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Start giftingThe Day of the Locust
Narrator
Grover Gardner
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Length
5 hours 21 minutes
Language
English
Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the best one hundred English-language novels by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song “Day of the Locusts” in homage, and Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes—actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it’s the bit actress Faye Greener who steals the spotlight with her wildly convoluted dreams of stardom: “I’m going to be a star some day—if I’m not I’ll commit suicide.”
Nathanael West (1903–1940)—novelist, screenwriter, playwright—was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life would prove prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. He died in a car crash in 1940, while returning to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year."
Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
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Reviews
“This is the Hollywood that needs telling about. It’s a fine job. I got a kick out of it.”
“It’s brilliant, savage, and arresting—a truly good novel.”
“West’s humor is of course not at the expense of the victim. It is a horselaugh at a world that is too ugly and bitter to be dealt with in any other way.”
“Los Angeles has been the subject of, and setting for, many fine novels, yet The Day of the Locust still feels like the single best-achieved piece of fiction the city has inspired.”
“West’s Day of the Locust, a sun-blazed Polaroid of its time, seems permanently oracular.”
“Narrator Grover Gardner expertly portrays a wide cast of characters who live on the margins of 1930s Hollywood in this prescient novel…Listeners will both chuckle and grimace at Gardner’s uncanny ability to mine the humor, pathos, and callousness of characters who range from shrewd aspiring actress Faye Greener to socially awkward Midwestern accountant Homer Simpson and obnoxious child actor Adore Loomis. The story is presented in vignettes, moving from one overlapping set of characters to another until a fuller picture emerges of those who see themselves as being cheated out of a secure and loving future.”
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