Audio book

 

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.

 

 

-

 

Kafka's Dick

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Alan Bennett

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 1 hour 30 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations
Humor

Our Price : $13.49

Purchase...

Alison Steadman, Richard Griffiths and Nigel Anthony star in this BBC radio 4 version of Alan Bennett's acclaimed comedy drama

'Pure joy' Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka makes his faithful friend Max Brod promise to destroy his writings, so that future biographers can never pick over the secrets of his life. Flash forward to the present day, where Kafka aficionado Sydney Cunliffe is writing an article on the great man, and events begin to take a distinctly Kafkaesque turn. First a mysterious stranger appears on Sydney's doorstep, claiming to be Max Brod (who has been dead since 1968). Then the Cunliffes' tortoise metamorphoses into Kafka himself.

Max is desperate to prevent his old friend from discovering that he didn't burn all his books, for it soon becomes clear that all Kafka ever wanted was anonymity, and to get his own back on his bullying father But when Kafka Senior turns up, he insists that his son buries the hatchet. If not, he will reveal Kafka's secret - the real truth about him and his 'old man'...
Set in Prague, 27 Batcliffe Drive and Heaven, Bennett's brilliantly clever, fast-moving comedy not only examines the relationship between life and art, but also asks a rather more fundamental question: what exactly was Kafka's embarrassing little problem!