Travis Young has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is North American Lake Monsters.
North American Lake Monsters
Summary
In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves. Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, or ex-wives, and sometimes they wear the faces we see in our mirrors. The people in these stories - ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids seduced by extremism - are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they’re ruined; sometimes redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, and terrifyingly human. Even at their most monstrous.
©2013 Nathan Ballingrud (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Torment Saint
Summary
Elliott Smith was one of the most gifted songwriters of the 90s, adored by fans for his subtly melancholic words and melodies. The sadness had its sources in life. There was trauma from an early age, years of drug abuse, and a chronic sense of disconnection that sometimes seemed self-engineered. Smith died violently in LA in 2003, under what some believe to be questionable circumstances, of stab wounds to the chest. By this time fame had found him, and record-buyers who shared the listening experience felt he spoke directly to them from beyond: astute, damaged, lovelorn, fighting, until he could fight no more. And yet, although his intimate lyrics carried the weight of truth, Smith remained unknowable. In Torment Saint, William Todd Schultz gives us the first proper biography of the rock star, a decade after his death, imbued with affection, authority, sensitivity, and long-awaited clarity. Torment Saint draws on Schultz's careful, deeply knowledgeable readings and insights, as well as on more than 150 hours of interviews with close friends from Texas to Los Angeles, lovers, bandmates, music peers, managers, label owners, and recording engineers and producers. This audiobook unravels the remaining mysteries of Smith's life and his shocking, too early end. It will be, for Smith's legions of fans and listeners still discovering his songbook, an indispensable examination of his life and legacy.
©2013 William Todd Schultz (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Fur People
Summary
When Sunny Lytle is evicted for keeping her fur family of thirteen dogs, eight cats, two ferrets, and two rabbits in her apartment in Kentucky, she packs them into a converted school bus and returns to her hometown, DeLeon Springs, Florida. Her dream is to create a no-kill animal rescue, but survival soon takes top priority. Camping in the woods is no longer the peaceful haven of her teen years, and the brutal demands of nature and the threatening intervention of Rita, a well-meaning veterinarian, create an ongoing struggle. Buck, a quirky homeless man, becomes her brave ally. Reconnecting with her alcoholic father and her high school boyfriend Jason revive fear and desire for Sunny. Relationships for Rita and Jason, and Sunny’s married Kentucky boyfriend Bear, rise and fall along the battlefront between societal values and passionate love for animals. To honor their memories, all animal names used in the novel are of deceased fur friends beloved by their families. True anecdotes of animal-human interaction enliven the scenes.
©2013 Vicki Hendricks (P)2013 Audible, Inc.