Play Audiobook Sample
The Story of My Teeth Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(4.00) - 1 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
The story of “Highway” Sánchez—bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer—and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico.
“I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I’m grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.”
Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous,” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf.
Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary influences.
Download and start listening now!
“A beautiful and quick moving story on the scenic route…Luiselli makes some bold explorations into the art of value and storytelling, and it’s something that shouldn’t go quietly into the night. We need to reflect, we need to explore. Many books have come and gone that have tried to make sense of the power of fiction, and A Story of My Teeth may be the closest we’ll get…It’s a gallery of thought. It’s meant to be appreciated part for part. This is writing illuminated.”
— Heavy Feather Review
Quotes
-
“The Story of My Teeth explores the meaning of home through the antics of an auctioneer, told in his own hyperbolic fashion.”
— BBC.com -
“Luiselli is as much a cartographer as a writer, interested in finding areas still unmapped…She combines fictional narrative with historical and intellectual points of reference, and the result is writing without preconceptions, as airy and open as a soccer field.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Quirky doesn’t begin to capture the wacky inventiveness of Valeria Luiselli’s second novel. The Story of My Teeth is a playful, philosophical funhouse of a read that demonstrates that not only isn’t experimental fiction dead, it needn’t be deadly, either. Luiselli’s elastic mind comfortably stretches to wrap itself around molars, Montaigne, fortune cookies and various theories of meaning.”
— NPR -
“This kind of writing—direct and gentle, affectionate and satirical, precise and imaginative, memorable and efficient—appears throughout, and the character of Gustavo is brought to life with exquisite imaginative power and beautifully judged tics and cadences…It is a sad, beautiful, and brilliant book. It will endure.”
— National (Abu Dhabi) -
“Quirky and charming, The Story of My Teeth is a delightful meditation on art, value, and truth.”
— BuzzFeed.com -
“The Story of My Teeth has a Joycean playfulness with words, events, structure, literary theory, languages, and human nature.”
— Midwest Book Review -
“Surprising and charming…It’s difficult not to follow wherever it takes you.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review) -
“A lively, loopy experimental novel rich with musings on language, art, and, yes, teeth…The whole book is a kind of extended commentary on how possessions acquire value largely through the stories we tell about them….A clever philosophical novel that, as the author puts it, has ‘less to do with lying than surpassing the truth.’”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“A fiercely intelligent, inventive, and hilarious exploration of worth, value, and creation in the worlds of art and literature.”
— Bookanista -
“The novel’s experimental structure is full of literary allusions and bon mots from across the ages. Readers hungry for more from Luiselli will be happy with a clever variation on her style.”
— Library Journal
Awards
-
A Millions.com Pick of Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2015
-
A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Fall
-
Shortlisted for the 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
-
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015
-
A Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015Selection for Literary Fiction and Fiction in Translation
-
A Flavorwire Pick for 50 Best Independent Press Books of 2015
-
A BuzzFeed Books Pick for Best Fiction of 2015
-
A 2015 New York Times Book Review Notable Book
-
A NPR’s Great Reads Selection of 2015
-
A 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction
-
Winner of the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
-
A 2016 Best Translated Book Award Longlist Selection
-
A Literary Hub Pick of Best Translated Novels of the Decade
-
A Wired Magazine Pick of Best Fiction of the Decade
The Story of My Teeth Listener Reviews
-
—
Matthew Hudson, 6/17/2018
About Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. In 2014 she was honored as part of the National Book Foundation’s list of “5 under 35.” Her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, earned rave reviews and won the Los Angeles Times’ 2015 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli’s fiction and essays have been translated into many languages, and her work has appeared in such publications as Granta, McSweeney’s, and the New York Times
About the Narrators
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
Thom Rivera is a multiple Earphones Award–winning narrator. He is also a classically trained television, film, theater, and voice actor. He has toured nationally and performed at regional theatres and Shakespeare Festivals throughout the US. On television, he can be seen in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, New Girl, The Mindy Project, and the CBS series Zoo.