Audiobooks by Dale Peck

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans twenty-five years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality. In 'Bliss,' a young man befriends the convicted felon who murdered his mother when he was only a child. In 'Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore,' a teenage boy fends off the advances of a five-year-old his mother babysits. And in 'Dues,' a man discovers that everything he owns is borrowed from someone else-including his time on earth. Walking the tightrope between tenderness and violence that has defined Peck's work since the publication of his first novel, Martin and John, through his most recent, Night Soil, What Burns reveals Peck's mastery of the short form.

Dale Peck (Author), Chelsea Stephens, Curt Bonnem (Narrator)

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The Law of Enclosures

This portrait of a marriage across the decades is “an astonishing work of emotional wisdom” (The New York Times). Beatrice and Henry—the parents of the protagonist of Dale Peck’s debut novel, Martin and John—are first drawn together when the teenage Henry is battling a brain tumor he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they’re still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again. Peck bisects the story of Henry and Beatrice’s marriage with a stunning fifty-page memoir about his own father, mother, and three stepmothers—which combines with the primary narrative to build an unforgettable and deeply moving book about the ways that family both creates and destroys us.

Dale Peck (Author), Carly Robins, Patrick Lawlor (Narrator)

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Now It's Time to Say Goodbye

“An utterly gripping thriller . . . and a highly sophisticated piece of literary legerdemain” from the Lambda Award–winning author of Night Soil (The New York Times). When the five hundreth person they know dies of AIDS, Colin and Justin flee New York City. They end up in Galatia, a Kansas town founded by freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War whose population is now divided, evenly but uneasily, between African Americans descended from the town’s founders and Caucasians who buy up more of the town’s land with each passing year. But within weeks of relocating, they are implicated in a harrowing crime, and discover that they can’t outrun their own tortured history, nor that of their new home. An encompassing, visionary, many-threaded work, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is an American novel of great scope and nearly mythological intensity. This is the third volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world. “[A] fascinating melodrama of sexual and racial confusion, conflict, and injustice.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Filled] with an emotional vengeance, dramatic breadth and observant fervency that brings his every gift to fruition.” —Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review “It is horrifying and funny and then too funny to be horrifying, or too horrifying to amuse. It is fiercely compelling and profoundly unpleasant. It is a virtuoso technical exercise that is also soul-music.” —The Boston Globe

Dale Peck (Author), Adenrele Ojo, Andrew Eiden, Angelo Di Loreto, Carly Robins, Jd Jackson, Joyce Bean, Patrick Lawlor, Ron Butler (Narrator)

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Martin and John

Dale Peck’s debut is a tour de force in which Martin and John find each other again and again: in a trailer park, a high-end jewelry store, a Kansas barn, and later, in New York City, living under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Though their names remain the same, their identities are constantly shifting, creating a fractured view of loss and desire in the early years of the AIDS crisis. Vaulting through self and history, Martin and John is one of the most remarkable novels to emerge from an America ravaged by disease, and one of the finest and most complex love stories of the ’90s. Martin and John is the first volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books which follow the character of John as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

Dale Peck (Author), Andrew Eiden (Narrator)

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Greenville

Inspired by a troubled family history, this “book of grace and dignity . . . will be around for a long, long time” (Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin). In this “terrific” novel, award-winning author Dale Peck recounts the childhood of his father, Dale Peck Sr. (Jonathan Safran Foer). Raised in poverty with seven brothers and sisters in suburban Long Island, terrorized by an abusive mother, Dale Sr.’s life changes when his alcoholic father dumps him at his uncle’s dairy farm in upstate New York. There, he begins to thrive, finding real love and connection with his Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bess. But ultimately, he is unable to outrun the chaos and violence of his old life.

Dale Peck (Author), Chris Andrew Ciulla (Narrator)

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Night Soil

Family secrets, sexual explorations, art world wealth, and legacies of racism and environmental destruction collide in this novel from Lambda Award-winning author Dale Peck. The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends. The Academy was founded by Judas’s ancestral grandfather, a nineteenth-century coal magnate. Driven by his mother’s secretive nature, Judas begins digging into his family’s history, and the Academy’s, until he unearths a series of secrets that cause him to question everything he thought he knew about his world.

