James Leo Herlihy has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Midnight Cowboy.
Midnight Cowboy
Summary
Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel's emotional nucleus. This unlikely pairing of Ratso and Joe Buck is perhaps one of the most complex portraits of friendship in contemporary literature. The focus on male friendship follows a strong path cut by Twain's Huck and Jim, Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg, Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, and Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity. Midnight Cowboy takes a well-deserved place among a group of distinguished American novels that write - often with unnerving candor - about those who live on the fringe of society.
©1965 James Leo Herlihy (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
Season of the Witch
Summary
“One of the best and most convincing novels written so far about the lifestyle of the Woodstock generation.” (Publishers Weekly) It’s the fall of 1969, and Gloria Random’s best friend John has been called up for the draft. To escape it, they decide to run away from their Midwest town and their mundane lives. Renaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch’s biological father. Landing in the East Village, they are pulled into a community of drug use, mystical rituals, and sexual experimentation as they try to hide deeper and deeper from the realities they left behind. James Leo Herlihy’s third novel captures the mood and grooves of late-60s New York at the height of the anti-war movement and the counterculture revolution. With his trademark wit and insight, Herlihy brings together a colorful cast of characters ripped right from the heart of one of the most turbulent eras in American history.
©1971 James Leo Herlihy (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
A Story that Ends with a Scream
Summary
In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair. She becomes enamored with the fantasy of this unknown man - at first falling deep into the escapism of the imagined affair, then resolving to find him for real to save her from her stale life. Herlihy’s other gothic tales tell of Consilada Rector, who can’t get people to believe in the leprechaun that presides over her husband’s bar; Mrs. Dorothy Fitzpatrick, who records of the existence of a ghostly mail delivery truck; and a dying man who comes to stay with a mother and her blessed son William.
©1957, 1963, 1965 James Leo Herlihy (P)2018 Audible Studios
All Fall Down
Summary
“There is something very wonderful about this book; it has a luminous thing that is the best thing in writing or any kind of art." (Tennessee Williams) Most people in town think 16-year-old Clinton Williams’ family is strange. His father, once an outspoken socialist, now searches for answers at the bottom of a glass. His mother has a reputation for scaring children. And his older brother, named Berry-berry, is a traveling vagabond, known by most for his cleft chin, loose morals, and streaks of violence. Clinton himself is seen as meek, timid, and not quite right, as he spends his days filling notebook after notebook, writing down every conversation he can overhear, word for word. Wishing he could contact his wayward brother, Clinton yearns for a day when he, too, can escape the neighborhood and travel the country. After following a clue to Berry-berry’s whereabouts, Clinton ventures to Coastal Florida hoping to find him, but instead gets a firsthand view of his brother’s callous destructiveness that will leave permanent marks on the young man.
©1960, 1990 James Leo Herlihy (P)2018 Audible, Inc.