The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya audiobook

The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories

By Yukiko Motoya
Translated by Asa Yoneda
Read by various narrators

Blackstone Publishing 9781593766788

Unabridged

Format : Retail CD (In Stock)
  • 2 Formats: Retail CD
  • 2 Formats: MP3 CD
  • $29.95

    ISBN: 9781982600747

  • $29.95

    ISBN: 9781982600754

Runtime: 5.16 Hours
Category: Fiction/Short Stories
Audience: Adult
Language: English
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Summary

Summary

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize

Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize

A Paste Magazine Pick of Best Audiobooks of 2019 (So Far)

A Time Magazine Pick of the Best Books of the Month

A BBC Culture Magazine Pick of November Books

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week

A Huffington Post Pick of Books We Can't Wait to Read

A Vulture.com Pick of Most Anticipated Books of Fall

A Nylon Magazine Pick of Book You'll Want to Read This Fall

A Millions.com Pick of Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2018

A Literary Hub Pick of 16 Books to Read This November

An Indie Next List selection

A Bustle Pick of Most Anticipated Books by Indie Presses

A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique―which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon―until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won’t come out of the fitting room―and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband’s features are beginning to slide around his face―to match her own.

In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien―and, through it, find a way to liberation. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“Eleven stories that fuse the banality of the everyday with dreamlike elements of fantasy.” —Time
“At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface.” —New York Times
“A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor.” —Kirkus Reviews
“I wish I could live inside a Yukiko Motoya book. Her perception and wisdom make the everyday experience feel magical and weird and the strangest experience seem strangely familiar.” — Etgar Keret, award-winning author of The Seven Good Years
“A blissfully surreal collection…Reality blurs with the fantastic, offering a welcome escape hatch out of a seemingly impossibly bleak world.” —Huffington Post
“A diverse set of narrators skillfully delivers eleven stories about individuality, relationships, and liberation. Each narrator succeeds in portraying different characters in the collection…Flawlessly produced and narrated, this is an outstanding listen. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” —AudioFile
“Changing narrators from one story to the next gives the listener an even more tangible sense of delineation than they get in print…Motoya’s unsettling stories deliver a combination of internal revelation and external malaise, and the longest story, ‘An Exotic Marriage,’ is a particular standout with Natalie Naudus’s breathless delivery.” —Paste magazine
“Six narrators…take turns evenly voicing eleven unpredictable tales…With aural amplification, the mundane morphs into the bizarre, while the fantastic settles into the seemingly normal.” —Booklist (audio review)
“In eleven short stories, Yukiko Motoya pulls back the curtain from everyday lives, to reveal that beneath the most mundane lies a world bizarre and alien.” —Bustle
“An often surreal, at times disturbing, and reliably twisted look at the hidden sides of our everyday lives.” —Nylon
“The twelve hilarious fables in Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder look at everyday life so closely they turn it inside out…Yet the way she tilts reality always interrogates something bigger…This is thrilling work.” —Literary Hub
“An unusual but ingenious collection…Funny without collapsing into wackiness, these eccentric, beguiling stories are reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Kafka.” —Publishers Weekly

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Author

Author Bio: Yukiko Motoya

Author Bio: Yukiko Motoya

Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Her first story, “Eriko to zettai,” appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013; the Mishima Yukio Prize for How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : Retail CD, MP3 CD
Category: Fiction/Short Stories
Runtime: 5.16
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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