From The Literary Hub:
If you’re excited for the February release of George Saunders’s very first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, let me just pile onto that excitement a little bit for you. Recently, TIME reported the insane cast of the audiobook version of the novel, which features some 166 characters. Accordingly, the audiobook will feature a large number of very notable persons: actors (Nick Offerman! Bradley Whitford! Julianne Moore! Jeffrey Tambor!), musicians (Carrie Brownstein! Jeff Tweedy!), and even writers (David Sedaris! Miranda July! Mary Karr! Saunders himself!). If the talent at hand here is any indication, it’s going to be incredible, and this is a particularly good thing, because this novel deserves it—and not only that, but it could have been easy to get wrong as an audiobook.
That is, it’s the unique format of the novel itself that makes this kind of out-of-the-box audiobook necessary. The story, which centers on the death of Willie Lincoln and his experience in the afterlife, watching his father’s visits to his grave, is told in a cacophony of voices, some presented as excerpts from actual texts (many of these texts are invented), and others as voices of the ghosts hanging around the graveyard, in general denial about their dead-ness (these, I feel safe saying, are all invented).
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
Spoon River Anthology. A Classic. Many voices. by Edgar Lee Masters….212 voices to be exact. 240-some ‘cacophony of voices’. In their voices from the afterlife. Ghosts speak their truths. Detailing how they all see the town and its wheeler dealers/ ordinary folk, tragedies, scandals, secrets. Published in 1915. Abridged versions played as theatre in most every school in the usa. The Spoon River taught in most schools as lit.
I loathe children’s stories that are narrated by multiple celebrity voices. It’s hard enough to do one voice well. But imo maybe this knockoff of Spoon River will be a nyt best sell. The dozens of other knockoffs over the last 102 years have been forgotten as dust. The Spoon River Anthology still shines as a psychological document that bears weight about the makeup of a small midwestern agri town long ago, the oddities and prevarications of human nature, still germane and right on in our times.
Old time radio:
https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
Audio dramas =/= audio book.
Hmmm, needs more ‘!’ thingies …
I’m underwhelmed. I enjoy books that are simply read well. I also enjoy audio dramas, but simply using many narrators doesn’t make an audio drama.
It’s not original either. Nor unique. Nor out of the box. There have been many audio books with many narrators, and many, many books presented with many voices, including some as excerpts of actual texts real or invented.
My reaction to the OP is suspicion of that much hype for something so banal. Pass.
cough radio plays cough