Play Audiobook Sample
We’ve Already Gone This Far Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 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
A heartfelt, vital collection; the debut of an exciting new talent already hailed as one of George Saunders’ “favorite young American writers”
In Patrick Dacey’s stunning debut, we meet longtime neighbors and friends—citizens of working-class Wequaquet—right when the ground beneath their feet has shifted in ways they don’t yet understand. Here, after more than a decade of boom and bust, love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor’s veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town; and a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged. We’ve Already Gone This Far takes us to a town like many towns in America, a place where people are searching for what is now an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream.
Story by story, Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers and reminds us that life’s strange intensity and occasional magic is all around us, especially in the everyday. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: a deeply felt, deeply imagined book about where we’ve been and how far we have to go.
Download and start listening now!
“Patrick Dacey is one of my favorite young American writers. The stories in We’ve Already Gone This Far are dangerous, funny, sometimes savage (the phrase ‘lyrical hammers’ comes to mind), but underneath it all beats a strangely kind and hopeful heart. Dacey is channeling both a terrifyingly dark view of America as well as a movingly optimistic one, and he shows us that the truth of who we are lies in that very juxtaposition. Fast, poetic, edgy, full of tremendous affection for the things of the world.”
— George Saunders, National Book Award–nominated author
Quotes
-
“We’ve Already Gone this Far is a strong, intelligent, deeply-felt book; Patrick Dacey is a beautiful and natural writer.”
— Mary Gaitskill, National Book Award–nominated author -
“These tales of neighborly conflicts, professional and personal malaise, and family tragedy are marked by a certain buoyancy. In describing these frustrated lives, Dacey can be as funny as he is compassionate…Dacey’s breakout collection shows that small towns can still yield big fictional rewards.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“In the keen, observational short-story style of writers such as George Saunders and Lauren Groff, We’ve Already Gone This Far illuminates both the quotidian details and the profound strangeness of modern American life. Readers will find this set of mournful, biting, and resonant tales united not only by geography but also by Dacey’s deep humanity towards his flawed characters.”
— Booklist -
“A fine debut collection from a storyteller who improves as the stakes get higher.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“These thirteen stories are linked not just through place and character but also by their pursuit of a warped form of happiness. Together they provide a startling portrait of American life today. A daringly resonant collection with the best endings in the business.”
— Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here without You -
“Whether a used-car salesman or past-his-prime coach or lonely mother of a deployed soldier, the characters in Dacey’s collection are ‘living on these images of the past’ looking for something that glimmers just out of reach. A book that brims with unguarded humanity and quiet moments of communion, I couldn’t stop reading it. Dacey is a masterful prose stylist, a vibrant and original new literary voice.”
— Rae Meadows, author of Mercy Train
We’ve Already Gone This Far Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Patrick Dacey
Patrick Dacey holds an MFA from Syracuse University. He has taught English at several universities in the United States and Mexico and has worked as a reporter, landscaper, door-to-door salesman, and most recently on the overnight staff at a homeless shelter and detox center. His stories have been featured in Zoetrope All-Story, Guernica, Bomb magazine, and Salt Hill, among other publications. Originally from Cape Cod, he currently lives in Virginia.
About the Narrators
Tanya Eby is a novelist and an audiobook narrator who has earned several AudioFile Earphones Awards and been nominated for the Audie Award. She has a BA degree in English language and literature and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine.
Lloyd James (a.k.a. Sean Pratt) has been a working professional actor in theater, film, television, and voice-overs for more than thirty years. He has narrated over one thousand audiobooks and won numerous Earphones Awards and nominations for the Audie Award and the Voice Arts Award. He holds a BFA degree in acting from Santa Fe University, New Mexico.
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, and Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.