-
The Recognitions
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $24.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
Great Roadtrip Book!
- By Kat on 10-17-12
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
-
JR
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering it's own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
-
-
Possibly superior as an audio book
- By Peregrine on 12-12-10
By: William Gaddis
-
Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
-
-
What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
-
Against the Day
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 53 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
-
-
brilliant!
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 01-28-07
By: Thomas Pynchon
-
Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
-
-
CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
Great Roadtrip Book!
- By Kat on 10-17-12
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
-
JR
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering it's own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
-
-
Possibly superior as an audio book
- By Peregrine on 12-12-10
By: William Gaddis
-
Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
-
-
What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
-
Against the Day
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 53 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
-
-
brilliant!
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 01-28-07
By: Thomas Pynchon
-
Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
-
-
CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
-
The Golden Bough
- A Study in Magic and Religion
- By: Sir James George Frazer
- Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
- Length: 44 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Golden Bough, the monumental study of religious rites and practices in ‘primitive’ societies, was one of the earliest influential texts in anthropology. Its author, Sir James Frazer, surveyed the wide range of cultural habits, taboos and beliefs in communities across the world concluding that there was an observable pattern in the way magic developed into religion, though formal expression emerged in different ways.
-
A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement
- By: Anthony Powell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 23 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a 4 volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times", A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
-
-
Imagination must...select and arrange reality.
- By Darwin8u on 01-05-17
By: Anthony Powell
-
Infinite Jest
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 56 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
-
-
5.0 stars..... quite an experience
- By james on 04-25-17
-
Vineland
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in Northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter, Prairie, search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a '60s radical who ran off with a narc.
-
-
..everybody's a hero at least once...
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
-
Pale Fire
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
-
-
An amazing feat for such a unique novel
- By AmazonCustomer on 03-27-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Magic Mountain
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 37 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.
-
-
worth the wait
- By L. Kerr on 06-01-20
By: Thomas Mann
-
The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
-
-
An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
-
The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
-
-
Great listen
- By P. Bowen on 01-15-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
A Game of Thrones
- A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1
- By: George R.R. Martin
- Narrated by: Roy Dotrice
- Length: 33 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off King's Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robert's name. Far to the north, behind the towering Wall, lie savage Wildings and worse - unnatural things relegated to myth during the centuries-long summer, but proving all too real and all too deadly in the turning of the season. Yet a more immediate threat lurks to the south, where Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, has died under mysterious circumstances....
-
-
Everybody is apparently a chain smoking old man.
- By Althea on 11-04-13
-
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.
-
-
A World I DON'T Ever Want to Escape From.
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-12
By: Michael Chabon
-
The Pillars of the Earth
- By: Ken Follett
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 40 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known...of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul...of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame...and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.
-
-
It was very hard to get through this one
- By Leslie on 03-12-13
By: Ken Follett
-
Finnegans Wake
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Barry McGovern, Marcella Riordan
- Length: 29 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.
-
-
The keys to. Given!
- By hyand on 06-16-21
By: James Joyce
Publisher's Summary
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the "real" and the "virtual" worlds, and Gaddis' novel pre-empts our common obsessions by almost half a century. This novel tackles the blurring of perceptual boundaries. The Matrix and Blade Runner pale in comparison to this epic novel.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Recognitions
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Mark
- 06-01-11
Brilliant book, excellent rendering.
Gaddis is not easy and it is not surprising that some readers/listeners do not find his work worth the effort. For readers, like me, who do, there is simply nothing to match the richness and depth of Gaddis' novel(s). If you enjoyed David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" or, e.g., James Joyce's "Ulysses", neither of which is easy but both of which offer a great deal of pleasure to those whose tastes lean in this direction, you will like "The Recognitions."
