Shalom Auslander has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 36 ratings. The most-rated is The Summons.
The Summons
Summary
Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He's 43, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep. And he has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known to all as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for 40 years. No longer on the bench, the Judge has withdrawn to the Atlee mansion and become a recluse. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. It is typed by the Judge himself, on his handsome old stationery, and gives the date and time for Ray and Forrest to appear in his study. Ray reluctantly heads south, to his hometown, to the place where he grew up, which he prefers now to avoid. But the family meeting does not take place. The Judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray. And perhaps someone else.
©2002 Belfry Holdings, Inc. (P)2002 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, a Division of Random House, Inc.
Foreskin's Lament
Summary
Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up and was estranged from his community, his religion, and its traditions, he could not find his way to a life where he didn't struggle against God daily. Foreskin's Lament reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander remembers his youthful attempt to win the "blessing bee" (the Orthodox version of a spelling bee), his exile to an Orthodox-style reform school in Israel after he's caught shoplifting Union Bay jeans from the mall, and his 14-mile hike to watch the New York Rangers play in Madison Square Garden without violating the Sabbath. Throughout, Auslander struggles to understand God and His complicated, often contradictory laws. He tries to negotiate with God and His representatives: a day of sin-free living for a day of indulgence, a blessing for each profanity. But ultimately, Auslander settles for a peaceful cease-fire, a standoff with God, and accepts the very slim remaining hope that his newborn son might live free of guilt, doubt, and struggle. Auslander's combination of unrelenting humor and anger renders a rich and fascinating portrait of a man grappling with his faith, family, and community.
©2007 Shalom Auslander (P)2007 Peguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Mother for Dinner
Summary
By the author of Foreskin's Lament, a novel of identity, tribalism, and mothers. Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about 450 pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his 11 brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict. Seventh struggles with his mother's deathbed request. He never loved her, but the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels - to her and to his people and to his "unique cultural heritage" - is overwhelming. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. But, as his brother First says, he's getting tired of chains. Irreverent and written with Auslander's incomparable humor, Mother for Dinner is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.
©2020 Shalom Auslander (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Hope: A Tragedy
Summary
The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way. His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won't stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one he bought. And when, one night, Kugel discovers history - a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history - hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse. The critically acclaimed writer Shalom Auslander's debut novel is a hilarious and disquieting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.
©2012 Shalom Auslander (P)2012 Penguin
Vorsicht, bissiger Gott
Summary
Sie heißen Chaim Yankel Rosenberg, Stanley Fisher oder Rabbi Pearlstein. Sie leben in Brooklyn oder in der Upper West Side von Manhattan, genau 5693 Meilen entfernt von Jerusalem und Tel Aviv. Und sie alle haben ein Problem mit Gott. Oder er mit ihnen, je nachdem. Bloom zum Beispiel hätte bei einem Autounfall ums Leben kommen sollen, aber sein Volvo war sicherer als der Plan, den Gott für ihn vorgesehen hatte. In gutem Glauben dankt er Gott für sein Glück, was diesen so rasend macht, dass er auf direktem Weg nach New York fährt, um Blooms Leben mit einer .45er ein garantiertes Ende zu setzen. Oder Schlomo: Der steht auf Blondinen aus Hochglanzmagazinen und hat ein schlechtes Gewissen, weil Heimisch, sein Hund, ihm immer vorwurfsvoll zuguckt, wenn er Hand an sich legt. Verzweifelt jagt Schlomo den Hund eines Tages auf die Straße. Die Frau im Auto ist blond, auf ihrem T-Shirt steht PORNOSTAR, und natürlich bremst sie zu spät. Story-Verzeichnis:1. Der Krieg der Bernsteins2. Bobo, der Schimpanse mit Selbsthassmodul3. Die schützende Hand ganz oben4. Heimisch weiß alles5. Holocaust-Tipps für Kidz6. Warten auf Joe7. Sensationelle Offenbarungen aus dem verschollenen Buch Stan8. Danke fürs Mitspielen9. Die Verwandlung10. Das Dilemma des Propheten11. Sie sind alle gleich12. Schlag die Heiden, Charlie Brown13. Gott ist ein großes, glückliches Huhn14. Guckt nicht so verquält, ihr seid doch auserwählt15. Glossar, das mein Lektor mir für die deutsche Ausgabe aufgezwungen hat.
(c)+(p) 2009 BUCHFUNK