David Rakoff has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 15 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 16 ratings. The most-rated is Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish.
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Narration by the Author or Authors, 2014 From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the 20th century. Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to one another by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-20th-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box - an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent", a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.
©2012 The estate of David Rakoff (P)2013 Random House Audio
Don't Get Too Comfortable (Unabridged Selections)
Summary
The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. David Rakoff's collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of our funniest, most insightful writers. In Don't Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff journeys into the land of plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily portrayed. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good times and chicken wings of Hooters Air, portraying the rarified universe of Paris fashion shows where an evening dress can cost as much as four years of college, or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core Playboy TV shoot, where he is provided with his very own personal manservant, David Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess, delving into the manic getting and spending that defines the North American way of life. Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism, and Rakoff is there to map that frontier. He sits through the grotesqueries of “avant garde” vaudeville in Times Square immediately following 9/11. Twenty days without food allows him to experience firsthand the wonders of “detoxification”, and the frozen world of cryonics, whose promise of eternal life is the ultimate status symbol, leaves him very cold indeed (much to our good fortune). At once a Wildean satire of our ridiculous culture of overconsumption and a plea for a little human decency, Don't Get Too Comfortable is a bitingly funny grand tour of our special circle of gilded-age hell.
©2005 David Rakoff (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Fraud
Summary
You've heard him on This American Life! Now read his book! Wherever he is, David Rakoff is a fish out of water. Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, playing an evil modeling agent on a daytime soap opera, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff doesn't belong. Nor does he try to. Still, he continually finds himself off in the far-flung hinterlands of our culture, notebook or microphone in hand, hoping to conjure that dyed-in-the-wool New York condescension. And Rakoff tries to be nasty; heaven knows nothing succeeds like the cheap sneer, but he can't quite help noticing that these are actual human beings he's writing about. In his attempts not to pull any punches, the most damaging blows, more often than not, land squarely on his own jaw - hilariously satirizing the writer, not the subject. And therein lies David Rakoff's genius and his burgeoning appeal. The wry and the heartfelt join in his prose to resurrect that most neglected of literary virtues: wit. Read the blurbs again on the back. They signal the arrival of a brilliant new American essayist. (Okay, Canadian.)
©2001 David Rakoff (P)2001 Random House, Inc.
Half Empty
Summary
The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times best-selling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) book, Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won’t come true. The book ranges from the personal to the universal, combining stories from Rakoff’s reporting and accounts of his own experiences: the moment when being a tiny child no longer meant adults found him charming but instead meant other children found him a fun target; the perfect late evening in Manhattan when he was young and the city seemed to brim with such possibility that the street shimmered in the moonlight—as he drew closer he realized the streets actually flickered with rats in a feeding frenzy. He also weaves in his usual brand Oscar Wilde-worthy cultural criticism (the tragedy of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, for instance). Whether he’s lacerating the musical Rent for its cutesy depiction of AIDS or dealing with personal tragedy, his sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the power of negativity.
©2010 David Rakoff (P)2010 Random House Audio
Selected Shorts: Funny Business
Summary
From wild and wacky to knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud fun, these humorous tales represent some of the best of recent seasons of the hit public radio series Selected Shorts. Comedian Wyatt Cenac gives a killer performance of Simon Rich’s hilarious tale of woe from the point of view of a condom in a young man’s wallet. Alec Baldwin gives a delightful over-the-top performance of James Thurber’s wonderfully silly classic tale of the day everybody in a small Ohio town thought the dam broke. Joe Meno’s playful and poignant “People Are Becoming Clouds,” slyly performed by Criminal Minds’ Kirsten Vangsness, tells the story of a wife who simply laughs and turns into a puff of soft white vapor every time her husband tries to kiss her. David Rakoff reads Dave Eggers’ sweet, good-humored story in which a father recounts to his son, while making dinner, how his parents saved the world together. Selected Shorts’ founding host Isaiah Sheffer recounts two tales: New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier’s wacky suggestion for young men today in “Dating Your Mom,” and David Schickler’s raucous tale of a family catering company’s crazy and delicious escapades in “Wes Amerigo’s Giant Fear.” With stories that cover all types of humor, this assorted collection of memorable stories is sure to leave listeners grinning.
©2014 Symphony Space (P)2014 Symphony Space
Selected Shorts
Summary
A lot can happen on the way from one place to another, especially when an overnight flight makes for an unexpected romantic encounter between strangers seated together; a trucker finds life beyond the ranch where he grew up; and a bored Midwestern housewife tries to escape Kansas City. This anthology of tales about people in transit features Stuart Dybek's "Pet Milk", read by Keith Szarabajka; Martha Gellhorn's "Miami-New York", read by Joanna Gleason; Edward P. Jones' "An Orange Line Train to Ballston", read by Sonia Manzano; Annie Proulx's "The Trickle-Down Effect", read by James Naughton; Dorothy Thomas' "The Getaway", read by Mia Dillon; James Thurber's "A Ride with Olympy", read by David Rakoff; and Eudora Welty's "No Place for You, My Love", read by Andrea Marcovicci.
©2008 Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2008 Symphony Space, Inc.