Dale Peck (Author), Lee Warden (Narrator)

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The Garden of Lost and Found

A man inherits a valuable piece of Manhattan real estate, leading to unexpected consequences, in this “strange and wonderful novel” (Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland). James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street—a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice: He can sell the building for a small fortune—which will mean not only turning Nellydean out of the only home she’s known for more than forty years, but also forfeiting his only remaining connection to his mother. Then Nellydean’s niece shows up, looking for a place for herself and her unborn child—and an older man becomes smitten with James, even as James’s health begins to fail. Prize-winning author Dale Peck’s fiction has been called “terrific” by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Cunningham described his voice as “like an angel chewing on broken glass.” In The Garden of Lost and Found, he maps a tangled network of sexual, familial, and financial complications, over which hangs the specter of 9/11, and “tells the quintessential New York story with his delicious style and piercing ability to move” (Martha McPhee, author of Gorgeous Lies).

Dale Peck (Author), Lee Warden (Narrator)

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Visions and Revisions

Part memoir, part extended essay, Visions and Revisions is a revolutionary look at the 1990s AIDS epidemic from "one of our most adventurous and singularly talented writers working today" (San Francisco Chronicle). Reminiscent of Joan Didion's "White Album" or Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday, Visions and Revisionsis a collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era that puts the reader on the streets of NYC during the early 90s AIDS crisis, also touching on such diverse subjects as the serial murders of gay men, Peck's first loves upon coming out, and the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance. Visions and Revisionscapitalizes on a wave of increased interest in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the recent premiere of the groundbreaking AIDS documentary How to Survive a Plague. This is the first memoir by one of our most controversial contemporary writers, and it offers a jarring, street-level portrait of AIDS activism in the 1990s. Visions and Revisions will follow the Soho Press reissue of Dale Peck's debut novel, Martin and John, which received stunning critical praise, as well as our release of a new anthology he is editing. Novelist and critic Dale Peck's latest work--part memoir, part extended essay--is a foray into what the author calls "the second half of the first half AIDS epidemic," i.e., the period between 1987, when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded, and 1996, when the advent of combination therapy transformed AIDS from a virtual death sentence into a chronic manageable illness. Visions and Revisionshas been assembled from more than a dozen essays and articles that have been extensively rewritten and recombined to form a sweeping, collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era. Moving seamlessly from the lyrical to the analytical to the reportorial, Peck's story takes readers from the serial killings of gay men in New York, London and Milwaukee, through Peck's first loves upon coming out of the closet, to the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance. The narrative pays particular attention the words and deeds of AIDS activists, offering up a street-level portrait of ACT UP together with considerations of AIDS-centered fiction and criticism of the era, as well as intimate, sometimes elegiac portraits of artists, activists, and HIV-positive people Peck knew. Peck's fiery rhetoric against a government that sat on its hands for the first several years of the epidemic is tinged with the idealism of a young gay man discovering his political, artistic, and sexual identity. The result is a book that is as rich in ideas as it is in feeling. A visionary and indispensable work from one of America's most brilliant and controversial authors.

Dale Peck (Author), Jeff Woodman (Narrator)

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Shift

A new caliber of thriller set at the collision of '60s counterculture and the rise of dark forces in world government. Heroes creator Tim Kring injects history with a supernatural, hallucinogenic what-if. Set in the crucible of the 1960s, Shift is the story of Chandler Forrestal, a man whose life is changed forever when he is unwittingly dragged into a CIA mind-control experiment. After being given a massive dose of LSD, Chandler de-velops a frightening array of mental powers. With his one-in-a-billion brain chemistry, Chandler's heightened perception uncovers a plot to assassi-nate President Kennedy. Propelled to prevent the conspiracy of assassi-nation and anarchy, Chandler becomes a target for deadly forces in and out of the government and is pursued across a simmering landscape peopled by rogue CIA agents, Cuban killers, Mafia madmen, and ex-Nazi scientists…all the while haunted by a beautiful woman with her own scandalous past to purge, her own score to settle. Chased across America, will Chandler be able to harness his "shift" and rewrite history? Combining the nonstop style of Ludlum with the sinister, tangled conspiracies of DeLillo and Dick, and featuring cameos from Lee Harvey Oswald to Timothy Leary to J. Edgar Hoover, Shift is a thriller guaranteed to be equal parts heart-stopping and thought-provoking.

Dale Peck, Tim Kring (Author), Robert Forster (Narrator)

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Drift House: The First Voyage

New York-based author and teacher Dale Peck was inspired to write this amazing story after the events of September 11, 2001. The three Oakenfeld children-Susan, Charles and Murray-are perplexed. Their parents aren't letting them turn on the television. Something strange is going on in the city, that's for sure. And now Mom and Dad are sending them off to Canada to stay with their Uncle Farley-who they've never even met!

Dale Peck (Author), Richard Poe (Narrator)

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