PDF Ebook A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
Well, when else will you find this possibility to obtain this book A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James soft file? This is your good opportunity to be below as well as get this wonderful book A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James Never ever leave this book before downloading this soft documents of A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James in web link that we provide. A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James will truly make a good deal to be your best friend in your lonely. It will certainly be the most effective partner to boost your company and also pastime.
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
PDF Ebook A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James. Offer us 5 minutes as well as we will reveal you the best book to read today. This is it, the A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James that will be your ideal option for far better reading book. Your 5 times will certainly not invest wasted by reading this web site. You can take guide as a source making better idea. Referring guides A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James that can be located with your demands is at some time difficult. However here, this is so simple. You could locate the most effective point of book A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James that you can review.
Yet below, we will certainly show you astonishing thing to be able always read the book A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James any place and whenever you occur and also time. The publication A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James by simply can aid you to recognize having guide to review every single time. It will not obligate you to constantly bring the thick e-book anywhere you go. You could merely maintain them on the device or on soft data in your computer to constantly read the area at that time.
Yeah, hanging around to read guide A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James by online can likewise offer you favorable session. It will certainly relieve to stay connected in whatever condition. Through this can be a lot more intriguing to do as well as easier to check out. Now, to get this A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James, you could download and install in the link that we supply. It will certainly help you to get very easy means to download the publication A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James.
The e-books A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James, from easy to challenging one will be a quite helpful works that you can take to alter your life. It will certainly not provide you adverse declaration unless you don't obtain the definition. This is undoubtedly to do in checking out a publication to overcome the meaning. Frequently, this publication entitled A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James is read because you actually similar to this sort of book. So, you could obtain much easier to comprehend the perception and significance. Once again to constantly remember is by reviewing this e-book A Brief History Of Seven Killings, By Marlon James, you can satisfy hat your curiosity begin by completing this reading publication.
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters-assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts-A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation.
- Sales Rank: #1142978 in Books
- Published on: 2014-10-15
- Released on: 2014-10-15
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 22
- Dimensions: 5.30" h x 1.10" w x 6.40" l,
- Running time: 7200 seconds
- Binding: Audio CD
- 1560 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2014: This is a book that I did not expect to enjoy. Having finished it—and feeling, as I do now, that A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the best books I’ve read all year—I went back and identified the reasons why I did not expect to like it. Reason #1— The story is an oral history told in multiple voices: that’s true, but James’ enormous talent makes the multiple voices work. Reading the novel is an immersive experience—the characters are real, they are engaging, and James uses them to look at all sides of the story. Yes, the multiple points-of-view are difficult at first, but each voice quickly distinguishes itself as unique and important; the payoff is a novel of sweeping scope and emotion. Reason #2—Many of the characters speak in Jamaican patois: like many readers, I’m not a big fan of dialect on the page. Tell me what they say, not necessarily how they say it. But James pulls it off with remarkable ease. I expected the patois to start to grate once I got further into the book. It never did. The language only added to my understanding of the story and its characters. Reason #3—Violence: this is not an easy book, particularly when it comes to violence. It starts early, and there’s a lot of it (certainly more than seven killings). But it’s there for a reason. By showing the violence, the poverty, and the struggle to survive in 70s Jamaica, James illustrates how the ghetto can change a person. Over time, we see how every man and woman is changed. Reason #4 –It’s about Jamaica: I hesitate to admit that I wasn’t initially interested in a book set in Jamaica. Am I just not interested in a world so different from mine? Whatever the underlying reason, I was wrong to think that way. I could take the easy route and say that this novel is about something more than Jamaica, but that seems obvious. All I can say is: these people were real to me. And like all great novels, James’ work drew me in, entertained me, and changed me in ways I could not have anticipated. –Chris Schluep
Review
“[Marlon James] is a virtuoso …[the novel is] an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America’s participation in that history. …the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it’s more than that….It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley’s, but like the tumult he couldn’t stop.”
—New York Times Book Review
�
“Nothing short of awe-inspiring.”
—Entertainment Weekly
�
“How to describe Marlon James’s monumental new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings? It’s like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting—a testament to Mr. James’s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.”
—The New York Times
�
“[A] tour de force… [an] audacious, demanding, inventive literary work.”
—Wall Street Journal
�
“Rendered with virtuosic precision and deep empathy.”
–Time
�
“Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history…This compelling, not-so-brief history brings off a social portrait worthy of�Diego Rivera, antic and engag�, a fascinating tangle of the naked and the dead.”
—The Washington Post
“A strange and wonderful novel…Mr. James’s chronicle of late 20th-century Jamaican politics and gang wars manages consistently to shock and mesmerise at the same time.”
—The Economist �
“James has written a dangerous book, one full of lore and whispers and history… [a] great book... James nibbles at theories of who did what and why, and scripts Marley’s quest for revenge with the pace of a thriller. His achievement, however, goes far beyond opening up this terrible moment in the life of a great musician. He gives us the streets, the people, especially the desperate, the Jamaicans whom Marley exhorted to: ‘Open your eyes and look within:/ Are you satisfied with the life your living?’”
—The Boston Globe
�
“Thrilling, ambitious…Both intense and epic.”
—Los Angeles Times
�
“A�prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica.”
—The New Yorker
�
“I highly recommend you pick [A Brief History of Seven Killings] up. As a book of many narrators, this novel reminds me of Roberto Bolano's�The Savage Detectives.”
—NPR, All Things Considered
�
“An impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity—and if they have, only briefly.”
—Chicago Tribune
�
“A sweeping novel that touches on family, friendship, celebrity, art, sexuality, ghetto politics, geopolitics, drug trade, gender, race and more, sending the reader from Jamaica to New York via Miami and Cuba and back.”
