Joe Formichella has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Staying Ahead of the Posse.
Scarpete Stories
Summary
Scarpete Stories is set in southern Alabama. It is the tale of A. J. Waters, a man whose life has spiraled so out of control and disconnected that he creates a fictional detective to first moderate, then inhabit, and finally subsume that life. The detective, Scarpete, is left to try and find some explanation for the necessity of his existence. With nothing but a bundle of scrawled pages on a series of legal pads, Scarpete investigates the life and death of the author who created him. Within those pages, he vacillates between narrator to muse to antagonist to protagonist. He coaxes A.J. to murder a recalcitrant Mobile editor, searches for an alleged child predator, solves the pitiful "crime" of a sign-altering prankster in the tony eastern shore city of Fairhope, and evokes the confession of a Virginia fugitive hiding out as a Mobile late night radio talk show host. The dissolution of A.J's marriage, family, and life is revealed piece by piece, first as an exercise in therapeutic counseling suggested by his ex. Then, as the exercise frustrates both doctor and patient, he retreats to the only place he knows where he might ask the necessary questions, might even find necessary answers, turning himself into a third-person character in the story, while the lines between reality and fiction, between author and character collide, intersect, then dissolve.
©2017 Joe Formichella (P)2017 Joe Formichella
Waffle House Rules
Summary
The "Last Best Class" of Fish River Community School had lost one of its members every year since the second grade. Waffle Houses were popping up throughout small-town Alabama with one corporate rule: "Good Food Fast." Struggling to cope with the tragedy that shadowed him most of his life, Dr. Jimmy Ryan dedicated himself to bringing people back from the brink, driven by his own guiding principle "Ain't Dead Yet." Not until Jimmy's own death did the folks at the Waffle House in Penelope, Alabama, learn the full extent of the secrets buried with the dead. Secrets resurrected over hot coffee refills at the Waffle House.
©2014 Joe Formichella (P)2019 Joe Formichella
Murder Creek
Summary
On a chilly evening in fall of 1966, Annie Jean Barnes left her home in East Brewton, Alabama, to spend time at a secluded fishing camp owned by a local doctor. Less than 48 hours later she was hospitalized - beaten and abused. Within a week, she was dead. And, it would seem, willfully forgotten by the citizens of Brewton - the more prosperous area on the west side of Murder Creek - who soon came to refer to the fate of Jean Barnes as an "unfortunate incident." The 2003 publication of Suzanne Hudson's novel In a Temple of Trees raised the ghost of Annie Jean. Present at Hudson's premiere book signing in Brewton, Joe Formichella met Barnes' surviving children and became moved to tell the story in full. Who was culpable for their mother's death? The town physician who owned the camp? The authorities who mishandled the subsequent investigation? Had there been a cover-up? With so much evidence either contradictory or mysteriously missing, was there now any way to bring anyone to justice? Formichella, in seeking those answers, found instead a larger question: what would justice mean for a community built as though it were a functioning social model for certain principles set down in the deeply flawed Alabama state constitution - a document penned in 1901 by wealthy land-owners and politicians, seeking to keep the riff-raff at bay? Systems of justice, in Alabama, and throughout America, should be designed to protect precisely those citizens too poor to wield any kind of influence. This is the story of a breakdown in that system, a clarion call for its correction, and a ray of hope for those who have waited too long for the answer to the simple question: who beat Annie Barnes?
©2016 Joe Formichella (P)2016 Joe Formichella
Staying Ahead of the Posse
Summary
Highlighted by the ESPN basketball documentary Black Magic, Ben Jobe's life and philosophy are captured in Staying Ahead of the Posse. This is history in the flesh, the history of basketball and the Civil Rights Movement, of desegregation and economic exploitation, of African independence and the modern-day plantation that is the American sports industry in general and the NCAA in particular. Ben's 40-plus years of coaching, teaching, nurturing, and mentoring intersected with and was influenced by all those factors. One generation removed from slavery, born in Little Hope, Tennessee, he was a 1956 graduate of Fisk University and coached at more than a dozen schools and across two continents, including leading the Southern University Jaguars to a historic upset in the 1993 NCAA basketball tournament.
©2016 Joe Formichella (P)2021 Joe Formichella