Talking Animals
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's Summary
"Joni Murphy’s inventive and beautiful allegory depicts a city enmeshed in climate collapse, blinded to the signs of its imminent destruction by petty hatreds and monstrous greed: that is, the world we are living in now. Talking Animals is an Orwellian tale of totalitarianism in action, but the animals on this farm are much cuter, and they make better puns." - Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
A fable for our times, Joni Murphy’s Talking Animals takes place in an all-animal world where creatures rather like us are forced to deal with an all-too-familiar landscape of soul-crushing jobs, polluted oceans, and a creeping sense of doom.
It’s New York City, nowish. Lemurs brew espresso. Birds tend bar. There are bears on Wall Street, and a billionaire racehorse is mayor. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust and there’s chatter about building a wall to keep them out.
Alfonzo is a moody alpaca. His friend Mitchell is a sociable llama. They both work at City Hall, but their true passions are noise music and underground politics. Partly to meet girls, partly because the world might be ending, these lowly bureaucrats embark on an unlikely mission to expose the corrupt system that’s destroying the city from within. Their project takes them from the city’s bowels to its extremities, where they encounter the Sea Equality Revolutionary Front, who are either a group of dangerous radicals or an inspiring liberation movement.
In this novel, at last, nature kvetches and grieves, while talking animals offer us a kind of solace in the guise of dumb jokes. This is mass extinction as told by BoJack Horseman. This is The Fantastic Mr. Fox journeying through Kafka's Amerika. This is dogs and cats, living together. Talking Animals is an urgent allegory about friendship, art, and the elemental struggle to change one’s life under the low ceiling of capitalism.
Critic Reviews
"[Edoardo] Ballerini does a fantastic job setting the right tone of sincerity and seriousness while also portraying the main character, Alfonzo, a lovable, irascible alpaca who is just trying to get his dissertation done and move on with his life. This is a fantastic story and a masterful performance."
—AudioFile Magazine
"Come for the cover, which depicts a thoughtful alpaca, and stay for the tale of intrigue, climate change, and metropolitan doom - all in a world without humans. Sounds nice right now!"
―Vulture, "29 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer" 2020
"A 21st-century combination of Animal Farm and Aesop's Fables . . . Murphy packs a lot of issues - class, climate change immigration, vegetarianism, and more - into a familiar plot about malfeasance. She balances her poetic ruminations and dogmatic lecturing with a goofy relish for puns . . . Weird yet engrossing and hard to forget."
―Kirkus (starred)
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What listeners say about Talking Animals
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- User
- 01-05-21
Feels graspy
This book was recommended to me/presented as a modern Animal Farm. Orwell's Animal Farm was simple and allegorial to past and current political issues, highlighting where the people and community give away their agency. As a reader seeing the animals do stupid things, I would have visceral reactions of disbelief, like, "No don't do that!" and then marvel seeing the parallel in today's world. Orwell took two seemingly unrelated stories (one fiction one nonfiction) that overlapped and that told the same story in a simple and relatable way.
In contrast, Talking Animals felt like it was grasping to convey a sense of what is going on in the world. Reading it did not feel natural, it felt forced like the characters and theme were made up to fit into today's global problems. The whole storyline is essentially about Alfonso waking up to the reality of global warming, immigration, racism, bureaucracy, and corrupt politics. But the way he wakes up is so incredibly boring and predictable that I had to force myself to finish the book. The worst part is, there was no reconciliation or solution, just a drifting sense of "Well now what."
There were two highlights of the book for me:
The first one is when he's at a party and he's trying to make sense of the bigger picture. And everybody's enjoying themselves and he's overthinking everything and one of the guests says to him, "Just enjoy yourself." For me that clicked because I tend to overthink a lot and not be in the present moment. So that was a good reminder and gave me a bit of a chuckle.
The other highlight was chapter 30, which is a message from the Ocean about how things are falling apart. That whole chapter and message was beautiful, moving, and heartfelt, and well written. I could finally feel emotion and a sense of connectedness and compassion to the whole (both in the book's story and how it relates to real life).
The rest of the book was just a meandering story. The fact that they were animals and not just people did not add anything special to the book, in fact I found a distracting.
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Story
Warmth is a new kind of book about climate change: not what it is or how we solve it, but how it feels to imagine a future - and a family - under its weight. In a fiercely personal account written from inside the climate movement, Sherrell lays bare how the crisis is transforming our relationships to time, to hope, and to each other. At once a memoir, a love letter, and an electric work of criticism, Warmth goes to the heart of the defining question of our time: how do we go on in a world that may not?
