The Hard Blue Sky
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The Hard Blue Sky
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Narrated by:
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Luci Christian Bell
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By:
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Shirley Ann Grau
About this listen
West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie. All Annie has ever known is the wild sea, but she longs for other people and places, including the glamor of life in the Big Easy. When a cruel, handsome man from the city passes through, he kindles Annie’s fantasies for a life beyond the island. Soon, the young girl faces a decision: Remain planted in the predictable life she has always known, or toss it all aside for her dreamed-of adventure.
The Hard Blue Sky is Grau’s debut novel, establishing her as a chronicler of bayou life and the complexities of the Deep South’s most impoverished corners.
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- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 230
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 192
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Story4 out of 5 stars 184
This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Too Good For Audio
- By Yennta on 06-18-12
By: Eudora Welty
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Nowhere is a Place
- By: Bernice McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 335
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4 out of 5 stars 304
Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets. But Sherry is determined to know the full story. In a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Mother and Daughter Tear. It. Up.
- By Susie on 01-15-14
By: Bernice McFadden
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Sugar
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,438
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,261
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,255
Sugar arrives in the small town of Bigelow, Arkansas, like an ominous storm. She saunters down the street in a blonde wig and spiked heels, cigarette dangling between red-painted lips. Without even speaking to her, the women in town hate her. But when she moves in next door to Pearl, a woman who tragically lost her daughter 15 years earlier, the two women bond over tragic pasts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wow wow wow
- By brenda transon on 08-27-19
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Southern Gods
- By: John Hornor Jacobs
- Narrated by: Eric G Dove
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Story4 out of 5 stars 165
Recent World War II veteran Bull Ingram is working as muscle when a Memphis DJ hires him to find Ramblin' John Hastur. The mysterious blues man's dark, driving music - broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio statio - is said to make living men insane and dead men rise. Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur's trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Big, Bold and Bright
- By John on 08-23-11
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Ken Kesey, Robert Faggen - introduction
- Narrated by: John C. Reilly
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,620
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 7,847
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7,825
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads, the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fantastic
- By Scott on 08-03-12
By: Ken Kesey, and others
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 100
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4 out of 5 stars 90
Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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I Will Send Rain
- A Novel
- By: Rae Meadows
- Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 47
Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934, and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, is struggling as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend. The wheat harvests are drying out, and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains.
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5 out of 5 stars
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We've seen pictures of the Dust Bowl
- By Henwhisperer on 10-12-16
By: Rae Meadows
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A Cup of Dust: A Novel of the Dust Bowl
- Pearl Spence Novels, Book 1
- By: Susie Finkbeiner
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 242
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 224
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 225
Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Intense
- By VickyJ on 02-07-21
By: Susie Finkbeiner
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The Auctioneer
- Valancourt 20th Century Classics
- By: Joan Samson
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 603
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 530
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Story4 out of 5 stars 528
In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, John Moore and his wife, Mim, work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dinsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find themselves gradually but inexorably stripped of their freedom, their possessions, and perhaps even their lives....
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3 out of 5 stars
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Unbelievable
- By pineapple67 on 11-08-19
By: Joan Samson
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 209
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 188
Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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Homecoming
- By: Cynthia Voigt
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 352
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 306
On Saturday morning, 13-year-old Dicey Tillerman sits in the car at the shopping mall with her younger sister and two brothers. Momma had said, "You be good." Then she walked away. They wait for a day and a night, but Momma never comes back. Finally, Dicey decides the children should go to Bridgeport, Connecticut where Aunt Cilla lives. Maybe Momma is waiting for them there. But they don't have enough money to take the bus. Determined to keep the family together, Dicey sets off on foot with her siblings.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The BEST audible book!
- By KP on 04-20-17
By: Cynthia Voigt
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The Salt House
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Duffy
- Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4 out of 5 stars 40
In the coastal town of Alden, Maine, Hope and Jack Kelly have settled down to a life of wedded bliss. They have a beautiful family, a growing lobster business, and the Salt House - an oceanfront cottage they're renovating into their dream home. But tragedy strikes when their young daughter doesn't wake up from her afternoon nap, taking her last breath without making a sound. A year later each member of the Kelly family navigates the world on their own private island of grief.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Culturally closed minded to what going on today.
- By Susan Griggs on 01-11-22
By: Lisa Duffy
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Continental Drift
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 50
Now available for the first time in audiobook format, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers. Russell Banks' Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Give up and die
- By AI on 12-09-21
By: Russell Banks
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Midnight Robber
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 503
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 456
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 456
It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival - until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Even Through the Dimensions, Girls Are Not Safe
- By mary on 12-11-12
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
- Stories
- By: Raymond Carver
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 54
With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became both the recognized master of the form and one of our best-loved fiction writers. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Humanity at the Breaking Point
- By Darwin8u on 03-31-19
By: Raymond Carver
What listeners say about The Hard Blue Sky
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- P. VanGesen
- 12-08-17
Not to My Taste
What disappointed you about The Hard Blue Sky?
I did not relate to the story nor did I enjoy it.
What was most disappointing about Shirley Ann Grau’s story?
Nothing specific
What does Luci Christian Bell bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I probably would not have gone as far as I did in the book had I been reading it.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Probably true to life for some people or at least of interest, just not me.
Any additional comments?
None
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Kimberly M. Lott
- 01-11-22
disappointing ending
Characters were good. parts of the story were very good. It lacked a coherence and the ending was really random.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Avidlistener
- 10-29-16
Disappointing ending
I was engrossed in the almost ethnographically detailed depiction of life on
this Louisiana island when it came to an abrupt and unsatisfying end. What a disappointment!
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