
The Fortress of Solitude
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Narrated by:
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David Aaron Baker
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By:
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Jonathan Lethem
About this listen
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions - what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money - are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore.
This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist. This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives.
This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.
This is the story Jonathan Lethem was born to tell. This is The Fortress of Solitude.
©2002 Jonathan Lethem (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
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When in doubt, don't.
- By Susan C. S. on 10-31-09
By: Jonathan Lethem
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White Noise
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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Infinite Jest
- By: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 64 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
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With footnotes!
- By George Saris on 04-25-24
By: David Foster Wallace, and others
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Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
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A beautiful nightmare
- By Ryan on 07-11-11
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Erasure
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days."
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A Rollercoaster That Never Descends
- By Amazon Customer on 01-07-24
By: Percival Everett
What listeners say about The Fortress of Solitude
Highly rated for:
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- T. C. Pile
- 11-16-08
Brilliant
The specificity of the music references, the accuracy of the slang and the poignancy of words unsaid, the feel of a place and time delivered as if by sense transmission, the roots and rise of the crack epidemic, the escape from the confusion and loneliness of adolescence into worlds of superheroes - "Fortress of Solitude" delivers on so many levels at once that I found myself backing up and listening again over and over to my favorite parts trying to gather it all in. This is a masterful piece of fiction that I know I will return to.
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- AFaceInTheCrowd
- 02-27-22
It’s not a novel, it’s a song
I liked this book by Johnathan Leitham even more than Motherless Brooklyn, the characters so vivid and the plot flowing steadily without gimmicks. But it may be that these qualities do not come so much from the novel itself but from an absolutely superb performance of the narrator. To my ear the voices are so true to the author’s descriptions, so flawless, recognizable and diverse that I cannot imagine this book in any other form, only as performed on this recording. Bravo, David Aaron Baker!
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- Jake Moses
- 02-18-18
Brilliant
The book amazing. The dynamic between white and black cultures is captured with such realism and honesty. It's hilarious and beautiful. Also, possibly the best narration I've ever heard for a book (and I've listened to more than 100).
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- steve liu
- 02-09-25
Narrator
Narration nailed it! Love the fantastical elements. I enjoyed it immensely! Highly recommend. Check it out. Ok bye
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Overall
- Noah
- 12-24-03
A Treasure!
I listened to this book a few months ago, yet it remains with me. I might even listen to it again as there are so many dimensions to Lethem's work. In addition to an interesting plot, the author presents rich information about growing up in Brooklyn, education, grafitti, music, prison life, and neighborhood development. Although it's a long listen, there is much magic in the content and the performance.
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2 people found this helpful
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- jacquelyn
- 05-14-13
One of the best books I've ever listened to.
Which character – as performed by David Aaron Baker – was your favorite?
Mingus Roode. I love him. When I wasn't listening I was wondering what was happening to him.
Any additional comments?
This is one of the only books I've ever read/listened to that I felt had no cheesy filler parts. Most books have parts that you can take seriously, and parts where you can tell the writer is filling in or trying to bring things together, you know where you stop hearing the story and you're just watching the writer write feeling a little sorry for him/her. This book was real heart felt story telling all the way through. These characters are real people, even though they aren't.. They could be any one of us is what I mean. Just read it.
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Overall
- Andrew Woodward
- 08-04-06
Historical Fiction Fatasy
I thought this book was an excellent portrayal about the lives of Brooklyn kids growing up in the seventies. True, the plot is a wider scope than some people may desire but it is unique and the character development is superb.
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- Orca
- 10-10-15
Better Read
I couldn't stick with the audio version, but perhaps one day I'll try again. It's a great book, which was better read.
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Overall
- Jana
- 11-25-03
Perfect! Maybe my favorite book ever
This book was fantastic, from the fascinating story to the fabulous writing (I agree with the previous reviewer who was so "wowed" by it), to the reader who managed to capture perfectly the wide range of voices and personalities of the characters. Even though there is some magic realism in the story, I found everything as believable as a memoir. This is a book I'm going to buy in hardcover and give for gifts this Christmas. I'm looking forward to my 23 and 28 year old sons reading it as so much describes their urban schools and the world and people they knew, including the graffiti painters, and the boys who went off into drugs and incarceration and the ones who survived, damaged or resilient, to grow up.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Lacy
- 08-25-18
Curious and ponderous
Lethem, in The Fortress of Solitude, gives us an imaginative, ponderous story. Page after page of extraordinary writing, sensitive to the aspects of the characters, and viscerally distilled sentences parsed on a razor’s edge. The characters are painted boldly and move the plot authentically; very memorable characters. The audible performance is very good.
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1 person found this helpful