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Excellent and cathartic
- By Nancy LaPlaca on 01-14-22
By: Daniel Sherrell
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Good Boy
- My Life in Seven Dogs
- By: Jennifer Finney Boylan
- Narrated by: Kelsey Navarro, Jennifer Finney Boylan
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking piece went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: Finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: Showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman - accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. "Everything I know about love," she writes, "I learned from dogs."
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Glad Audible was reading for me...
- By Karstin M Naberhuis on 04-08-22
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The Edge of Every Day
- Sketches of Schizophrenia
- By: Marin Sardy
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The debut of an important new literary voice: Marin Sardy's extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent memoir unflinchingly traces the path of the schizophrenia that runs in her family. Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where the author grew up, Marin Sardy weaves a fearless account of the shapeless thief - the schizophrenia - that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life.
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Fascinating compelling interesting and heart felt
- By Maryswriting on 06-03-19
By: Marin Sardy
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Whale Day
- And Other Poems
- By: Billy Collins
- Narrated by: Billy Collins
- Length: 1 hr and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral.
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To be read in the voice of Billy Collins
- By Maggie Hess on 11-03-20
By: Billy Collins
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Why Fish Don't Exist
- A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
- By: Lulu Miller
- Narrated by: Lulu Miller
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When his specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation.
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If fish don't exist, do stars matter?
- By K. Ishihara on 12-05-20
By: Lulu Miller
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To Be a Man
- Stories
- By: Nicole Krauss
- Narrated by: Nicole Krauss
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
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The joy of great literature
- By Brian Datnow on 01-02-21
By: Nicole Krauss
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Negative Space
- By: Lilly Dancyger
- Narrated by: Lilly Dancyger
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.
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Striking
- By Laurah Bajorek on 05-05-21
By: Lilly Dancyger
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Whereabouts
- A Novel
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Susan Vinciotti Bonito
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
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Gorgeous melancholy reflections
- By BenYL on 06-15-21
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
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Half Empty
- By: David Rakoff
- Narrated by: David Rakoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times best-selling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) audiobook, Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won’t come true.
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A Good Friend I Never Met
- By Rodney on 08-14-12
By: David Rakoff
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Chicago
- A Novel
- By: Brian Doyle
- Narrated by: Wayne Mitchell
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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On the last day of summer, a young college grad moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there. A love letter to Chicago, the Great American City, and a wry account of a young man's coming-of-age during the one summer in White Sox history when they had the best outfield in baseball, Chicago is a novel that will plunge you into a city you will never forget and may well wish to visit for the rest of your days.
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A fine, entertaining book, very well read.
- By Richard Delman on 09-28-19
By: Brian Doyle
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What on Earth Have I Done?
- Stories, Observations, and Affirmations
- By: Robert Fulghum
- Narrated by: Robert Fulghum
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Fulghum's new book begins with a question we've all asked ourselves: "What on Earth have I done?" As Fulghum finds out, the answer is never easy and, almost always, surprising. For the last couple of years, Fulghum has been traveling the world, from Seattle to the Moab Desert to Crete, looking for a few fellow travelers interested in thinking along with him as he delights in the unexpected.
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Healing words
- By Carolyn on 10-12-07
By: Robert Fulghum
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The Yield
- A Novel
- By: Tara June Winch
- Narrated by: Tony Briggs
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon.
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got tired of waiting for the story
- By Catherine E. Shearer on 07-11-20
By: Tara June Winch
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Mill Town
- Reckoning with What Remains
- By: Kerri Arsenault
- Narrated by: Kerri Arsenault
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years, the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe.
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An extremely important book for any American
- By barbara on 10-02-20
By: Kerri Arsenault
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The Hotel Neversink
- By: Adam O'Fallon Price
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing - and the ones that follow - will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion.
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A Depressing Book, Depressingly Read
- By Bob P. on 05-29-21
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Bedtime Stories for Adults: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia
- Relaxing Lullabies and Daily Exercises Based on CBT Techniques to Help You Fall Asleep. Overcome Stress, Anxiety and Depression
- By: Kirsten Wallace
- Narrated by: Teena Katz
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Sleep disorders are becoming more prevalent. The use of drugs can cause side effects that lead to poor sleep. And older people suffer from more sleep-related medical and mental conditions. The good news is that all of these sleep problems can be handled effectively. Good sleep at any age is possible.
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What the hell is this?
- By Sastelise on 05-23-21
By: Kirsten Wallace