The American People, Vol. 1, Larry Kramer
The American People, Vol. 1, Larry Kramer
List: $29.95 | Sale: $20.97
Club: $14.97

The American People, Vol. 1
Search for My Heart

Author: Larry Kramer

Narrator: various narrators, Robertson Dean, Traber Burns, Keith Szarabajka, Ray Porter, Kate Reading, Laura Hicks, Grover Gardner, Bahni Turpin, Chris Patton, Kirsten Potter, Sean Runnette, MacLeod Andrews, Carrington MacDuffie, Richard Powers

Unabridged: 38 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/12/2015


Synopsis

The long-awaited new novel by America’s master playwright and activist—a radical reimagining of our history and our hopes and fearsForty years in the making, The American People embodies Larry Kramer’s vision of his beloved and accursed homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here, as only he can, he tells the heartbreaking and heroic story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease yet host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness.In this magisterial novel’s sweeping first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family outside Washington, DC, trying to get along in the darkest of times.The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love.

About Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer is an award-winning playwright and author and a celebrated public-health and gay-rights advocate. A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer has won numerous awards for his plays and in 2013 was named a Master American Dramatist by the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater. In 2014, the HBO adaptation of his play The Normal Heart won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.

About Robertson Dean

Robertson Dean has played leading roles on and off Broadway and at dozens of regional theaters throughout the country. He has a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from Yale. His audiobook narration has garnered ten AudioFile Earphones Awards. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he works in film and television in addition to narrating.

About Traber Burns

Traber Burns worked for thirty-five years in regional theater, including the New York, Oregon, and Alabama Shakespeare festivals. He also spent five years in Los Angeles appearing in many television productions and commercials, including Lost, Close to Home, Without a Trace, Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Gilmore Girls, and others.

About Keith Szarabajka

Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.

About Ray Porter

Ray Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator and fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Almost Famous, ER, and Frasier.

About Kate Reading

Kate Reading, named an AudioFile Golden Voice, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks across many genres, over a thirty–year plus career and won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. Among other awards, she has been recognized as an AudioFile Magazine Voice of the Century, Narrator of the Year, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and winner of an Publisher’s Weekly’s Listen-Up Award. She records at her home studio, Madison Productions, Inc., in Maryland.

About Laura Hicks

Laura Hicks is an Obie Award–winning actress who has appeared on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional theater, film, and television. A native New Yorker and a Juilliard graduate, she has performed throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, Austria, Italy, and Ireland.

About Grover Gardner

Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.

About Bahni Turpin

Bahni Turpin has guest starred in many television series, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Six Feet Under, and Cold Case. Her film credits include Brokedown Palace and Crossroads. She has won numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and three prestigious Audie Awards.

About Chris Patton

Chris Patton has narrated over seventy-five audiobooks. His voice can be heard narrating such titles as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the dystopian juggernaut Yesterday’s Gone, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series, and two titles by Joyce Carol Oates. Chris began his career in theater at age ten, and his voice-over career at twenty-nine. Since then, he has voiced over two hundred anime titles, numerous commercials and e-learning and industrial projects, and several video games. He’s also fronted a synthpop band called Paul Lynde Is Dead, written a teen urban fantasy about an emo vampire called Scene Immortal, and has appeared as a special guest at more than eighty-five pop-culture conventions.

About Kirsten Potter

Kirsten Potter has won several awards, including more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and been a three-time finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. Her work has been recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and by AudioFile magazine, among many others. She graduated with highest honors from Boston University and has performed on stage and in film and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy.

About Sean Runnette

Sean Runnette, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, has also directed and produced more than two hundred audiobooks, including several Audie Award winners. He is a member of the American Repertory Theater company and has toured the United States and internationally with ART and Mabou Mines. His television and film appearances include Two If by Sea, Cop Land, Sex and the City, Law & Order, the award-winning film Easter, and numerous commercials.

About MacLeod Andrews

MacLeod Andrews is an actor, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator who earned the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. He has starred in a number of independent short and feature films and is a member of the Rising Phoenix Repertory Company in New York City.

About Carrington MacDuffie

Carrington MacDuffie is a voice actor and recording artist who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has been a frequent finalist for the Audie Award, including for her original audiobook, Many Things Invisible. Alongside her narration work, she has released a new album of original songs, Only an Angel.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, and Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.


Reviews

There are currently no user reviews for this audiobook.

Quotes

“Kramer is a singular force, furious because he cares. He honestly confronts hard, unspoken truths and goes somewhere with them, which is a rare thing.” Publishers Weekly (boxed, signature review)

“Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as ‘You don’t just drop a penis like Tibby’s into the narrative and let it go’?” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)