Audiobook

 

Disorder Peculiar to the Country, A

Author : Ken Kalfus

Performed By : James Boles

Publisher : Audio Evolution LLC

Runtime : 8 hours 36 minutes

Categories : Fiction
Arts & Drama
Crime & Thrillers
Contemporary

Our Price : $24.95

Purchase...

Joyce and Marshall Harriman are in the midst of a contentious divorce, but still sharing a cramped, overmortgaged Brooklyn apartment with their two children.

On the morning of September 11, Joyce departs for Newark to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall, after dropping the kids at daycare, heads for his office in the World Trade Center.

She misses her flight and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in the devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other is dead, and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, foreign wars, and the stock market collapse, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time.

In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

Ken Kalfus is the author of a novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the short story collections, Thirst, which won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country was a National Book Award finalist for 2006.

Reviews:

"Kalfus is an endlessly ingenious writer….Features some of the best fiction writing yet about September 11….A brilliant comedy of manners…about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own."—Salon.com

"My inner idealist hopes Kalfus' novel joins the ranks of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 on the required reading lists."—Philadelphia Magazine

"Kalfus' new novel [is] like a fever dream of recent events…Through the interbleeding of public and private story lines and his lampooning approach, Kalfus [is] freeing the way we think about September 11….If hyperbole can be weaponized anywhere in literature, it is here."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Read by James Boles, Direction, Mastering and Original Music by Peter Pantelis.

 

 

-

 

Felix Holt, The Radical

Author : George Eliot

Performed By : Nadia May

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 18 hours

Categories : Classic Literature

Our Price : $33.95

Purchase...

"George Eliot's work places great importance on setting...much background is provided to make the nineteenth-century love triangle come alive. Narrator Nadia May fills the listener in with brisk, breathless cadences, breezing through the lengthy descriptions like a lovable neighborhood gossip. Her crisp accent, pauses between sentences, and mastery of tone help the listener understand the predicament of Esther Lyon....As she reads the text, May seems to be enjoying it herself, which enables the listener to do the same."--AudioFile

Relinquishing thoughts of a materially rewarding life, the respectably educated Felix Holt returns to his native village in North Loamshire and becomes an artisan. He is a forceful young man of honor, integrity, and idealism, burning to participate in political life so that he may improve the lot of his fellow artisans.

Contrasted with Felix Holt is the intelligent, economically secure Harold Transome, just returned from the East to assume responsibility for Transome Court, his inherited manor home, and to take a seat in Parliament.

Both men vie for the hand of Esther, a young woman of charm and virtue, who must choose between a life of idealism and a life of refinement.

The narrative is enhanced by plot twists involving illegitimacy and lines of inheritances, as well as by Eliot's vivid character studies, including the corrupt political agent Johnson, Harold Transome's mother, with her fears of a secret being revealed, and the loyal servant Denner.