Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Narrator: Scott Sowers
Unabridged: 0 hr 50 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: 11/30/2012
They will not be disappointed. His notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of three hundred fine collectors' copies and twenty-six leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here -- "Mescalito," published in Thompson's 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed -- has been available to the public, making the trade edition of Screwjack a major publishing event. "We live in a jungle of pending disasters," Thompson warns in "Mescalito," a chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969 -- including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it. Screwjack just gets weirder with its second offering, "Death of a Poet." As Thompson describes this trailer-park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: "Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train." The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale "Screwjack" so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man's burden: that "we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School ...and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again." Ostensibly written by Raoul Duke, "Screwjack" begins with an editor's note explaining of Thompson's alter ego that "the first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life...." "I am guilty, Lord," Thompson writes, "but I am also a lover -- and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you...." Nor has Hunter S. Thompson been to American literature. Quite the contrary: What the legendary Gonzo journalist proves with Screwjack is just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is, amid all the hilarity. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here "build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff....That is the Desired Effect".
In Our Time is an exploration of alienation, loss, and war that launched Ernest Hemingway into the American public consciousness and began his career as one of American’s foremost writers.Originally composed of six vignettes commissioned by Ez...
A bumper selection of eight more stories featuring the Norfolk cleric which delights his audience with his idiosyncratic sleuthing.
Benjamin Button was literally born an old man. He lived a backwards life, for his body grew younger as the years passed him by. Come and listen to the original, unabridged story by F. Scott Fitzgerald which inspired the movie.
A Stephen King ghost story in the grand tradition, Riding the Bullet is the ultimate warning about the dangers of hitchhiking. A college student's mother is dying in a Maine hospital. When he hitches a ride to see her, the driver is not who he appe...
A heart-opening tale of transformation.One winter evening a shoemaker finds a mysterious stranger naked and freezing by a shrine in his small village. The shoemaker rescues the man, and takes him home. Though the stranger won’t say where he ca...
In this all-new short story from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci, worlds collide when government assassin Will Robie is caught in the crossfire with Oliver Stone and the Camel Club.Will Robie is closing in on his next target whe...
In the mystical land of Arabia, there is secreted a magical door that opens with the command, “Open, Sesame!” Inside lays the plunder of a century of robbers and mercenaries. When Ali Baba witnesses 40 thieves open this door with the enc...
A mysterious island, shrouded in fear, evil, and darkness. Here the amoral General Zaroff hunts. And what, you ask, is the most dangerous game? It is the manner and substance of his nightly killings.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner’s short story, The Half Life, previously published in Redbook magazine is now available on audio. From Redbook ’s Red-Hot Read series, a short story by the New York Times #1 bestsellin...