Driving on the Rim
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Driving on the Rim
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Narrated by:
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Traber Burns
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By:
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Thomas McGuane
About this listen
The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
But there must be meaning to existence beyond professional accreditation, and though scantly equipped, Berl Pickett has been on a mission to find it, despite being charged with negligent homicide in the death of his former lover. Will he at last find his spiritual awakening?
©2010 Thomas McGuane. All rights reserved. (P)2010 AudioGoListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Fans of literary fiction will enjoy Traber Burns’ superb rendition of Thomas McGuane’s meditative novel and its memorable protagonist. McGuane’s latest book follows Irving Berlin Pickett, a socially awkward doctor and self-proclaimed nitwit living in his Montana hometown.
Burns’ narration is pitch perfect. He brings ”Berl” to life and makes a potentially exasperating character sympathetic and likeable. Best known for his performances in the Piers Anthony fantasy series Adept Apprentice, Burns captures the regional cadence and wry humor and gives an understated, brilliant performance.
Burns’ performance is crucial, as Driving on the Rim is a character study and relies less on plot. Born to an Evangelical Christian mother and a hapless father, Berl is still ruminating on his strange childhood. He rues his inability to make good decisions and his livelihood as a doctor is in jeopardy after his former lover dies under his care. Strange romantic entanglements further complicate his life, which threatens to spin out of control. Berl finds solace in the Montana landscape and reflects on religion, faith, and love as he struggles to find a way to make his way in the world.
Esteemed author McGuane really shines with well-crafted sentences that are alternately funny and insightful, and his gorgeous depictions of nature. His version of Montana, itself a living character in the novel and a vivid backdrop to Berl’s tale, is populated by an eclectic bunch of interesting people (a lazy ranch hand, a ruthless pilot, a hard-living lawyer, and a sex-crazed aunt to name a few) that make the novel feel rich.
Listeners who strictly enjoy popular fiction may not care for the slow pace and winding narrative, but ardent literary fiction admirers will embrace the strong writing, compelling and flawed characters, and Burns’ nuanced performance. Julie MacDonald
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 754
When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 363
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 220
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Story4 out of 5 stars 221
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Cider House Rules
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 24 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,434
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,829
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,820
From one of America's most beloved and respected writers comes the classic story of Homer Wells, an orphan, and Wilbur Larch, a doctor without children of his own, who develop an extraordinary bond with one another.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 07-02-07
By: John Irving
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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 193
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 141
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 136
Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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Netherland
- By: Joseph O'Neill
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 331
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 147
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Story4 out of 5 stars 148
Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Get Your Post-Colonial Gatsby ON!
- By Darwin8u on 04-13-12
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Travels with Charley in Search of America
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Gary Sinise
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,553
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 4,871
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,870
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Gary Sinise is fantastic!
- By C. Wilson on 01-11-17
By: John Steinbeck
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 294
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 243
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 242
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4 out of 5 stars 62
In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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Hour of the Hunter
- By: J. A. Jance
- Narrated by: Gene Engene
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 242
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 200
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Story4 out of 5 stars 194
A brutal, psychopathic murderer is released from prison - and stalks his prey with intent to kill.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Hour of the Hunter
- By Marion Burke on 03-01-08
By: J. A. Jance
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More Things in Heaven and Earth
- Watervalley Days, Book 1
- By: Jeff High
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 104
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 99
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 96
As an ambitious young doctor with a penchant for research, Luke Bradford never wanted to set up practice in a remote rural town. But to pay back his student loans and to fulfill a promise from his past, he heads for Watervalley, Tennessee - and immediately stumbles into one disaster after another. Will he be labeled the town idiot before he’s even introduced as the new doctor?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Looking forward to the next one!
- By MJ on 07-19-16
By: Jeff High
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A Thousand Acres
- By: Jane Smiley
- Narrated by: C. J. Critt
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 659
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 541
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Story4 out of 5 stars 550
Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family's fertile thousand-acre farm. As each couple struggles with their own tragedies and challenges, they know their father is judging them in light of the weighty inheritance that hovers within their reach.
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1 out of 5 stars
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good book bad reader
- By C. Carlson on 08-07-08
By: Jane Smiley
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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The Visiting Privilege
- New and Collected Stories
- By: Joy Williams
- Narrated by: Richard Powers, Emily Woo Zeller, Elisabeth Rodgers, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: 33 stories drawn from three much-lauded collections and another 13 appearing here for the first time in book form.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 223
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 193
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Story4 out of 5 stars 196
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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The Portable Veblen
- By: Elizabeth Mckenzie
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 196
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 175
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 176
An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor. The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that's as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its words, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not what it was cracked up to be
- By Linda on 02-03-16
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Bullet in the Brain
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 281
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 253
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 251
Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Perfect Example
- By Sarah on 08-01-17
By: Tobias Wolff