Jo Ann Beard has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.1★ across 158 ratings. The most-rated is The Hunter.
The Hunter
Summary
Boston's debauched elite is going up in flames, and it's the Fitzpatrick family that set it on fire. Hunter I didn't mean to star in a sex tape, okay? It was just one of those unexplainable things. Like Stonehenge, Police Academy 2, and morning glory clouds. It just happened. Now, my ball-busting father is sentencing me to six months of celibacy, sobriety, and morbid boredom under the roof of Boston's nerdiest girl alive, Sailor Brennan. The virginal archer is supposed to babysit my ass while I learn to take my place in Royal Pipelines, my family's oil company. Little does she know, that's not the only pipe I'll be laying.... Sailor I didn’t want this gig, okay? But the deal was too sweet to walk away from. I needed the public endorsement; Hunter needed a nanny. Besides, what’s six months in the grand scheme of things? It's not like I'm in danger of falling in love with the appallingly gorgeous, charismatic gazillionaire who happens to be one of Boston's most eligible bachelors. No. I will remain immune to Hunter Fitzpatrick's charm. Even at the cost of losing everything I have. Even at the cost of burning down his kingdom.
©2020 L.J. Shen (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
The Middlesteins
Summary
For more than 30 years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food - thinking about it, eating it - and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live. When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle - a whippet thin perfectionist - is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone? Or are others at fault, too? With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.
©2012 Jami Attenberg (P)2012 Hachette Audio
In Zanesville
Summary
The 14-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She flies under the radar - a sidekick, a marching-band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed and character is forged. In time, their friendship is tested - by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them, and by the first startling, subversive intimations of womanhood. With dry wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders and that within the souls of the overlooked often burns something radiant.
©2011 Jo Ann Beard (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Boys of My Youth
Summary
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention and acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter", one of the 14 extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, and it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigencies of time and fate.
©2016 Jo Ann Beard (P)2016 Hachette Audio
Festival Days
Summary
A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville, who “honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life”. (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winner for The Friend) When “The Fourth State of Matter”, her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance, ranging from the death of a beloved dog to a relentlessly engrossing account of a New York artist trapped inside a burning building, as well as two triumphant, celebrated pieces of short fiction. Here is an unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by listeners and writers, teachers and students. Anchored by the title piece - a searing journey through India that brings into focus questions of mortality and love - Festival Days presents Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now.
©2021 Jo Ann Beard (P)2021 Little, Brown & Company