Words from the Brink
Solstice Shorts Festival 2021
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Words from the Brink
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Narrated by:
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Sophie Aldred
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Cal-I Jonel
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By:
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Cherry Potts
About this listen
We’ve given the planet a hard time over the last couple of centuries, and she’s showing the wear and tear of her least considerate offspring. We asked our authors: Where are the signs of renewal? Are there signs of regrowth? Have we pushed nature too far? What if it’s already too late? This audiobook presents poems and stories from the brink, responding to the floods and droughts and fires all around the globe with tenderness, compassion, fear, grief, and rage.
Gaia is represented in all her power and glory, and butterflies and plants sow seeds of hope, while other writers ask: How do we stop it? How do we survive it? And how do we live beyond the catastrophe on our horizon? Are we heading for recovery or extinction? Stories and poems from AG Parker, Angela Graham, Ben Macnair, Cath Holland, Cath Humphris, Cathy Lennon, Claire Booker, Corinna Schulenburg, Diana Powell, Elaina Weakliem, Emily Ford, Jane Aldous, Jane McLaughlin, Jared Pearce, Jessica Conley, Jill Michelle, Julian Bishop, Karen Ankers, Kate Foley, Katherine Gallagher, Kelly Davis, Lesley Curwen, Lisa Clarkson, Lucy Grace, Lucy Ryan, Lyndsey Weiner, Mandy Macdonald, Michelle Penn, Natascha Graham, Ness Owen, Rachael Li Ming Chong, Rob Walton, Robert René Galván, Samn Stockwell, Simon Brod, Stevie Krayer, Tara Willoughby, Tim Dillon, and Xia Leon Sloane.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 641
In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology, and literature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A perfect pairing of prose and narrator
- By chris on 11-05-12
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The Mosquito Coast
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 309
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 277
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Story4 out of 5 stars 279
Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Dreadful in every sense of the word.
- By Joan on 07-12-15
By: Paul Theroux
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Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 203
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 164
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 153
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
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The Wild Places
- By: Robert Macfarlane
- Narrated by: Simon Bubb
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 92
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 79
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Story5 out of 5 stars 79
Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his vital, bewitching, inspiring classic, Robert Macfarlane sets out in search of the wildness that remains.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Magical
- By Jennifer on 01-27-22
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 282
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 252
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Story4 out of 5 stars 253
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Stylish modern magic realism
- By Ryan on 04-10-13
By: Karen Russell
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 375
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 325
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Story4 out of 5 stars 323
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,100
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 950
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Story4 out of 5 stars 939
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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4 out of 5 stars
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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My Family and Other Animals
- By: Gerald Durrell
- Narrated by: Hugh Bonneville
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 266
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 224
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 230
The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas in which the family lived on the island. Apart from Gerald (the youngest) and Larry, the family comprised their widowed mother, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love it, but please mark as Abridged!
- By Meredith Ramirez on 09-14-21
By: Gerald Durrell
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The Trees
- By: Ali Shaw
- Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 70
There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Post apocalypse with a little bit of magic
- By Tam on 09-20-16
By: Ali Shaw
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The Winemaker's Daughter
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
When Brunella Cartolano visits her father on the family vineyard in the basin of the Cascade Mountains, she's shocked by the devastation caused by a four-year drought. Passionate about the Pacific Northwest ecology, Brunella, a cultural impact analyst, is embroiled in a battle to save the Seattle waterfront from redevelopment and to preserve a fisherman's livelihood. But when a tragedy among fire-jumpers results from a failure of the water supply - her brother Niccolo is among those lost - Brunella finds herself with another mission.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Obviously Not Read By A Washington Resident
- By John C Schuyler on 04-24-19
By: Timothy Egan
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Beatlebone
- By: Kevin Barry
- Narrated by: Kevin Barry
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Nooooo way
- By James on 11-17-15
By: Kevin Barry
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Ninth Ward
- By: Jewell Parker Rhodes
- Narrated by: Sisi Aisha Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 131
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 111
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 111
Acclaimed novelist Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American Book Award winner. Rhodes’ Ninth Ward is a stunning tale set against the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. Orphaned 12-year-old Lanesha lives with Mama Ya-Ya, the midwife who birthed her, in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Although Lanesha is different—able to see ghosts like that of her dead mother—she never feels unloved, an empowerment that helps her survive the devastating storm.
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1 out of 5 stars
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The only thing worse than narrator is story itself
- By Erin on 02-13-13
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The Turquoise Ledge
- By: Leslie Marmon Silko
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 61
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 56
Leslie Marmon Silko established herself as “the finest prose writer of her generation” (Larry McMurtry) with her debut novel Ceremony, one of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century. Of mixed Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican, and white heritage, Silko brings a unique perspective to her powerful works. In this deeply personal and spiritual book, she combines memoirs, traditional storytelling, and ruminations on the natural world.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Crazy lady talks about aliens, snakes and rocks
- By Justice Campbell on 10-21-17
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Castle of Water
- A Novel
- By: Dane Huckelbridge
- Narrated by: Max Winter
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 360
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 327
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 327
For Sophie Ducel, her honeymoon in French Polynesia was intended as a celebration of life. For Barry Bleecker, the same trip was meant to mark a new beginning - turning away from his dreary existence in Manhattan finance to seek creative inspiration. But when their small plane is downed in the middle of the South Pacific, the sole survivors of the wreck are left with one common goal: survival.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I wanted a happy ending
- By Shanise Bell on 06-20-19
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors
- By: Nayomi Munaweera
- Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 101
Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, social hierarchies, their parents’ ambitions, teenage love shape Yasodhara and her siblings’ lives, and, subtly, the differences between Tamil and Sinhala people; but the peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara's family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara's life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl's.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Pronunciation
- By Mahidevran on 04-07-18
By: Nayomi Munaweera