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McSweeney's Field Recordings

Listen McSweeney's Field Recordings by McSweeney's
Review by Maris Kreizman, eMusic

Pucker up, all you hopeless romantics. Prepare to share a big wet kiss with the folks from McSweeney's. For this second installment of Field Recordings, created exclusively for eMusic, the venerated indie book and magazine publisher has combed its archives to create a seductive story collection subtitled Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams. So think of this audiobook as a literary mixtape, one that strikes the perfe...

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When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Listen When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
Review by Claire Zulkey, eMusic

The celebrated humorist travels the world in search of…something.
With a title inspired by a Japanese safety pamphlet, David Sedaris’s new book of essays whips through time and space traveling, in no particular order, through his past and present. Readers familiar with his work will enjoy more tales of Sedaris’ childhood in North Carolina. In “The Understudy,” he recalls the incredulousness with which he and his sibli...

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Straight Man

Listen Straight Man by Richard Russo
Review by Karrie Higgins, eMusic

Mischievous on the surface, serious at its heart.
Novelist Richard Russo sees comedy in everything and everyone, conjuring characters so wholly alive that they break our hearts, even as we laugh out loud. To wit: when the embattled college professor in the novel Straight Man wets himself while dozing in his office and has to climb through a hole in the ceiling to escape his colleagues, his desperation at once elicits ...

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Blade Runner

Listen Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick
Review by Sam Adams, eMusic

Philip K. Dick ponders what it means to be human.
The title of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? may have been altered to snare fans of Ridley Scott’s film version, but it’s the differences from the same that make Dick’s novel worth revisiting. His Deckard is not a futuristic Philip Marlowe, but a working stiff in a failing marriage, a mercenary who kills androids for the money. Dick’s Earth is a m...

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America America

Listen America America by Ethan Canin
Review by Sam Adams, eMusic

The national disillusion of the 1970s. In miniature.
Ethan Canin’s fourth novel is, mercifully, less overarching than its portentous title would suggest. Recreating the national disillusion of the 1970s in miniature, Canin’s story focuses on Corey Sifter, a middle-class upstate New York boy who is catapulted into the world of politics when the town patriarch takes him under his wing. From digging holes in Liam Metarey...

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Eat, Pray, Love

Listen Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Review by Maris Kreizman, eMusic

Self-indulgent? Sure. But Gilbert's warm, relatable, and fun travelogue also suggests that healing oneself merely requires an open mind — no passport necessary.
When the average American woman feels down in the dumps, she might look for solace in any variety of clichéd pick-me-ups: butter pecan, white Zinfandel, Dr. Phil. Not Elizabeth Gilbert. When her world unraveled after a nasty divorce and a torturous l...

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Discover Audiobooks

The Taming of the Shrew

Dirty Jokes In Shakespeare by Pauline Kiernan

The works of Shakespeare contain more than 700 puns on sex and more than 400 on genitals. But, sadly, most of these have been kept under wraps for centuries, depriving the world of some of the sharpest, most sophisticated and hilarious jokes in the whole of literature. Shakespeare’s sexual wordplay ranges from uproarious innuendoes to profoundly moving expressions of emotional pain. His kings, queens and aristocrats ar...

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Spotlight on Audiobooks

The Great Derangement

eMusic Q&A: Matt Taibbi by J. Gabriel Boylan

You may know Matt Taibbi from his incisive, uproarious Rolling Stone columns, or perhaps from his satirical work for the New York Press (including one column entitled “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of The Pope”). Or it could be you know Matt Taibbi because he looks a lot like that dude who joined your evangelical church group for a few months, asked a lot of questions and suddenly disappeared. Going u...

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Matthew Sweet
New DLM

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