Padgett Powell has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators. The most-rated is Selected Shorts.
A Woman Named Drown
Summary
Hailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress-cum–pool shark. On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a “woman named Drown.” He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they’re heading farther south together - to Florida - where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life’s laboratory are about to get quite contradictory. Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness - a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much - and yet everything - happens at once.
©1987 Padgett Powell (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Edisto Revisited
Summary
In the sequel to Powell’s acclaimed debut, Edisto, Simons Manigault is older - if not particularly wiser - and searching for the cure to his restlessness in memory, travel, and forbidden loveFourteen years after we first met Simons Manigault, our protagonist is newly graduated from Clemson University, bored, unfocused, and idling his summer away at his mother’s home in Edisto, South Carolina. Not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood, Simons finds himself surrendering to cynicism, as well as to the temptations of his "turned-out-well" first cousin, Patricia. To avoid sinking further into his rut, Simons embarks on a road trip through the South. After a disastrous stint as a Corpus Christi fisherman, he exits the Lone Star State, doubling back to the Louisiana bayou to spend some quality time with his former friend and mentor - and his mother's ex-lover - Taurus. But as even Taurus' once sought-after wisdom wears thin, Simons begins to suspect that the grass is not greener on the other side - it may be burnt, brown, and dead wherever he goes. Padgett Powell's literary return to Edisto is as outrageous, witty, and bitingly sharp as its predecessor. Listeners who adored their first meeting with Simons Manigault will relish a second helping of his ennui and bad behavior. Newcomers will likewise be heartily glad they made the trip.
©1996 Padgett Powell (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Edisto
Summary
Padgett Powell has received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer`s Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award. He teaches in Gainesville, Florida, where he was born in 1952. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper`s, and many other periodicals.
Simons Everson Manigault ("You say it `Simmons.` I`m a rare one-m Simons") lives with his mother, an eccentric professor (known as the Duchess), on an isolated and undeveloped strip of South Carolina coast. Convinced that her son can be a writer of genius, the Duchess has immersed Simons in the literary classics since birth ("Like some kids swat mobiles, I was to thumb pages") and has given him free rein to gather materials in such spots as the Baby Grand, a local black nightclub. ("It was an assignment. I`m supposed to write. I`m supposed to get good at it.")
Although possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication beyond his years, Simons feels the normal adolescent bewilderment about the behavior of his parents. His conventional father, the Progenitor, has recently left the family in a dispute over Simon`s upbringing and has moved to nearby Hilton Head, where he would like to see his son raised among the orthodox surroundings of condominiums, country clubs, and private schools. At the book`s center is Taurus, an enigmatic father-surrogate who tutors the boy in the art of watching the world without presumption.
Edisto is, as Walker Percy observed, "a truly remarkable first novel, both as a narrative and in its extraordinary use of language. It reminds one of The Catcher in the Rye, but it`s better - sharper, funnier, and more poignant."
©1983, 1984 Padgett Powell (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Selected Shorts
Summary
Selected Shorts: Falling in Love presents a collection of stirring tales of love and longing: Rick Bass' "Fires", read by Ted Marcoux Padgett Powell's "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping", read by Christina Pickles Laurie Colwin's "The Lone Pilgrim", read by Hope Davis E. Nesbit's "Melisande", read by Jane Curtin Edna O'Brien's "Violets", read by Fionnula Flanagan Maile Meloy's "Travis, B.", read by William Hurt Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The series originates at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.
©2006 The Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2006 The Symphony Space, Inc.