George Saunders's newest story, published only as an audiobook and Kindle Single, is told from the point of view of Fox 8, the title character who pens his tale of friendship and loss by way of a letter addressed simply: "Deer Reeder." As the spelling gets weirder — and the voice dearer — Fox 8 implores his correspondent to "Reed my leter, go farth, ask your felow Yumans what is up." This is a really good… more »
South Park dissed them big time in a memorable episode. You've probably had them offer you a free e-meter audit at the mall. And maybe you were even one of those unlucky few who got snookered into watching Battlefield Earth. Yes, Scientology is nutty as hell — but it's also undeniably fascinating, in the best tradition of American nuttery. This winter, curious readers were blessed with the publication of two books on the infamously secretive (and litigious)… more »
Gillian Flynn has a message for her readers: She is not one of her characters. The author of this summer's best-selling thriller Gone Girl has been mistaken for one of the seriously twisted offspring of her mind since the publication of her first novel, Sharp Objects, in 2006. "I guess I should take it as a compliment that people assume all my books are true," Flynn says from her home in Chicago. Sharp Objects includes a dysfunctional… more »
Over the past few months, our audiobooks ranks have been growing even more than usual. The reason? We're thrilled to welcome our newest publishing partner, Brilliance Audio, who have been creating great audiobooks for nearly 30 years in all genres, from bestsellers like Dean Koontz and Lee Child to award-winning nonfiction and memoirs, classics, and more. The one thing they have in common is a focus on marrying the author’s voice with the narrator, creating… more »
We've all heard about the luck of the Irish, that mythological good fortune that clings to the Emerald Isle and all of its inhabitants. But we'd wager that the luckiest people around aren't Irish at all…nor are they, technically, people. Fictional characters have the highest good luck-to-mishaps ratio around, finding themselves in the most impossible of impossible situations and then, just as unexpectedly, coming out unscathed (and maybe even enlightened) on the other end. There's… more »
Sure, we play Bach, Beethoven and Mozart -- though we also dig the early music of Tallis, chance works by Cage, arias from Verdi and John Adams, as well as the composers on New Amsterdam records. Everything here was released after 2008, too, which is another way of declaring that notes written down on paper are still some of the most exciting ones to hear in all of contemporary music. more »
