E. L. Doctorow has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 11 ratings. The most-rated is Ragtime.
Ragtime
Summary
Ragtime, a classic work of historical fiction first published in 1975, details the lives of three families in early 20th-century New York. The novel interweaves fictional characters with actual historic events and figures. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence. A rich tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in a unique historic context. Time magazine included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923-2005.
©1997 E. L. Doctorow (P)1997 E. L. Doctorow
Billy Bathgate
Summary
To listen to this audiobook is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow's trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow's boldest and most beloved best sellers. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Fred Ahlert Music Corporation and Henderson Music Company: Excerpts from the lyrics to "Bye Bye Blackbird", lyrics by Mort Dixon, music by Ray Henderson. Copyright 1926. Copyright renewed 1953. All rights for the extended term administered by Fred Ahlert Music Corporation for Olde Clover Leaf Music and Henderson Music Company, c/o William Krasilovsky, Feinman and Krasilovsky. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Bourne Co./New York Music Publishers: Excerpt from the lyrics to "Me and My Shadow", words by Billy Rose, music by Al Jolson and Dave Dreyer. Copyright 1927 Borune Co. Copyright renewed, International Copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The Songwriters Guild of America and CPP Belwin, Inc.: Excerpt from the lyrics to "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else", by Gus Kahn and Isham Jones. Copyright 1924. U.S. rights renewed 1980 Gilbert Keyes Music and Bantam Music. Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpt from the lyrics to "Limehouse Blues", by Philip Braham and Douglas Furber. Copyright 1922 Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
©1989 E. L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House Audio
Welcome to Hard Times
Summary
Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage - a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably - and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Here is E. L. Doctorow's debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. Praise for Welcome to Hard Times: “Terse and powerful.” (Newsweek) “A taut, bloodthirsty read.” (The Times Literary Supplement) “A superb piece of fiction.” (The New Republic)
©1975 E. L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House Audio
The Book of Daniel
Summary
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life…marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships…with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is an audiobook of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is an audiobook of investigation: transcribing Daniel's interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is an audiobook rich in characters. It is an audiobook that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is an audiobook about the nature of Left politics in this country its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is an audiobook about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel. Cover art: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
©2005 E. L. Doctorow (P)2013 Random House Audio
City of God
Summary
New York Times best-seller. With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery - and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration - is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America’s preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time. Praise for City of God: “A grander perspective on the universe...a novel that sets its sights on God.” (The Wall Street Journal) “Dazzling.... The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole.” (Time) “Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days.” (Los Angeles Times) “Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence.” (Chicago Tribune) “One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years.... Reading City of God restores one’s faith in literature.” (The Houston Chronicle)
©2001 E. L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House Audio
Doctorow: Collected Stories
Summary
A superb collection of 15 stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow - the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate. He has been called "a national treasure" by George Saunders. Doctorow's great topic, said Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history". This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope - or an actual glimpse of greatness. In "A House on the Plains", a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. In "Walter John Harmon", a man starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction. "Jolene: A Life" follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. "Heist", the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the best-seller City of God. "The Water Works", about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. "Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate" is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow's revisions. These 15 stories, written from the 1960s to the early 21st century, and selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015, are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. Read by John Rubinstein, with Joshua Swanson and Jesse Bernstein "Willi" read by John Rubinstein "The Hunter" read by John Rubinstein "The Writer in the Family" read by Jesse Bernstein "Heist" read by John Rubinstein "The Water Works" read by John Rubinstein "Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate" read by John Rubinstein "Jolene: A Life" read by John Rubinstein "Baby Wilson" read by John Rubinstein "A House on the Plains" read by Joshua Swanson "Walter John Harmon" read by John Rubinstein "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" read by John Rubinstein "Wakefield" read by John Rubinstein "Edgemont Drive" read by John Rubinstein "Assimilation" read by John Rubinstein "All the Time in the World" read by John Rubinstein
©2017 E. L. Doctorow (P)2017 Random House Audio
Andrew's Brain
Summary
This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times - funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history."
©2013 E. L. Doctorow (P)2013 Random House Audio
Sweet Land Stories
Summary
Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security. Cover art: Polkys (detail), 1985, watercolor (c) Andrew Wyeth
©2004 E.L. Doctorow (P)2013 Random House Audio
Loon Lake
Summary
It is the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a passionate young man from Paterson, New Jersey, leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds, on a cold and lonely night in the Adirondack Mountains, is a vision of life so different from his own that it changes his destiny, leading him from the side of a railroad track to a magical place called Loon Lake.
©2010 E. L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House Audio
All the Time in the World
Summary
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World's Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow constitutes a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow "distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world". A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family. A college graduate takes a dishwasher's job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money. A husband and wife's tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there. An urbanite out on his morning run suspects that the city in which he's lived all his life has transmogrified into another city altogether. These are among the wide-ranging creations in this stunning collection, resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous Doctorow classics, All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.
©2011 E. L. Doctorow (P)2011 Random House