Mink River, Brian Doyle
Mink River, Brian Doyle
2 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Mink River

Author: Brian Doyle

Narrator: David Drummond

Unabridged: 12 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/16/2014

Categories: Fiction, Family Life


Synopsis

In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman who is addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime is committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking . . .



This is the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and when the book ends, listeners will be more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

About Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author of six collections of essays, two collections of "proems," two nonfiction books, the short story collection Bin Laden's Bald Spot, the novella Cat's Foot, and the novels Mink River, The Plover, and Martin Marten.

Doyle's books have seven times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion, the American Scholar, the Sun, the Georgia Review, and in newspapers and magazines around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Age (in Australia). His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies.

Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the John Burroughs Award for Nature Essays, Foreword Reviewss' Novel of the Year award in 2011, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 (previous recipients include Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, and Mary Oliver).


Reviews

Goodreads review by Candi on October 12, 2019

4.5 stars "Sometimes I think that all people in all times must have had the same joys and sorrows... Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and that modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people’s hearts have always been the same, hap......more

Goodreads review by Vit on July 17, 2022

Mink River is a legend of the town… It is a myth of its fabulous inhabitants… Brian Doyle is a true lover of parlance… The novel is fizzing froth of words… Not an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise – there are no ancient stone houses perched at impossible angles over eye-popping vistas with l......more

Goodreads review by Carla on June 05, 2012

The language, the writing style, the people, the philosophy? All great. I can't help but cry. I'm crying for the people in the book who died, who were lost, who were injured. I'm crying because not everyone dies when they could have. I'm crying because some people heal. Because some children heal. A......more