Audiobooks have become such a driving economic force in the publishing industry that they have spawned their own dedicated networks of promotion, circulation, and consecration. Audiobook rights are now a staple of book contracts, changing the terms of negotiation. Their sales are counted and listed by The New York Times. They even have their own literary prizes, the Audies and the Golden Voice Awards.
The audiobook boom is also changing how writers work. In 2021, novelist Jess Walter and narrator Edoardo Ballerini released The Angel of Rome, a jointly written, two-hour “Audible Original,” born of the pair’s previous work together. Walter is writing lines with Ballerini’s voice in mind, and Ballerini is so familiar with Walter’s work that he is able to add some lines himself; the idea of this collaboration is thus woven into the born-audio novella from the start.
I sleep with my very own glacier that night. Try it sometime if you want to know just how insignificant you can be. Melting throughout day, the ice releases what sounds like barks, then pistol shots. It groans, a sound like no other, and shoots out thick streams of snowmelt that arc high above, luminous in the half-light of a dim reeling sun, before plunging down, down into the dark lake.
The next day I climb the rock pile for two hours but make it barely halfway up. The sweat soaking my shirt comes as much from fear as exertion. The vast field of boulders bows alarmingly in the center, perilously close to giving way. Crossing that stretch seems much riskier than waiting for the helicopter, but even that option now seems like a long shot.
Michael Farris Smith forcefully illustrates what a stylist he is, delving deep into a suspense-laden, emotional story about people and a landscape on the edge in “Salvage This World.”
A main theme within The Albatross – as evidenced by the title – is the unlikelihood of succeeding in something the second time around. The rarest of miracle manoeuvres is described by golf aficionado Josh as being ‘very deliberate, very thoughtful, one superb shot followed by another’. The same could be said of this book.
At dusk, orphans flock to the abandoned chapel,
an assembly formed by starvation, from scabs & stuttering ribs,
memories of parents slamming doors to ruined flats