24 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- andrew
- 11-17-10
Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
This is not a perfect rendition of The Recognitions. All of the narration annoys when dialogue is absent- the actor sounds as though he is trying out for the Smart Ass's Encyclopedia. However, he plays all of the characters very distinctly and very respectably, and that is saying a lot as these are difficult, varied, and plentiful characters. The production is really 4 stars, but the book itself is a 5, and so great that I am giving the whole a 5 in the hopes you will read it. A lot of brilliant ideas float through "God cares as much for a moment as for an hour", "Do you think your Dutch masters never made bad pictures just because we have a few masterpieces passed down to us?", "How can I write a novel when I only know boys? Easy, I'll just do what Proust did and change half the boys names to girls", and so forth. Gaddiss perhaps more than any author is strengthened in the audiobook form because he writes in a stream of consciousness or a stream of reality where snippets of conversation come to you as if you were just sitting on the street, or walking through the novel. Don't dare try this book if you need very linear progression with distinct chapters and chronology like it was 7:45 am on October... and it was raining outside with a temperature of... you won't get any of that. One character asks another "Don't you ever wear a coat?" And that tells you it is winter now in this scene. No hero emerges either, though you expect it and wait for it. The novel feels drawn out near the end and is by no means perfect, but quite great and brilliant. Sadly overlooked, as was Gaddiss, though he fell to pure satire and snarkiness after this one book. For further reading see the Clementine Recognitions, The Golden Bough, and any other apocrophal early church writings. JR is much funnier but less rewarding and narrower in its reach.
36 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Darwin8u
- 04-17-12
Mr. Gaddis' Opus
My first impulse was to just copy some old, obscure review of 'the Recognitions' and claim it as my own. Alas, even the reviewers, academics, and cult worshipers of the God of PoMo all seem at once thunderstruck AND intimidated by Gaddis' opus.
What I understood was brilliant, what I didn't understand is most likely obscene. This is not a novel for the casual beach read, although as I write this, I am on a beach...washing sand out of my ebbs and salt off my flow, so never mind.
25 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- AFaceInTheCrowd
- 09-30-21
Half of it is in Latin the other half might as well be
This novel may have been revolutionary in 1949 but the genre is well developed by now and weirdness alone cannot justify giving it 39 hours.
I could have managed to the end because descriptions if these New Yorkers are astute, merciless and often funny. But then I hit this patch of mad monologue which is literally almost all in Latin and too religious for my sensibility anyway. After a few hours of complete incomprehension I had to stop. My time on this Earth is too short.
Anything by, say, Pynchon is a preschool book compared to this, and so much more ingenious, delightful and meaningful than this opus. IMHO.
The reader is superb snd seems to understand everything he is reading, respect.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kindle Customer
- 03-12-19
It Might Not Be for Everyone, But I Was Ready
I've known of Gaddis and his writing for a very long time, but it was only recently that I acquired the "The Recognitions" on Audible. What a blast! I wish I had attempted it sooner, but something tells me I may not have had the reading chops before now. Nick Sullivan's performance may be the best I have ever listened to. As soon as I saw Mr. Sullivan was reading "JR" as well, I added it to my playlist.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Justin Kern
- 02-27-19
this narrator rules
book was good at some parts, others sucked. top notch reading, great variety of voices. I don't think I could've made it through this book w/out such great voice work, bringing the characters to life.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sher from Provo
- 09-22-18
What Story?
It’s not that I hated this book, it’s just that life is too short to listen for 50 hours to something that keeps going around in circles. It is a funny book, and an insightful book, and I actually enjoyed it in some ways, but it also wore me out trying to make sense of why there was so much detail that went nowhere. I made it for 18 hours and just felt like enough was enough. If you love this book, that is awesome. If you couldn’t hang in there for 50 hours, I’m with you. On to other things.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
- Linda Likes to Learn
- 12-19-10
WHEN WILL YOU MAKE A BEGINNING????
Alright - I admit it: I am ONLY 7 hours into this novel....but they have been the longest 7 hours of an audio book that I have ever painfully limped through. I'm intelligent and literate - but my tolerance for 'stream of conscious' type stories evidently has gotten very low. The idea seemed very intriguing: a fine art forger who is a little "different".... And I love the idea of a very long book that gives me a lot of time to enjoy the way words play against each other. But at this rate, I think I'll never make it through the 48 hours total. The Pope used to ask Michaelangelo "When will you make an end?!?" as the years went on and the Sistine Chapel still wasn't finished. For this author, I must ask: "When will you make a beginning?!?" (And a middle, and an end, too!)
17 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Joseph Wendt
- 01-31-22
Too long.
—It was…
—Too lo…
—Too long?
—Yes, it was… there are 4 more words required.
—Just long enou… it’s too long.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- M
- 03-07-19
Great!
Very amusing and entertaining!
Fabulous narrator. Well done indeed.
Am looking forward to enjoying Gaddis's other novels.