Deb Olin Unferth has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Barn 8.
Barn 8
Summary
An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers Two auditors for the US egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night - an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland - a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits - assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues. Deb Olin Unferth's wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes listeners into the minds of these renegades: a farmer's daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon 40,000 hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses 20,000 years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation. Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.
©2020 Deb Olin Unferth (P)2020 Recorded Books
Wait Till You See Me Dance: Stories
Summary
"Deb Olin Unferth's stories are so smart, fast, full of heart, and distinctive in voice - each an intense little thought-system going out earnestly in search of strange new truths. What an important and exciting talent." - George Saunders For more than 10 years, Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly askew, wickedly comic, cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, NOON, and The Paris Review. Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction. Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling "The First Full Thought of Her Life", a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In "Voltaire Night", students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In "Stay Where You Are", two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent - but the gunman has his own problems. An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth's unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.
©2017 Graywolf Press (P)2017 TalkingBook