—Newsweek
�
“Like a capacious 19th-century novel crossed with a paranoid Don DeLillo conspiracy-theory thriller…the book rewards time spent, bringing a complex perspective on violence, corruption, and the untidiness of humanity to vivid life and astonishing detail. It makes you want to rush out and read everything else James has written.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
�
“The way James uses language is amazing….Vigorous, intricate and captivating,�A Brief History of Seven Killings�is hard to put down.”
—Ebony �
�
“A gripping tale in which music, drugs, sex, and violence collide with explosive results.”
—Bustle
�
“James’s masterful novel radiates; [it’s] a character-driven tale that takes place in a maelstrom of guns, drugs and politics.”
—Playboy
�
“Brilliantly executed… The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
About the Author
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
Robertson Dean has recorded hundreds of audiobooks in almost every genre. He's been nominated for several Audie Awards, won nine Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of 2010. He lives in Los Angeles, where he records books and acts in film, TV, and (especially) on stage.
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
Most helpful customer reviews
90 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
The most challenging novel I've read this year
By Mike W.
This was probably the most challenging novel I've read in several years. Who am I kidding? There's no probably about it. Marlon James has constructed an incredibly complex story, and it took every bit of memory available to me to keep up. He was kind enough to include a cast of characters, but I made it a point to refer to it as little as possible, opting instead to try and follow the story under my own power.
Add to the story's complexity the fact that most of the characters are from the ghettos of Kingston, and speak in a patois that takes some serious acclimation initially, and will slow your reading speed to a crawl at times. Amazingly though, after spending nearly a week with these characters, I felt like I had picked up the meanings quite well and could read those sections much quicker. Strangely, for me, this adaptation was the most rewarding aspect of this particular reading experience. In fact, as much respect as I now have for Marlon James' talent, I have to admit that I did not actually enjoy this novel, and found it made for an almost constantly uncomfortable reading experience.
The last time I felt the inability to enjoy such a well written book, I was reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a Pulitzer finalist. Both books require the reader to spend most of their time in very difficult places. By difficult I mean places where innocents suffer a great deal of agony and injustice, and both books left me feeling a certain hopelessness from which I felt the reader was never released. That may well be James' intention, and the fact that he could take me to such places and make them feel so real as to make me uncomfortable is a testament to his talents.
This novel contains a great deal of incredibly graphic violence (including rape), and in fact I cannot name a more graphically violent novel that I've read in the past few years. Perhaps Philip Meyers' "The Son" comes close? There is also a lot of quite graphic sex, and since the majority of the novel's many characters are hardcore criminals, the language is very often coarse throughout the story. The number of such moments are what makes it difficult for me to recommend the book to anyone whose taste and tolerance for such things I do not know well. But the novel seems to me to have been an honest one, and as you wallow in the depths and the dregs with these gangsters, you sense the suffering from which they were born, and and begin to understand their Machiavellian existence. Again, James was able to take me to some places I've certainly never been, but I can't necessarily say I'm glad I went there.
Overall, this is a brilliantly executed novel by a man who possesses a great deal of talent, and yet it is a book that is likely to prove a challenging read to most, for the reasons I've listed and more. I can't say that I'm happy to have read it, but I can certainly appreciate the art that James has created, and I do take some personal satisfaction in having followed such an intricate story to its end. Reading difficult fiction isn't always enjoyable, but it is usually beneficial, and for that I can say I'm grateful to have read A Brief History of Seven Killings.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
An epic work
By Peter J. Orvetti
"A Brief History of Seven Killings" is an epic, intense, and awe-inspiring book. The comparisons to James Joyce and "As I Lay Dying" are apt and deserved.
A caution: This novel has multiple narrators (one of whom changes names several times), lengthy stream-of-consciousness passages, and is written with a great reliance on Jamaican patois and with references to events that may be unfamiliar to many readers. In short, it is a tough read. I started it and got about 50 pages in and realized I had no idea what I had read, so I put it aside, read some lengthy reviews and pieces of literary criticism about the book, and then started over. That was time well-spent, since after that I quickly became immersed in the book and enjoyed it thoroughly.
The first half of the book, leading up to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (referred to only as "The Singer", which gets to be a bit cloying), is stronger than the second half, dealing with the deaths of those involved in the attempt. This is not because those latter stories are uninteresting -- they are -- but because James is at his best in fully painting the world of December 1976 Jamaica. The first 300-odd pages take place over just two days, giving all the characters time to emerge. The rest of the book is a bit more rushed (and therefore a bit more confusing).
189 of 204 people found the following review helpful.
Ambitious, Well Rendered, And Difficult
By Falkor
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS is bound to be a bestseller as it has an intriguing premise inspired by fact, an interesting setting and many critical endorsements even before the book is actually released. However prospective readers should also know this is a long complicated book that has a diverse cast of characters telling the story. Thankfully there is a list of seventy-six characters mentioned by these narrators sorted by the location and time period where they appear helpfully supplied at the beginning of the book. This list even includes a brief statement of these players' roles in the novel. I admit to turning to these four pages frequently in the course of reading the novel. Some of the narration uses a great deal of slang that is occasionally difficult to figure out even using context clues. I found myself often using internet resources to decipher some of this language as well as to get more background information about Jamaica in the 1970's, 80's and early 90's. This is certainly an ambitious book and it is well rendered. However the casual reader may want to realize the investment in time and effort needed to appreciate it.
See all 527 customer reviews...
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James PDF
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James EPub
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James Doc
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James iBooks
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James rtf
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James Mobipocket
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James Kindle
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James PDF
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James PDF
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James PDF
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James PDF
