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Alan Bennett - Untold Stories Part 3: Written On The Body

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Alan Bennett

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 2 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Biographical
Autobiography
Arts & Drama
Comedy

Our Price : $18.49

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Alan Bennett reads five more extracts from Untold Stories , his major collection of new writings.

 

Untold Stories . Alan Bennett's first major collection of prose since his bestselling Writing Home , brings together the finest and funniest of his writing over the last ten years.

Following on from Untold Stories: Part I: Stories and Part 2: The Diaries ,  Part 3: Written on the Body is both a reflection on Alan Bennett's childhood and schooldays and a meditation on writing.

Written on the Body is a sideways look at Bennett's schooldays at Leeds Modern School, and a recollection of the growing pains of puberty. Seeing Stars is a nostalgic view of the movies of the Forties, seen by Bennett and his family in any one of the half a dozen cinemas in their district in Leeds, including the Western, the Clifton, the Picturedrome and the Lyric.

Finally, Staring Out of the Window lets us into Bennett's creative process, which apparently consists of a good deal of... well... staring out of the window.

Alan Bennett's television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage, including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, The Madness of George III (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George ) and an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows . The History Boys won the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, the South Bank Award and six Tony Awards.

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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

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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.