Skip content
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch
The Beautiful Miscellaneous by Dominic Smith
  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
Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, youโ€™ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

The Beautiful Miscellaneous

$17.96

Retail price: $19.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Richard Powers
Length 9 hours 44 minutes
Language English
  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

From the critically acclaimed award-winning author of The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre comes this moving story of a boy trapped in the shadow of his father's genius.

Nathan Nelson is the ordinary son of a brilliant physicist. From an early age, his father has doggedly prodded him toward greatness, enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps and teaching him college algebra. By the time Nathan is seventeen, hopes for a late-blooming prodigy seem dashed. Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. A tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with a profoundly altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information. Nathan's father, seeking an application for the new talent, sends him to a research institute where, amid misfits and savants, Nathan tries to find a purpose for the new way he perceives the world.

Dominic Smith is the author of The Beautiful Miscellaneous. He is a former recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. He grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas, where he received an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers.

Richard Powersย has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book,ย The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, youโ€™ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

“With an exquisite ear not just for language but for emotional truth as well, Dominic Smith has written an ambitious and strikingly unusual tale about what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of a brilliant father and under the force of his expectations. I finished this book in awe of Smith’s imagination—and of his enormous heart.”

โ€œ[Smith] conjures Nathanโ€™s colorful, mysterious new existence with vivid detail. The real story in this touching, gracefully wrought novel lies around the edges of the plot. It is really about the weight of family dreams and expectations.โ€

“Fantastic…an utterly fresh look at how a child can grow beyond parental expectations and find the genius of being himself.”

“Garcia, a stage actor by training, treats Smith’s novel as an extended monologue to be performed, summoning the moods and sensations of its prose via subtle shifts of emphasis. The result is a performance-driven audiobook, rendered in minimalist fashion.”

โ€œThis unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures.โ€

“[A] finely modulated second novel…a luminous addition to novels about fathers and sons.”

Expand reviews
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch