Paul La Farge has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Night Ocean.
The Night Ocean
Summary
From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them. A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean"); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L. C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan - the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself. As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception - about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
©2017 Paul La Farge (P)2017 Recorded Books
Haussmann, or the Distinction
Summary
LaFarge's stunning novel of love, betrayal, and exploitation is based on themes involving the life of the great city planner Georges-Eughne Haussmann. Baron Georges-Eughne Haussmann was the architect of modern Paris. In two decades, from 1853 to 1869, he transformed the cramped, filthy lanes of the medieval city into the airy boulevards and green parks of today. Yet there is a story that, on his deathbed, Haussmann wished to undo everything he'd built. "Would that it had died with me!" he is supposed to have said. What is the secret of the baron's last regret? To answer this question, author Paul LaFarge tells the story of a three-sided affair that pitted love against ambition and architecture against flesh, in this sweeping drama of a changing social order.
©2001 Paul LaFarge (P)2003 Blackstone Audiobooks
Luminous Airplanes
Summary
In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a desert festival to learn that his grandfather has died and that he has to return to Thebes - a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language - in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the internet boom, and mourns the loss of Swan, a madman who may have been the only person to understand what was happening to the city, and to the world. La Farge’s ambitious new work considers large worlds and small ones, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.
©2011 Original material, Paul La Farge. Recorded by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. (P)2011 HighBridge Company