William Gaddis has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is JR.
JR
Summary
Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
©1975 William Gaddis (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Agape Agape
Summary
William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than 50 years, Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career - long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts - Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.
©2002 The Estate of William Gaddis (P)2018 Tantor
Carpenter's Gothic
Summary
This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter Gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed, and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad - and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis' inimitable virtuoso dialogue and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).
©1985 William Gaddis (P)2018 Tantor
The Recognitions
Summary
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the "real" and the "virtual" worlds, and Gaddis' novel pre-empts our common obsessions by almost half a century. This novel tackles the blurring of perceptual boundaries. The Matrix and Blade Runner pale in comparison to this epic novel.
©1978 William Gaddis (P)2010 Audible, Inc.