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Know Your Beholder: A Novel Audiobook, by Adam Rapp Play Audiobook Sample

Know Your Beholder: A Novel Audiobook

Know Your Beholder: A Novel Audiobook, by Adam Rapp Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Adam Rapp Publisher: Little, Brown & Company Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 5.67 hours at 1.5x Speed 4.25 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: March 2015 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9781478983361

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

19

Longest Chapter Length:

35:21 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

13:40 minutes

Average Chapter Length:

26:48 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

4

Other Audiobooks Written by Adam Rapp: > View All...

Publisher Description

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom.

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, thirtysomething Francis Falbo is holed up in an attic apartment while recovering from a series of traumas—his mother’s death, his beloved wife’s desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band’s irreconcilable breakup. He hasn’t changed out of his bathrobe—the uniform of a life in default—for nine days. All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. Francis becomes increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.

Know Your Beholder is an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled around us and we must collect the jagged pieces to begin anew. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

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"Adam Rapp is an exciting and fearless writer. From the dark places of the soul he mines equal parts pain and light. In Know Your Beholder, he has fully and unapologetically rendered each of his characters-men and women alike, both good actors and bad. This rueful and immensely entertaining novel is his best work yet, a transfixing study of the heart's resilience and the complicated beauty of living that provides the kind of consolation that only our greatest fictions can."

— A. M. Homes%2C New York Times bestselling author of The Mistress's Daughter and May We Be Forgiven

Quotes

  • More often than any book I can easily recall, Rapp's novel had me laughing like a fool, embarrassing myself each time I unthinkingly brought it out in public. Perhaps more surprisingly, that humor felt entirely natural--born organically from the idiosyncrasies of the characters themselves rather than foisted on them... Rapp mostly dredges comedy from Francis' peculiar ways of seeing the world and from the mundanely weird people who populate it.

    — NPR
  • Rapp's novel is surprisingly high-spirited, comic without diminishing the emotional depth of his motley crew. That''s largely thanks to Rapp's gift for figurative language.

    — Washington Post
  • Rapp is such a skillful and evocative writer he can make magic out of the ordinary stuff of daily life... Know Your Beholder has a surprisingly satisfying finish on multiple levels.. It's nothing less than masterful.

    — Cleveland Plain Dealer
  • Know Your Beholder is funny and sad, smart and moving, dark and hopeful. Adam Rapp writes with a lyrical acumen and wit that are not just impressive, but immensely engaging.

    — Jonathan Tropper, New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where I Leave You and One Last Thing Before I Go
  • Know Your Beholder is a message from the heart and from the beard, a message from the new weird America to every guy who's ever spent too much time in his bathrobe and every women who's ever considered what that guy would look like if he actually got himself together and shaved. Adam Rapp knows about laughing to keep from crying. He's a melancholy Lenny Bruce of the sentence and his imagination is never less than intense.

    — Hari Kunzru%2C author of the national bestseller The Impressionist
  • Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder is a wry, big-hearted novel that captures the contradictions of the American present--with its good intensions, self-deceptions, grand ambitions, and crippling fears.

    — David Bezmozgis%2C Giller Prize finalist and author of The Betrayers
  • With Know Your Beholder, Adam Rapp has ascended into the upper ranks of American fiction. His narrator, Francis Falbo, is an unforgettable crooner of heartwreck and hilarity, and the narrative itself is woven of uncommon tenderness and beauty as the dreams of the past meet the ghosts in their present.

    — William Giraldi%2C author of Hold the Dark and Busy Monsters
  • Know Your Beholder is hilarious and deeply sad, often at the same time. Such an eerie beauty permeates this tale--with its haunting descriptions of houses, people, music, tornado storms, agoraphobic terror, lost children, lost minds--that when you finish you feel you've awakened from one of the narrator's strange, heartbreaking dreams, filled with a kind of inexplicable, overwhelming love.

    — Brad Watson%2C National Book Award finalist for The Heaven of Mercury
  • “Rapp…is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance.”

    — New Yorker, praise for the author
  • “I love Adam’s writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp.”

    — Eric Bogosian, award-winning actor and Guggenheim fellow, praise for the author 

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About Adam Rapp

Adam Rapp is the acclaimed author of Under the Wolf; Under the Dog, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award; and 33 Snowfish, an American Library Association Best Book for young adults. He is also an accomplished playwright, and his Red Light Winter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006. He lives in New York City.