As I Lay Dying
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Narrated by:
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Marc Cashman
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Robertson Dean
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Lina Patel
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Lorna Raver
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By:
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William Faulkner
About this listen
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Selected Short Stories
One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner’s imaginary South, one of literature’s great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.
Along with a new Foreword by E. L. Doctorow, this edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.
Check out more selections from Oprah's Book Club.(P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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"For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country."--Robert Penn Warren
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"Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough. As well as he could then." So thought a dying writer in an early version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The writer was, of course, Ernest Hemingway. The place was the Michigan of his boyhood, where he remembered himself as Nick Adams. The now-famous "Nick Adams" stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent - a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.
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Let Nick Adams introduce you to Ernest Hemingway
- By Paul on 04-04-12
By: Ernest Hemingway
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
- By: Zora Neale Hurston
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
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perfection
- By Mel on 04-06-15
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Cane
- By: Jean Toomer
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.
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When Robots Read, and I'm a Fan of Robots...
- By Jonathan on 03-26-13
By: Jean Toomer
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The Long Valley
- By: John Steinbeck, John H. Timmerman - introduction
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.
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Generally Good Stories, Some are Great
- By Michael on 06-18-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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Drums Along the Mohawk
- By: Walter D. Edmonds
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 21 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Drums along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds' masterpiece, is not only the best historical novel about upstate New York since James Fenimore Cooper, it was also number one on the bestseller list for two years, only yielding to the epic Gone with the Wind. This is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped.
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Wonderful
- By Robert on 09-06-15
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Cataloochee
- By: Wayne Caldwell
- Narrated by: Scott Sowers
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Wayne Caldwell's Cataloochee -a rich, vivid, arresting work beginning at the dawn of Reconstruction - sprawls across the succeeding generations like the vast green mountains of its rural North Carolina setting. Best-selling author Charles Frazier calls it "a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America." This enthralling saga evokes the full color spectrum of mountain life, from lights to darks and every shade in between.
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Love It!
- By Cynthia J. Hakansson on 02-27-09
By: Wayne Caldwell
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Chasing the North Star
- By: Robert Morgan
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free, Carra Patterson
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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On a moonless night in the spring of 1851, a young slave makes a bid for freedom with only the North Star to guide him. Best-selling novelist and historian Robert Morgan returns with a stunning new work of historical fiction.
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Not what we thought
- By bds on 05-07-19
By: Robert Morgan
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A Different Drummer
- By: William Melvin Kelley
- Narrated by: Jay Smooth
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
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A wonderful and moving story
- By E. on 10-25-19
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Sunset Song
- By: Lewis Gibbon
- Narrated by: Eileen McCallum
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The most acclaimed Scottish novel of all time, Sunset Song is a powerful portrait of a land and people in turmoil, seen through the life and struggles of its heroine, Chris Guthrie. In the years up to and beyond the First World War, Chris' resilience, like the land itself, endures despite everything and is portrayed with a lyrical intensity that echoes through the years and still resonates today.
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Absolute masterpiece!
- By Jeff Koeppen on 03-03-18
By: Lewis Gibbon
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Simply great.
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disappointment
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A long, enjoyable listen
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Simply great.
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disappointment
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Excellent characterization, fine suspense
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so large, so powerful, so conflicted
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Billy Liar
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For William ‘Billy’ Fisher, an energetic imagination makes life tolerable, but well-nigh intolerable for all around him. He lies his way into and out of every situation, making any promise to get him out of trouble, thereby creating ever more tortuous entanglements to be wriggled out of in the future. Billy dreams of escaping the dull drudgery of his life at home with his parents and grandmother in the monotony of his stifling Yorkshire hometown.
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The Mansion
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The Mansion tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin, Flem. "For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man," noted Ralph Ellison. "Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." This volume includes a new introduction to the trilogy by acclaimed novelist George Garrett, author of Death of the Fox and The Succession.
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Mink Cometh
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By: William Faulkner
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The Unvanquished
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- Unabridged
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Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Unvanquished focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions.
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Humorous and poignant
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By: William Faulkner
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The Reivers
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One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque story that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucas Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey.
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4 days in the life of an eleven year old
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The Town
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The story of Flem Snopes' ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, this is the second volume of Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South.
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Accessible Faulkner
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By: William Faulkner
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Wise Blood
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Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.
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Grotesque Southern Gothic Masterpiece
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Back Roads
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Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is. With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.
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An unexpected twist
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The Violent Bear It Away
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The orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle - that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensue, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.
