Books in mp3

 

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.

 

 

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Garden Party and Other Stories, The

Author : Katherine Mansfield

Performed By : Marguerite Gavin

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 6 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Classic Literature

Our Price : $14.95

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"With the timing and phrasing of a musician, Marguerite Gavin narrates this last-published collection of Katherine Mansfield's short stories. Gavin has a lovely singing voice that particularly enhances one of the stories about a singing teacher. She generally reads with a great deal of enthusiasm and expression."--AudioFile

"[Marguerite Gavin's] voices are marvelous; presenting British accents of every description from cockney to Queen, with clear delineation between characters male and female, is a skill especially important in these character-driven tales. Her sound effects (birdcalls, running water, etc.) are perfect, and she sings in such a lovely clear soprano that the listener wishes there were more songs in the stories....highly recommended."--Library Journal

The fifteen stories collected in this volume demonstrate the genius of a woman who, in her own short lifetime, was compared to Chekhov. The tales are sensitive revelations of human behavior in quite ordinary situations. The men, women, and especially the children whom Mansfield portrays in such delicate pastels are involved in no sensational episodes, yet they are vividly true to life. With careful, quiet observation and subtle irony, Mansfield investigates the variety of relationships that make up a life and the complex emotions of unfulfilled longings. In the title story, a young woman's garden party coincides with the death of a working-class neighbor, bringing a brush of mortality and realism into her carefully constructed plans and ideals. The Garden Party was the last of Mansfield's works to be published before her untimely death at the age of 35.