Brian Doyle has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 14 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.8★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Mink River.
Mink River
Summary
In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman who is addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime is committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. This is the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and when the book ends, listeners will be more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.
©2010 Brian Doyle (P)2014 Tantor Media
Martin Marten
Summary
Dave is 14 years old, living with his family in a cabin on Oregon's Mount Hood (or as he prefers to call it, like the Multnomah tribal peoples once did, Wy'east). Dave will soon enter high school, with adulthood and a future not far off - a future away from his mother, father, his precocious younger sister, and the wilderness where he's lived all his life. And Dave is not the only one approaching adulthood and its freedoms on Wy'east that summer. Martin, a pine marten (of the mustelid family), is leaving his own mother and siblings and setting off on his own as well. As Dave and Martin set off on their own adventures, their lives, paths, and trails will cross, weave, and blend. Why not come with them as they set forth into the forest and crags of Oregon's soaring mountain wilderness in search of life, family, friends, enemies, wonder, mystery, and good things to eat? Martin Marten is a braided coming-of-age tale like no other, told in Brian Doyle's joyous, rollicking style.
©2015 Brian Doyle (P)2017 Tantor
The Plover
Summary
Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man.... But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan O Donnell's lonely boat is eventually crammed with humor, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull. Brian Doyle's The Plover is a sea novel, a maritime adventure, the story of a cold man melting, a compendium of small miracles, an elegy to Edmund Burke, a watery quest, a battle at sea - and a rapturous, heartfelt celebration of life's surprising paths, planned and unplanned.
©2014 Brian Doyle (P)2014 Tantor
WordTheatre: Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Volume 2
Summary
WordTheatre, the short story performance specialists, casts the perfect actors to bring great contemporary writing to life. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Recorded live at benefit performances for their Fellowships endowment, Volume 2 of this stunning collection contains nine outstanding examples of the short story. Though varying in theme and tone, they share a brilliant pedigree. Linus Roache reading "Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle Brian Cox reading "The Human Table" by Marvin Cohen Janel Moloney reading "Recorded Message" by Philip Dacey Nicholas Brendon reading "Stay" by David Schuman Gil Bellows reading "Oblivion, Nebraska" by Peter Moore Smith Wendy Makkena reading "Self Knowledge" by Richard Bausch Carla Gugino reading "Gina's Death" by Charles Baxter Christopher McDonald reading 'Today Will Be A Quiet Day" by Amy Hempel Emily Meade reading "The River Nemunas" by Anthony Doerr. Produced and directed by Cedering Fox; edited by Sara Bencivenga; mixed and mastered by Theo Mondle; music composed by Greg Chun. WordTheatre gives voice to great writing. We are an innovative, internationally recognized, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring empathy, curiosity and conversation through powerful and entertaining performances, both live and recorded, of the world's best contemporary literature. We aim to ignite a passion for reading, writing, and self-expression in our community and in future generations.
©2014 Cedering Fox (P)2014 WordTheatre
Eight Whopping Lies and Other Stories of Bruised Grace
Summary
“Brian Doyle is an extraordinary writer whose tales will endure.” (Cynthia Ozick, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Quarrel and Quandary) This is a guided tour through the mind of one of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Catholic writing. Brian Doyle effortlessly connects the everyday with the inexpressible and consistently marries searingly honest prose with interruptions of humor and humanity. These essays bear Doyle’s trademark depth and deliver with eloquence his piercing observations on mohawks and miracles, vigils and velociraptors, syntax and scapulars, jail and jihad, and mercy beyond sense.
©2017 Brian Doyle (P)2018 Franciscan Media
Bin Laden's Bald Spot & Other Stories
Summary
Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian Doyle's fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling - these stories will remind listeners of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldn't be.
©2010 Red Hen Press (P)2018 Red Hen Press
One Long River of Song
Summary
A playful and moving book of essays by a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times) who invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of the everyday When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of 60 after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted listeners who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it's the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband's whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle's eyes, nothing is dull. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." A life's work, One Long River of Song invites listeners to experience joy and wonder in ordinary moments that become, under Doyle's rapturous and exuberant gaze, extraordinary.
©2019 David James Duncan and Brian Doyle (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company