Audiobooks by E. L. Doctorow

A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow—the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” This power is apparent everywhere in these stories: the bravery and self-delusion of people seeking the American dream; the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer people false hope, or an actual glimpse of greatness. In “A House on the Plains,” a mother has a plan for financial independence, which may include murder. In “Walter John Harmon,” a man starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction. “Jolene: A Life” follows a teenager who escapes her home for Hollywood on a perilous quest for success. “Heist,” the account of an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith, was expanded into the bestseller City of God. “The Water Works,” about the underbelly of 1870s New York, grew into a brilliant novel. “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” is a corollary to the renowned novel and includes Doctorow’s revisions. These fifteen stories, written from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, and selected, revised, and placed in order by the author himself shortly before he died in 2015, are a testament to the genius of E. L. Doctorow. Read by John Rubinstein with Joshua Swanson and Jesse Bernstein "Willi" read by John Rubinstein "The Hunter" read by John Rubinstein "The Writer in the Family" read by Jesse Bernstein "Heist" read by John Rubinstein "The Water Works" read by John Rubinstein "Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate" read by John Rubinstein "Jolene: A Life" read by John Rubinstein "Baby Wilson" read by John Rubinstein "A House on the Plains" read by Joshua Swanson "Walter John Harmon" read by John Rubinstein "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" read by John Rubinstein "Wakefield" read by John Rubinstein "Edgemont Drive" read by John Rubinstein "Assimilation" read by John Rubinstein "All the Time in the World" read by John Rubinstein Praise for E. L. Doctorow “He has rewarded us, these forty-five years, with a vision of ourselves, as a people, a vision possessed of what I might call ‘aspirational verve’—he sees us clearly and tenderly, just as we are, but also sees past that—to what we might, at our best, become.”—George Saunders “Doctorow did not so much write fiction about history as he seemed to occupy history itself. He owned it. He made it his own.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates “On every level, [Doctorow’s] work is powerful. . . . His sensitivity to language is perfectly balanced, and complemented by a gigantic vision.”—Jennifer Egan “[Doctorow wrote] with such stunning audacity that I can still remember my parents’ awed dinner-table conversation, that summer, about a novel they were reading, called Ragtime, that went up to the overgrown wall enclosing the garden of fiction and opened the doorway to history.”—Michael Chabon “Doctorow’s prose tends to create its own landscape, and to become a force that works in opposition to the power of social reality.”—Don DeLillo “A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.”—Joyce Carol Oates

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Jesse Bernstein, John Rubinstein, Joshua Swanson (Narrator)

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Loon Lake: A Novel

It is the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a passionate young man from Paterson, New Jersey, leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds, on a cold and lonely night in the Adirondack Mountains, is a vision of life so different from his own that it changes his destiny, leading him from the side of a railroad track to a magical place called Loon Lake. Permissions: FIVE HUNDRED MILES Words and Music by HEDY WEST © 1964 (Renewed) UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC. and ATZAL MUSIC, INC. All Rights Administered by UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved Excerpts from "Exactly Like You" by Dorothy Fields, copyright© MCMXXX and copyright renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., New York, NY

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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Welcome to Hard Times

Hard Times is the name of a town in the barren hills of the Dakota Territory. To this town there comes one day one of the reckless sociopaths who wander the West to kill and rape and pillage. By the time he is through and has ridden off, Hard Times is a smoking ruin. The de facto mayor, Blue, takes in two survivors of the carnage–a boy, Jimmy, and a prostitute, Molly, who has suffered unspeakably–and makes them his provisional family. Blue begins to rebuild Hard Times, welcoming new settlers, while Molly waits with vengeance in her heart for the return of the outlaw. Here is E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, a searing allegory of frontier life that sets the stage for his subsequent classics. “A forceful, credible story of cowardice and evil.” –The Washington Post “We are caught up with these people as real human beings.” –Chicago Sun-Times “Dramatic and exciting.” –The New York Times “Terse and powerful.” –Newsweek “A taut, bloodthirsty read.” –The Times Literary Supplement “A superb piece of fiction.” –The New Republic

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), John Rubinstein (Narrator)

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World's Fair: A Novel

"Something close to magic." The Los Angeles TimesThe astonishing novel of a young boy's life in the New York City of the 1930s, a stunning recreation of the sights, sounds, aromas and emotions of a time when the streets were safe, families stuck together through thick and thin, and all the promises of a generation culminate in a single great World's Fair . . .

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), John Rubinstein (Narrator)

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Billy Bathgate: A Novel

To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

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City of God

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery-and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration-is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America's preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time. Praise for City of God "A grander perspective on the universe . . . a novel that sets its sights on God."-The Wall Street Journal "Dazzling . . . The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole."-Time "Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days."-Los Angeles Times "Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence."-Chicago Tribune "One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years . . . Reading City of God restores one's faith in literature."-The Houston Chronicle From the Hardcover edition.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), John Rubinstein (Narrator)

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Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories

Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In The Writer in the Family, a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced into deceiving a relative through letters. In Wili, an early-twentieth-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. In The Foreign Legation, a girl and an act of political anarchy collide with devastating results. These and other stories flow into the novella Lives of the Poets, in which the images and themes of the earlier stories become part of the narrator's unsparing confessions about his own mind, offering a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Jesse Bernstein, John Rubenstein, John Rubinstein (Narrator)

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Andrew's Brain: A Novel

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, AND THE THELEGRAPH This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times - funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrews Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history." Praise for Andrews Brain "Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorows remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks - the best kind." - USA Today "Cunning [and] sly . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that hes both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: Hes a fool, but hes no innocent." - The New York Times Book Review "A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [Andrews Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair." - The Sunday Times (London) "Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn." - San Francisco Chronicle "Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons theyve never imagined." - The Plain Dealer "Andrews ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous." - Associated Press "[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness." - More "A quick and acutely intelligent read." - Entertainment WeeklyFrom the Hardcover edition.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Narrator)

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Sweet Land Stories

One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live. Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security. Two of these stories have already won awards as the best fiction of the year published in American periodicals, and two have been chosen for annual best-story anthologies. Composed in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), John Rubinstein, Joshua Swanson (Narrator)

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The Book of Daniel

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life-marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships-with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents' innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel's interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case-lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country-its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel. Cover art: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Art ( c ) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

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The Waterworks: A Novel

“An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.” –The Washington Post Book World One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.” “Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow’s] poetic imagination.” –The New York Times Book Review “Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders.” –Boston Sunday Herald “Enthralling . . . a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last.” –Chicago Sun-Times “An immense, extraordinary achievement.” –San Francisco Chronicle

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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All the Time in the World

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World's Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow "distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world". A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family. A college graduate takes a dishwasher's job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money. A husband and wife's tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there. An urbanite out on his morning run suspects that the city in which he's lived all his life has transmogrified into another city altogether. These are among the wide-ranging creations in this stunning collection, resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous Doctorow classics, All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.

E. L. Doctorow, E.L. Doctorow (Author), Jesse Bernstein, John Rubinstein, Joshua Swanson (Narrator)

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