Days of Awe

Stories

By: A.M. Homes

Narrated by: full cast

Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

A razor-sharp story collection from a writer who is always "furiously good" (Zadie Smith, best-selling author of Swing Time).

With her signature humor and compassion, A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in this collection - exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.

In "A Prize for Every Player", a man is nominated to run for president by the customers of a big box store, while he and his family do their weekly shopping. At a conference on genocide(s) in the title story, old friends rediscover themselves and one another - finding spiritual and physical comfort in ancient traditions. And in "Hello Everybody" and "She Got Away", Homes revisits a Los Angeles family obsessed with the surfaces and frightened of what lives below.

In the nearly three decades since her seminal debut collection The Safety of Objects, Homes has been celebrated by listeners and critics alike as one of our boldest and most original writers, acclaimed for her psychological accuracy and "satire so close to the truth it's terrifying" (Ali Smith). Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is a major new addition to her body of visionary, fearless, outrageously funny work.

Audiobook table of contents:

• Brother On Sunday, read by Mark Bramhall
• Whose Story Is It and Why Is It Always On Her Mind?, read by Kimberly Farr
• Days of Awe, read by Rebecca Lowman
• Hello Everybody, read by Devon Sorvari
• All Is Good Except for the Rain, read by Cassandra Campbell
• The National Caged Bird Show, read by Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Will Damron, Kimberly Farr, Rebecca Lowman, Fred Sanders, and Devon Sorvari
• Your Mother Was a Fish, read by Cassandra Campbell
• The Last Good Time, read by Will Damron
• Be Mine, read by Rebecca Lowman
• A Prize for Every Player, read by Will Damron
• Omega Point, read by Kimberly Farr
• She Got Away, read by Devon Sorvari

Cover Photograph: “White Sands National Monument” © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

©2015 A. M. Homes (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . Days of Awe is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . . Days of Awe feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.” (Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review)

“Exuberantly transgressive.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature - with irreverent wit, devastating empathy and haunting shocks . . . Days of Awe [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.” (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon)