Triburbia

By: Karl Taro Greenfeld

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

A group of fathers meets each morning at a local Tribeca coffee shop after walking their children to school. The sound engineer looks uncomfortably like the guy on the sex-offender posters around the neighborhood; the memoirist is on the verge of being outed for fabricating his experiences; and the chef puts his quest for the perfect quail-egg frittata before his children's well-being. Over the course of a single school year, we are privy to their secrets, passions, and hopes, and learn of their dreams deferred as they confront harsh realities about ambition, wealth, and sex. And we meet their wives and children, who together with these men are discovering the hard truths and welcome surprises that accompany family, marriage, and real estate at midlife.

©2012 Karl Taro Greenfeld (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Critic reviews

"[A] compelling little universe that will matter even to outsiders who don't know that Lispenard Street will never be as glamorous as Greenwich Street. " ( Publishers Weekly)

"The excellent Triburbia brings to mind such modern masters as Cheever, Updike, and Salter, but Greenfeld delivers his own wonderfully sharp-eyed take on recent American life.... This is fiction of the first rank - intense, suspenseful, and relevant in the most urgent way." (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)

"Pitch-perfect, dry, and smart, this is a vivid portrait of New York, our lives, our loves, and our hearts." (Susan Orlean, author of Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief)

What the &@)(?!?

This book is a disjointed collection of really interesting stories. They are insightful and plausible. But the tie that supposedly binds the "chapters" together is vague, unclear, and occasionally pointless. The ending was so odd that I thought that there was a problem with my Kindle! The book does not have an ending, resolution, or culmination. The words just stop. This could have been a really good book but it just doesn't blend and the reader is left wondering what it was all about.

Triburbia

It's more of a collection of short stories than a novel. I liked the characters so much that I wish it had been the other way around. Still, it's worth listening to -- very funny and a terrific performance by Kirby Heyborne.

I want my credit back--NO ENDING WHATSOEVER!!

Did Triburbia inspire you to do anything?

Yes, it inspired me to write a negative review because the book lacked any sense of an ending.

Any additional comments?

I completely agree with the prior reviewer. I was enjoying this well written and insightful collection of stories, waiting for them to be somehow linked together at the ending, but that never happened. When I heard "Audible hopes you have enjoyed this production," I went right to my computer, thinking I had neglected to download Part 2, and eager to hear the rest of the book. But there is no Part 2. I am an avid reader and have certainly read books in which the ending is unclear or mysterious, but never a book that literally ends in the middle. Very strange and frankly, kind of annoying.