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I Am Radar Audiobook, by Reif Larsen Play Audiobook Sample

I Am Radar Audiobook

I Am Radar Audiobook, by Reif Larsen Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Adam Grupper Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc. Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 16.83 hours at 1.5x Speed 12.63 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: February 2015 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9781490647586

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

49

Longest Chapter Length:

57:52 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

26 seconds

Average Chapter Length:

30:55 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

2

Other Audiobooks Written by Reif Larsen: > View All...

Publisher Description

In this kaleidoscopic novel, a love-struck radio operator discovers a secret society offering mind-bending performance art in war zones around the world. In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists-who stage experimental art for people suffering under war-time sieges- Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. In I Am Radar, acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen-the author of The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet-delivers a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic. In the wreckage of the twentieth century, the characters of I Am Radar hunt for what life and art can still be salvaged. During the civil wars of Yugoslavia, two brothers walk shockingly different paths: one into the rapacious paramilitary forces terrorizing the countryside, the other into the surreal world of besieged Belgrade. In arctic Norway, resistance schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a secret Nazi nuclear reactor to stage a dramatic art performance, with no witnesses. In the years before Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, an expatriate French landowner adopts an abandoned native child and creates a lifelong scientific experiment of his new son's education. In the modern-day Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the world's largest library in the futile hope that the books will cement a peace in the war-torn country. All of these stories are united in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where a radio operator named Radar struggles with a horrible medical affliction, a set of hapless parents, and-only now, as an adult-all too ordinary white skin. A sophisticated, highly addictive reading experience that draws on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and performance art, Larsen's I Am Radar is a novel somehow greater than all of its remarkable parts, a breathtaking and unparalleled joyride through the worst that humanity has to offer only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption

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“Adam Grupper infuses the unfolding connections with mysterious undertones. His narration moves swiftly through the story’s many shifting time periods and countries. In the transitions from Eastern Europe to modern America, he maintains a steady tempo. Grupper’s flexibility is evident in the characters’ emotions, as revealed in dialogue. He excels with a range of male and female voices of a variety of nationalities. This is a complex, lengthy work, well told for the patient listener.”

— AudioFile

Quotes

  • “A deeply patterned narrative that darts easily from small-bore domestic dramas to sweeping historical catastrophes with just the right fillip of silliness and levity to keep the whole text eminently approachable…I Am Radar is as easy to enjoy for its swaggering tragicomic spirit as it is to admire for its celestial ambition.”

    — New York Times Book Review
  • “His prose is addictive and enchanting…matched by his many ambitions.”

    — Los Angeles Times
  • “Wise yet unpretentious, both broad and deep, I Am Radar will slake the most unquenchable thirst for storytelling and open the reader’s eyes to new possibilities in fiction.”

    — Shelf Awareness
  • “Gripping…Masterly…This is a sprawling, engrossing novel about the ravages of war and the triumph of art. Larsen is an effortless magician, and his performance here is a pure delight.”

    — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
  • “A delightfully disorienting and immersive experience.”

    — Library Journal (starred review)
  • “Strange things happen when Radar Radmanovic is around…If Larsen’s story makes demands of its readers, it also offers plenty of rewards. Imaginative, original, nicely surreal.”

    — Kirkus Reviews

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About Reif Larsen

Reif Larsen studied at Brown University and has taught at Columbia University, where he received his MFA in fiction. His first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. The novel was a Montana Honor book, a finalist for the IndieBound Award, and was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Larsen’s essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Tin House, the Millions, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Asymptote Journal, and the Believer.

About Adam Grupper

Adam Grupper, award-winning narrator, has garnered honors from AudioFile magazine, Publishers Weekly, iTunes, the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, and the Audio Publishers Association. He has been in eleven Broadway productions, including the acclaimed revival of Fiddler on the Roof. His film and television credits include The Rebound, Homeland, Master of None, Music and Lyrics, Two Weeks Notice, Elementary, and Allegiance.