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Biblical, American and Absolutely Brutal
- By Darwin8u on 10-22-12
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The Sun Also Rises
- By: Ernest Hemingway, Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: William Hurt
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- Unabridged
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A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, The Sun Also Rises introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
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Great actor, terrible reader, kills classic
- By Kerry on 09-14-14
By: Ernest Hemingway, and others
What listeners say about As I Lay Dying
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Emeritus
- 03-26-07
Listening to a Play
The multiple voices are simply wonderful and, having read this in hard copy many times over the years, I had some trepidations about listening. However the words are as powerful as they are in print and have the added quality of staying as the voices of a "play" in your head. Terrific.
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37 people found this helpful
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Overall
- MichelleStrobel
- 10-31-08
Clarity
I use this "tour de force" novel in my high school English class, and I've found that the audio helps the students follow the story better. I personally enjoy the narrators who with their use of dialects are able to add life to the characters, even Addie, who is dead for most of the novel.
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29 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-19-20
great ensemble performance of an American classic
really enjoyed this reading. all performances are fantastic. very theatrical rendition of this American classic.
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- Olivia Berry
- 03-03-16
awesome!!
this book is so amazing. I read it with my AP English class and it is just such an amazing story with layers of symbolism and character depth. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves American literature. it's not too long and easy to understand!
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Overall
- Tad Davis
- 06-28-11
Beautiful, grim, and hilarious
The multiple narrators of this audiobook bring the story to life: a grim tale of poverty and death with an unexpected dash of hilariously dark humor. A woman is dying and is finally dead, and her husband and children set out with the coffin on a journey to her home town. The language is colorful and concrete and filled with incantatory repetitions of certain phrases. It's the ultimate jinxed road trip, cursed at times with what appear to be all the plagues of Egypt. Without giving away too much, I'll just say, to paraphrase the Bible: where there's a dead body, the vultures will gather. This saying may have originally been intended as a metaphor, but in Faulkner's beautifully poetic prose, you can hear the flapping of wings.
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20 people found this helpful
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- Barry
- 12-14-12
Ain't no end to bad luck when once it starts
What makes this book interesting is not the story. The story is pretty banal. What makes this book interesting is the characters, and the insight into how people feel and think, and the dynamics that develop within a family or any other group of people. Faulkner was a brilliant innovator of stream-of-consciousness and other modern narrative devices. I appreciate him more the more I read of him. A lot of writing presupposes that people think in words, but Faulkner tries to express the non-verbal feelings we have drawing from the words we would use if we had the time and the vocabulary to sort them all out. I think this accounts for some of the poetical imagery we get from characters who would not otherwise think some of the thoughts Faulkner ascribes to them.
The travails of the Bundren family are painful to watch. They all have their secrets from each other. They are all flawed individuals. They have barely held together as a family. Watching them all stumble through the trial of dealing with Addie's death makes you wonder how they can possibly all stay together much longer. But there are counterforces at work too.
One thing I cannot understand is how a 270 page book can be narrated in under 7 hours. I guess I will have to go look at a paper copy and try to figure it out.
The use of 4 readers for this book is extremely helpful in sorting out which of the 15 narrators is speaking at any given time. In general I give them high marks for conveying Faulkner's language and coping with the ambiguities of stream-of-consciousness writing. The one exception I have to comment on is the voice chosen for Dewey Dell. The reader chooses to make Dewey Dell into a kind of wispy, ethereal, dreamy teenager. She fails to capture any of the sullen, angry adolescent that Faulkner constantly hints is at the core of Dewey Dell's character.
However, that minor complaint in no way detracts from the overall quality of this audiobook. It's not about Dewey Dell, any more than it is about Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardamon or even Addie. It's ultimately about something else. Something I don't know how to express. Faulkner knew how to express it, but it took him a whole book to do it.
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19 people found this helpful
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- Jeffrey
- 01-16-12
A True Classic
Where does As I Lay Dying rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
It was near the top.
What other book might you compare As I Lay Dying to and why?
Tobacco Road, because they both deal with a poor rural southern family. However in this case the family seems to genuinely care about each other and are not starving.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes, I had insomnia one night and listened to the entire book
Any additional comments?
Faulkner is difficult for me to understand without a study guide. Following it with a study guide it was an enjoyable experience.
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- Mandy Collins
- 05-02-19
unusual
This was required reading for a literature class I'm in. It's an unusual story, but good.
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- xitchel
- 11-24-11
Great story and awful Audible bookmarks
No fault of Faulkner, the Audible bookmarks detract from the listening experience. Random bookmarks appear and disappear, and there's no way of titling the bookmarks. I like the idea of Audible books, but it's a hassle to copy the files onto CD and the books are a little pricey, too. Fix the bookmarking problems and I would consider buying more in the future. Otherwise, I'll buy audiobooks on CDs in the future.
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- SF
- 09-12-18
Don’t write reviews....
Eye opener how the powers that be corrupt indiscriminately. Michael Lewis has the gift of explaining/storytelling like no other
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