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The Hole
- Narrated by: Brianna Ishibashi
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
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By: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher's summary
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Hole is by turns reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, David Lynch, and My Neighbor Totoro, but is singularly unsettling.
Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.
One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole - a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.
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- TiffanyD
- 01-29-21
Murakami-esque in much except its brevity
You need to be willing to put yourself in a place where you are able to suspend most of your disbelief. Nothing much happens, but it creates a definite mood of hot summers and surrealism that I enjoyed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Anna Christine
- 12-20-22
Interesting
This book has Alice in Wonderland/My Neighbor Totoro vibes, but with a 25-30 year protagonist who is struggling with changes in her life. Definitely surreal translated fiction.
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Story
Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife”, once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts.
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Bourgeois whining
- By electricfool on 06-17-23
By: Jenny Offill
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Life Ceremony
- Stories
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi, Nancy Wu, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
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Addicted
- By Patrick Ryan Bennett on 09-26-23
By: Sayaka Murata
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Kitchen
- By: Banana Yoshimoto
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
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First Time is the Charm
- By just asking for some common sense on 08-22-19
By: Banana Yoshimoto
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New People
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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As the 20th century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom". Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation on the Jonestown massacre.
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Different!!
- By Gabby on 11-17-17
By: Danzy Senna
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One’s Company
- A Novel
- By: Ashley Hutson
- Narrated by: Rachel Jacobs
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the voice that reminds her of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three's Company. When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision—to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity—takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three's Company and slip into the lives of its main characters.
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Strange, absurd, funny, heartbreaking
- By Harry on 06-16-22
By: Ashley Hutson
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The Woman in the Dunes
- By: Kobo Abe
- Narrated by: Julian Cihi
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together, their fates become intertwined as they work side-by-side at this Sisyphean task.
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Nihilistic horror
- By Mr. Sagan on 07-20-19
By: Kobo Abe
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Fever Dream
- A Novel
- By: Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell - translator
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 3 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Experience the blazing, surreal sensation of a fever dream...A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale.
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Ghastly tale, brilliantly told.
- By Kat - Audible on 03-22-18
By: Samanta Schweblin, and others
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Nightbitch
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Yoder
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.
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If you don’t get it just say so
- By Stephanie Rzonca on 02-19-22
By: Rachel Yoder
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All the Lovers in the Night
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Mirai
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.
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Enjoyable listen
- By Rose on 05-16-22
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Patricia Wants to Cuddle
- By: Samantha Allen
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Justis Bolding, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When the final four women in competition for an aloof, if somewhat sleazy, bachelor’s heart arrive on a mysterious island in the Pacific Northwest, they mentally prepare themselves for another week of extreme sleep deprivation, invasive interviews, and of course, the salacious drama that viewers nationwide tune in to eagerly devour. Each woman came on The Catch for her own reasons - brand sponsorships, followers, and yes, even love - and they’ve all got their eyes steadfastly trained on their respective prizes.
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CUDDLE ME ALREADY
- By jmitch on 06-28-22
By: Samantha Allen
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Tinkers
- By: Paul Harding
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating.
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Annoying and pretentious
- By William on 01-12-09
By: Paul Harding
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Pizza Girl
- A Novel
- By: Jean Kyoung Frazier
- Narrated by: Jeena Yi
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.
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Poorly cast narrator :(
- By J. Case on 06-11-20
Related to this topic
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Jack: Secret Histories
- Young Repairman Jack Series 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Alexander Cendese
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance