Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

A Horse Walks into a Bar

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Joe Barrett

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Translator Jessica Cohen
Length 5 hours 49 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Summary

Random House presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, read by Joe Barrett.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017


The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic โ€“ charming, erratic, repellent โ€“ exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.

A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesnโ€™t know whether to laugh or cry โ€“ and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why heโ€™s been summoned to this performance.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

Unrelentingly claustrophobicโ€ฆ The violence that A Horse Walks Into A Bar explores is more private and intimate. Its central interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the selfโ€ฆ Strategic weaving together of manic humour and tearsโ€ฆ Searing and poignant. Brilliant, blisteringโ€ฆ With Dovaleh, Grossman has created a character whoโ€™s captivating and horrific and a stand-up routine thatโ€™s disgusting and authentically human. I can hardly say how the book achieves its bewitching effects. It all happened so fast. Unless pop lyricists have the lock on the Nobel prize in literature from now on, then a leading future candidate must be David Grossman. Much of it is extremely funny, but itโ€™s also tightly controlled and carefully pacedโ€ฆ Few writers hold a more unflinching mirror up to Israeli society than Grossmanโ€ฆ [A Horse Walks into a Bar] is a work of sombre brilliance and disquieting rage, an unsparing exploration of the seductive spell of escapism and โ€œthe corruption that is in cynicism.โ€ This is a virtuoso piece of writing, a whirlwind of laughter and tears that sucks you in and makes you hold your breath. Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting