Bookseller Created
Southern Fiction
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores!
Start gifting
Send as gift
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
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
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayThe Violent Bear It Away
Narrator
Mark Bramhall
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
6 hours 15 minutes
Language
English
First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O’Connor’s work.
The orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, struggle to defy the prophecy of their dead uncle—that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber’s young son, Bishop. As Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop’s soul.
O’Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writer acutely alert to where the sacred lives and where it does not.
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. She was awarded the Best of the National Book Awards for Fiction in 2009, and she was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.
Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their “Best Voices of the Year.” He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
Featured in these playlists...
Reviews
“I am sure her books will live on and on in American literature.”
“There is very little contemporary fiction which touches the level of Flannery O’Connor at her best.”
“O’Connor’s second and last novel is a peculiar argument with itself about religious zealotry and faithlessness peopled by uniformly grotesque characters: the elderly Mason Tarwater, whose religious fanaticism borders on insanity; his nephew, Rayber, who is an atheist in reaction to his uncle; and Frank Tarwater, Mason’s unsentimental grand-nephew, whose soul the older men fight to claim. Narrator Mark Bramhall does nothing to soften the edges of O’Connor’s Southern Gothic characters. He attacks each with a gleeful zest that is practically propulsive. His performance will not necessarily make listeners like this novel, but it will no doubt keep them far more engaged than they may have been otherwise.”
“A specialist in southern horror stories.”
Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores!
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks