Charles Yu has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.8★ across 13 ratings. The most-rated is Interior Chinatown.
Interior Chinatown
Summary
A 2020 National Book Award Winner "One of the funniest books of the year...a delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire." (The Washington Post) From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet. "Fresh and beautiful...Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition." (The New York Times Book Review)
©2020 Charles Yu (P)2020 Random House Audio
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Summary
Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.
©2010 Charles Yu (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Watchlist
Summary
Threats known and unknown. Etgar Keret. Robert Coover. Aimee Bender. Jim Shepard. Alissa Nutting. Charles Yu. Cory Doctorow. Randa Jarrar. Katherine Karlin. Miracle Jones. Mark Irwin. T. Coraghessan Boyle. Dale Peck. Bonnie Nadzam. Lucy Corin. Chika Unigwe. Footsteps in the night. Paul Di Filippo. Lincoln Michel. Dana Johnson. Mark Chiusano. Juan Pablo Villalobos. Chanelle Benz. Sean Bernard. Kelly Luce. Zhang Ran. Miles Klee. Carmen Maria Machado. David Abrams. Steven Hayward. Deji Bryce Olukotun. Alexis Landau. Bryan Hurt. We are being watched. That this statement no longer shocks is itself shocking. Post-Snowden, we know that the government - everywhere - has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching whatever we do on the Internet. The only thing concealed is the nature of our watchers. In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, reflect on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. From drone strikes to birds mistaken for spies, paintings that change when they're not looked at to machines that let their dying users look back and reconsider the most important decisions of their lives, these stories take a broad and imaginative look at the state of surveillance in our global and interconnected world. How does constant surveillance affect us? Does it change how we behave as we seek approval or avoid judgment from an often faceless audience? Do we know who's watching? What does it mean to be watched? By turns political, apolitical, cautionary, and surreal, these stories reflect on what it's like to live in the surveillance state. Edited by Bryan Hurt.
©2015 Bryan Hurt (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
Summary
New York Times Notable Book author Charles Yu wrote the best-selling novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In his stunning, often humorous, collection Sorry Please Thank You, Yu draws on pop culture and science to make incisive observations about society - and to offer touching insight into the human condition. In two of Yu’s remarkable stories, he focuses on a big-box-store night-shift employee with girl trouble and a company that outsources grief for profit.
©2012 Charles Yu (P)2012 Recorded Books