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Why Visit America
- Stories
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Equal parts speculative and satirical, the stories in Why Visit America form an exegesis of our current political predicament while offering an eloquent plea for connection and hope.
The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the 13 stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.
The audiobook opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal - the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist - a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition - from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child - her own - from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory - his entire life - is wiped clean.
As the audiobook moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom-com, Western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Listened to together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
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Performance
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Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret—one which will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own.. Spanning fifty kaleidoscopic years, on a street—and in a galaxy—where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined. Urgent and compassionate, Signal Fires is a magical story for our times, a literary tour de force by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers.
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Depressing, poorly read
- By Arden Mahaffey on 11-02-22
By: Dani Shapiro
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When Things Get Dark
- Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson
- By: Ellen Datlow - editor
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella, Cassandra Campbell, Erin Moon, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling anthology in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant, and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and listeners. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, brings together today’s leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson.
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Come for the Oates, stay for the rest!
- By Rebecca Rowland, author on 12-23-21
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The Travelers
- A Novel
- By: Regina Porter
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet James Samuel Vincent, an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish-American background but hews to his father’s meandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia’s mother - Agnes Miller Christie - is a beautiful African-American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life in the Bronx. Soon after, her husband, Eddie Christie, is called to duty on an air craft carrier in Vietnam.
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Each character is quite a character.
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-22
By: Regina Porter
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The Arsonists' City
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Leila Buck
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Nasr family is spread across the globe - Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut - a constant touchstone - and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house.
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amazing
- By Kindle Customer on 05-07-22
By: Hala Alyan
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Flight Risk
- A Novel
- By: Joy Castro
- Narrated by: Rebecca Mozo
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Morales is a successful Chicago sculptor hiding a brutal family history - one not even her husband knows. After decades of turning her back on her past, she’s forced to return to Appalachia when she receives news of her estranged mother’s death. But going back means revisiting the traumatic childhood she escaped - and the family that cast her out when she needed them most.
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Timely!
- By Johnny L. Granquist on 12-03-21
By: Joy Castro
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Luster
- A Novel
- By: Raven Leilani
- Narrated by: Ariel Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Edie is stumbling her way through her 20s - sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage - with rules.
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Spellbinding
- By Nana on 08-07-20
By: Raven Leilani
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Dark River Inn
- A Troubled Spirits Novel
- By: J.R. Erickson
- Narrated by: Alan Carlson
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the day of his ex-wife’s wedding when Dan makes the winding mountain journey to a remote cabin for an escape from the life that another man has stepped into. Less than 48 hours into his reprieve, the forest tranquility is shattered when he looks through a telescope and witnesses the violent abduction of a young woman. Dan springs into action, but there’s no evidence of an abduction nor reports of a missing woman. That is, until Dan sees the missing person’s poster for Ivy Trent.
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A bit disappointing
- By Laurie Kohn on 07-20-21
By: J.R. Erickson
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The Ninth Metal
- The Comet Cycle, Book 1
- By: Benjamin Percy
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The town of Northfall, Minnesota, will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon. John Frontier returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government.
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Everyone Will Enjoy This Except My Mother
- By Liv Rosin on 06-04-21
By: Benjamin Percy
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Milk Blood Heat
- Stories
- By: Dantiel W. Moniz
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning.
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Wonderful
- By Anonymous User on 05-28-21
By: Dantiel W. Moniz
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Disappearing Earth
- A novel
- By: Julia Phillips
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls - sisters, eight and 11 - go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother.
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The setting is completely unique!
- By Kelly on 06-25-19
By: Julia Phillips
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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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Dark August
- A Novel
- By: Katie Tallo
- Narrated by: Piper Goodeve
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Augusta (Gus) Monet is living an aimless existence with her grifter boyfriend when she learns that her great grandmother - her last living relative - has just died. Ditching her boyfriend, Gus returns to the home she left as a young girl. Her inheritance turns out to be a dilapidated house and an old dog named Levi. While combing through her great grandmother’s possessions, Gus stumbles across an old trunk filled with long-lost childhood belongings.
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Bad narration
- By Dyan D. on 10-24-20
By: Katie Tallo
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The Lie
- A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out
- By: William Dameron
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity - a forty-year-old straight white male - had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance.
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Beautifully written
- By Lisa Villa on 08-25-19
By: William Dameron