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Listeners

by Leni Zumas
Listeners

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ISBN13: 9781935639299
ISBN10: 1935639293
Condition: Standard


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Awards

Staff Top 5s 2012 2012 Powell's Staff Top 5s

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  1. Featured in Indiespensable Volume 33!
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners explores a far-out world where a patchwork of memory, sensation, and imagination maps the flickering presence of ghosts.

This is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Quinn is thirtysomething, a survivor of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Twenty years later, she is in the midst of a decade-long slide down the other side of punk-rock stardom after her successful music career was abruptly halted. Sassy and smart, tough but broken, Quinn is at loose ends. She develops unique strategies for coping, but no matter what twisted tactic Quinn conjures to keep her psyche intact, she cannot keep the past away. The Listeners is about what lurks in the shadows and what happens when what's lurking insists on being seen.

Leni Zumas portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss, in all its grotesque beauty. From the first line the prose is glorious: pricklingly honest and hallucinatory, a lucid dream world realized. The Listeners marks the debut of a major American writer.

Review

"Zumas has already proven herself a remarkable maker of short stories. Now she has sustained and heightened the exhilaration of her writing in this striking novel." Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

Review

"Leni Zumas is a wonder, an alchemist, a witch. She brews a wild elixir in these stories, which take you where you never thought to go. Here are mothers infatuated with astronauts and dragons; here is a girl suckling elvers and owlets. Here is the body unspooling and nibbled at, the body undone and made fast again with the strength of the wish to be loved. Somethings timely in these stories and hip, and yet they let us fall out of time. Fall into sorrow and be lifted again. What a blessing — to succumb to Zumas's power, to these gorgeous, beguiling songs." Noy Holland, author of What Begins with Bird

Review

"Leni Zumas's visceral debut novel is a darkly funny and disturbing rager. Weaving a dreamlike coming-of-age story with the melancholic tales of a rock band self-destructing and a family's loss, Zumas's deft language careens through the lives of her characters with killer sentence after killer sentence. It's a crushing, dazzling performance." Kevin Sampsell, author of A Common Pornography

Review

"Almost no one does the right thing — or, at least, the expected thing — in these stories. You may find them funny (there's just enough humor to keep them upbeat of Carson McCullers), but there's also a very good chance they will unzip you, unsettle you....Synapses snap, crackle and pop while you're reading this strange collection." Los Angeles Times

Review

"I have never read stories like Leni Zumas's before and I can't get them out of my head. Her language is real sorcery — it dismantles the world you think you know and takes you to strange, fecund territories of the imagination. Sentence by sentence, Leni creates worlds so vivid and fever-bright that you forget you're reading words on a page and begin to see real plums, scars, black stars lashed to the bottom of canoes. Her characters are girls and boys in bad trouble, who feel as close to you and as far from you as the black sheep in your own family." Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Video

The Listeners from Luca Dipierro on Vimeo.


About the Author

Leni Zumas's story collection, Farewell Navigator, was published by Open City in 2008. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Keyhole, and New York Tyrant.

4.9 9

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 4.9 (9 comments)

`
KMJ , January 23, 2013 (view all comments by KMJ)
The characters (and their experiences) of this deftly written novel resonate with the reader long after reading. Best book of the year.

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Cynthia Coffee , January 14, 2013
Loved this beautiful and haunting novel.

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Dean Slader , January 02, 2013
I loved this book. Funny, quirky, a little disturbing & definitely original.

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Jerry Dale McFadden , January 01, 2013 (view all comments by Jerry Dale McFadden)
Loved this book! I would have never known about it if it weren't for Powell's. I'm always in search of new writers who clearly have their own voice. Zumas speaks a language all her own. I immediately had to pick up her book of short stories that came out prior to The Listeners. Of the 25 books or so that I managed to read this year, this one tops the list! Highly recommended.

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Katsuya , December 27, 2012 (view all comments by Katsuya)
Finally, some magic. I haven't read a book this magic since Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Leni Zumas' dream-like book is lucid enough to put you in the reality of her characters and plot, but with sentences and prose that glimmer in the subtle ways of our unconscious world. The Listeners tells the story of a tragedy of our tribes - family and friends - wrestling with demons imagined and real, and forging a path forward despite yourself and the obstacles of the past. This is a beautiful novel. Read it.

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Zulaikha , December 21, 2012 (view all comments by Zulaikha)
Wow. I found this book absolutely stunning. I was disturbed, felt Quinn's pain, wanted to escape at times but couldn't. A lot of the imagery was grotesque but never just for shock value. I loved the way the story was told in a nonlinear, cryptic way. If you need to know exactly what is happening at all times in a novel, run away from this one. If you're willing to allow characters and story to unfold and let you figure out what you want to make of it, grab this book and expect to finish it in less than two days. This is a book I will not soon forget. Poetic, enticing, much more than any summary you can read.

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KMJ , August 29, 2012 (view all comments by KMJ)
This is a remarkable novel that resonates on many levels. Standard themes are covered (family, loss, apathy, addiction, etc.), but they are done so by such a unique voice that it all seems fresh and innovative.

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min7586 , August 07, 2012 (view all comments by min7586)
Really enjoyed this book. I think my enjoyment was enhanced significantly by reading the interview with Leni Zumas from the Indiespensables, which added a lot to my understanding of the work and the characters...without this I think I would have had some problems connecting to the material, but with it I was able to feel that connection.

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Christopher McLaughlin , June 01, 2012 (view all comments by Christopher McLaughlin)
I love this book. Leni Zumas's masterful command of language makes for an engrossing, entertaining read. The minimal use of conventional exposition lets the story unfold on its own, unencumbered by strictures of chronology, logic, or tradition. This is one of the most powerfully written books I've read in a long time.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781935639299
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
05/15/2012
Publisher:
TIN HOUSE BOOKS
Pages:
352
Height:
1.10IN
Width:
4.80IN
Thickness:
1.25
Copyright Year:
2012
Author:
Leni Zumas
Author:
Leni Zumas
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

Ships free on qualified orders.
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List Price:$15.95
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