"Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny." —George Saunders, New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo This program is read by Maggie Siff, acclaimed star of Mad Men, Billions, and Sons of Anarchy. Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his thirties with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie—a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity—finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs. Desperate and humiliated, Mark begins to post a series of online video monologues that critique Baby Boomers and their powerful hold on the job market. But as his videos go viral, and while Cassie starts to build her career, Mark loses control of what he began—with consequences that ensnare them in a matter of national security. Told through the perspectives of Mark, Cassie, and Mark’s mother, Julia, a child of the '60s whose life is more conventional than she ever imagined, Daniel Torday's Boomer1 is timely, suspenseful, and in every line alert to the siren song of endless opportunity that beckons and beguiles all of us. More praise for Boomer1: "Torday writes exquisitely about our hallucinatory simultaneous realities, where lives are conducted onscreen and offline, networked to millions of strangers and tremendously alone.” -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! "Daniel Torday’s Boomer1 is a wild, wickedly funny, and deeply empathetic look at modern American culture and politics. Sometimes he’s writing cutting satire, sometimes he’s writing Greek tragedy, and sometimes he’s just writing passages of staggering beauty, but he’s always a brilliantly compelling and necessary voice in these strange, troubling times." -- Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment
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“Maggie Siff glows in her narration of this contemporary fiction..Siff seamlessly portrays these three distinct personalities. She depicts the anger and drive of the Millennials and reflects sympathy and kindness for the Boomer parents. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
“A wild, wickedly funny, and deeply empathetic look at modern American culture and politics.”
— Phil Klay, New York Times bestselling authorMaggie Siff glows in her narration of this contemporary fiction.
— AudioFile, Earphones Award“Wry…Reads as contemporary satire with Shakespearean echoes.”
— New York Times“Stylishly written, cleverly observed, and boldly imagined.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Torday has his finger on the pulse of American society in the twenty-first century, and he smartly suggests that when it comes to relationships between the generations, the patient may not be in the best of health.”
— Shelf Awareness“Smart and culturally attuned.”
— Library Journal“Torday constructs a hilarious story about generational conflict brought to a boiling point…Torday’s wry examination of those attempting to survive in postrecession America is particularly poignant.”
— Publishers WeeklyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Daniel Torday is the director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. An author and former editor at Esquire magazine, he serves as an editor at the Kenyon Review. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, the New York Times, and the Kenyon Review. His novella, The Sensualist, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction.
Maggie Siff is an Earphones Award–winning narrator.