Try free for 30 days
-
Sixty Stories
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $39.00
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Snow White
- By: Donald Barthelme
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 3 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.
-
The Art of Subtext
- Beyond Plot
- By: Charles Baxter
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first book in The Art Of series of books on the craft of writing, fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted.
-
Running in the Family
- By: Michael Ondaatje
- Narrated by: Michael Ondaatje
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
-
-
Richly Told
- By Nicky Webber on 12-06-2019
-
The Braindead Megaphone
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigates the works of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Esther Forbes, and leads the listener across the rocky political landscape of modern America.
-
Housekeeping (40th Anniversary Edition)
- A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death.
-
-
Amazing story
- By RUTH on 18-11-2023
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
If you enjoy tedium . . .
- By Anong on 13-04-2023
-
Snow White
- By: Donald Barthelme
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 3 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.
-
The Art of Subtext
- Beyond Plot
- By: Charles Baxter
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first book in The Art Of series of books on the craft of writing, fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted.
-
Running in the Family
- By: Michael Ondaatje
- Narrated by: Michael Ondaatje
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
-
-
Richly Told
- By Nicky Webber on 12-06-2019
-
The Braindead Megaphone
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigates the works of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Esther Forbes, and leads the listener across the rocky political landscape of modern America.
-
Housekeeping (40th Anniversary Edition)
- A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death.
-
-
Amazing story
- By RUTH on 18-11-2023
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
If you enjoy tedium . . .
- By Anong on 13-04-2023
-
Train Dreams
- A Novella
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
-
Greatest Hits
- Herald Classics
- By: Harlan Ellison, J. Michael Straczynski - editor
- Narrated by: Harlan Ellison, Grover Gardner, Hillary Huber, and others
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Harlan Ellison’s work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as listeners discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time.
-
Pale Fire
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
Sprawling work engulfs pleasurably
- By Stan on 01-10-2016
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
-
Absalom, Absalom!
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson township in the early 1830s. With a French architect and a band of wild Haitians, he wrung a fabulous plantation out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. Sutpen was a man, Faulker said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him". His tragedy left its impress not only on his contemporaries but also on men who came after, men like Quentin Compson, haunted even into the 20th century by Sutpen's legacy.
Editorial reviews
Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories is a collection of some of his greatest work from the 1960s and 1970s. Each of these pieces is raucous, absurd, incisive, and beautiful; each represents not only a story, but the re-imagination of the story as a form. And in each, as writer David Gates points out in the introduction, Barthelme manages to "restore freshness to a much handled language"
It's difficult to know when to take Barthelme's characters seriously, and narrator Dennis Holland appears to delight in this ambiguity as he portrays a staggering slew of characters with an equally wide array of accents and tones. Holland's versatility as a narrator is particularly apparent in dialogue-rich stories like "Daumier", where he shifts flawlessly between characters as unalike as Celeste and Mr. Hawkins — a young French au-pair and an old Western cowboy who are, themselves, a figment of the narrator-writer's imagination. However playfully Mr. Holland portrays his characters, and despite their sometimes tenuous existence even as entities of fiction, his narration manages to always treat them with humanity and respect.
If Barthelme's humor is at times obscured by the bizarreness of his narratives, Mr. Holland's excellent sense of timing casts it wittily into relief. In Holland's hands, stories like "The Death of Edward Lear", in which an aging, self-described "nonsense writer and landscape painter" invites acquaintances to his bedside to witness the moment of his death, are likely to elicit outright laughter where silent reading might have brought on a slow smile.
In other places, such as "The Balloon", Holland's narration is subtle, allowing Barthelme's brilliant, stunning language to create for the listener a world both alien and familiar. Throughout the whole range of these stories, Holland's narration is cheerful, even amused — a characteristic that underlies the sometimes biting incisiveness of Barthelme's characters and scenes.
Though Barthelme's loose narrative structure can sometimes be challenging to follow without the help of the physical page (it would be ideal to read along as you listen), this collection feels truly brought to life by Dennis Holland's gifted narration. Sixty Stories is a delightful, vibrant listen. —Emily Elert
Publisher's Summary
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts.
Like all of Barthelme's work, the 60 stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Donald Barthelme's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Tracy Daugherty about the life and work of Donald Barthelme – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.