Accordion Crimes
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Narrated by:
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Tom Stechschulte
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By:
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Annie Proulx
About this listen
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers and listeners across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Accordion Crimes is another masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent.
The book opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his 11-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx's story as it falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. The music is their last link with the past - voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance - but it, too, is forced to change.
Proulx's prodigious knowledge, heartbreaking characters, and daring storytelling unite the sections of Accordion Crimes - a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.
©1996 Annie Proulx (P)2011 Simon & SchusterListeners also enjoyed...
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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Ava's Man
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrated by: Rick Bragg
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression
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Deeply moving
- By Kate on 08-12-03
By: Rick Bragg
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The Wettest County in the World, or Lawless
- A Novel Based on a True Story
- By: Matt Bondurant
- Narrated by: Erik Steele
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County.
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Just outstanding!
- By Rich on 08-18-12
By: Matt Bondurant
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Provinces of Night
- By: William Gay
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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E.F. Bloodworth has returned to his home - a forgotten corner of Tennessee - after 20 years of roaming. The wife he walked out on has withered and faded, his three sons are grown and angry. Warren is a womanizing alcoholic, Boyd is driven by jealousy to hunt down his wife's lover, and Brady puts hexes on his enemies from his mamma's porch. Only Fleming, the old man's grandson, treats him with the respect his age commands, and sees past all the hatred to realize the way it can posion a man's soul.
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Story and Narration a perfect match
- By 99hedys on 10-03-15
By: William Gay
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The Lost Country
- By: William Gay
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.
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One of the finest novels I have read!
- By Donald B. Eager on 09-06-21
By: William Gay
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Cannery Row
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Jerry Farden
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack and his boys, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and most poignant works.
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Five stars with a Caveat
- By Bette on 04-23-12
By: John Steinbeck
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Caramelo
- By: Sandra Cisneros
- Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
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Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
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Nothing with Strings
- NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories
- By: Bailey White
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.
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A real jewel.
- By Mary on 12-31-08
By: Bailey White
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Black Wings Has My Angel
- By: Elliott Chaze
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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A legend among noir buffs, Chaze's long-lost pulp classic is the dreamlike tale of a man after a jailbreak who meets up with the woman of his dreams - and his nightmares.
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Guilt..... a deadly emotion !!
- By John on 08-24-14
By: Elliott Chaze
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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A poignant literary work of art.
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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In the late 17th century, two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters — barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over 300 years.
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Can't Explain Why I Love This Book
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By: Annie Proulx
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In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. On his journey to Burma, Edgar encounters prophets and thieves, soldiers and tale-spinners, and an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major who owns the piano will turn out to be. Edgar encounters a place more mysterious and dangerous than he could ever have imagined.
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The absolute best in reading, a true classic!
- By David on 10-09-03
By: Daniel Mason
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The Winter Soldier
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- Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz
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What listeners say about Accordion Crimes
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Charles Earthman
- 02-12-17
Ugly tirades
The discretion of how some of the characters felt about others was hard to hear.
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- Aida Jones
- 05-28-15
Awesome
I loved it, Sad and beautiful! Great narration by Tom Stechschulte. I highly recommend it!
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3 people found this helpful
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- enya keshet
- 07-30-19
Annie Proulx can tell a story
It's a string of stories, loosely connected, but told fantastically. The narrator does an exquisite job.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mimi Routh
- 03-05-15
YEAH, REALLY DEPRESSING!
How I wish these audio books could be rated for their "feel-good" or encouraging or uplifting quality, for intelligent content that is HOPEFUL! I like this author and enjoyed her Ace in the Hole. I've gotten Shipping News and already saw the film. Ditto Brokeback Mountain. And the other book, the autobiographical one. Now I'm one-third into this thing with an aching tooth, deadlines to meet, 20 pounds to lose before a planned surgery, documents to find and letters to write -- do I want to hear how everyone who ever owned this accordion came to a bad end? I love American history and Annie has some good material here, but . . . sheesh! For sure she is not Walt Whitman!
So I'm writing this little review to warn others and to praise the narrator. Stechschulte -- if I can spell his name okay -- is bloody marvelous! He gets all the accents, various languages, all ages, both sexes and he even sings. I will watch for him in choosing my future listens.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Deborah Smith
- 03-26-18
Not worth reading
It was very hard to keep listening to this book. The story was shallow and depressing. The end was crazy with all the money that had been in the accordion but it never helped all the people who had it. The reader was not good. He had to pause to breath. It was hard to listen to.
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- Martha
- 08-20-12
This book should be a crime
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
For this to be a 4 or 5 star experience, it would have had to be a different story. It was dreary, depressing, endlessly gruesome, and just plain awful.
What was most disappointing about Annie Proulx’s story?
There was unending pain and misery in this story. There were no characters to root for. Everyone was either awful, crazy, or abused and/or all of the above. As the book progressed, the story rambled more and more until I just wanted to be finished so I could stop reading this horrible book.
Which character – as performed by Tom Stechschulte – was your favorite?
Although he did an admirable job with the material, I have to say that none of them were my favorite.
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Accordion Crimes?
All of them.
Any additional comments?
I read this for my book club and when we met to discuss it, everyone in the group really could not stand this book. It probably generated the most conversation of any book we have discussed and that's the only good thing I can say about it.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Annette Grefe
- 06-14-11
Just too depressing
I LOVED the Shipping News by Annie Proulx, and the premise for this book sounded fascinating. So I bought it as soon as I saw it. The writing is exquisite in its often whimsical detail, but I kept waiting for some kind of story to tie things together, and some kind of silver lining behind the clouds of squalor and human misery. I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting, slogging through all that misery... but by the second part I gave up because the "tie" or the silver lining never showed up. The narrative was just too depressing.
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5 people found this helpful