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Title details for Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow - Available

Homer & Langley

A Novel

by E.L. Doctorow
Arthur Morey
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
“Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Booklist

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.
Praise for Homer & Langley
“Masterly.”—The New York Times Book Review 
“Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th century America; yet this book’s most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other’s tragically exclusive company.”— O: The Oprah Magazine
“A stately, beautiful performance with great resonance . . . What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before.”—San Francisco Chronicle 
“Wondrous . . . inspired . . . darkly visionary and surprisingly funny.” —The New York Review of Books
“Cunningly panoramic . . . Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that cpature the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness.”—Elle

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 1, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415965641
      • File size: 205250 KB
      • Duration: 07:07:36

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Arthur Morey's performance of Doctorow's most recent novel is pallid--an altogether suitable approach for the author's eponymous heroes, a pair of reclusive brothers. More ghosts than human beings, they have retreated into their Upper East Side brownstone, where, for decades, they obsessively hoard all manner of collectibles. The pair were real eccentrics who died in the 1940s, although in Doctorow's fiction he has extended their lives another 30 years so that they'll experience Vietnam and "flower power." But they experience all events only tangentially, from the remove of their withdrawal from life. The perceptions of Homer, the blind brother and teller of this story, seem wistful and unearthly in Morey's narration, but that is most assuredly Doctorow's strange stage direction. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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