The Devil's Tub

Collected Stories

By: Edward Hoagland

Narrated by: Scott Aiello

Edward Hoagland, best known for his essays, is also an extraordinary writer as fiction, as readers of his stories The Final Fate of Alligators and Kwan's Coney Island can attest. First published in periodicals such as The Paris Review, Esquire, The New Yorker, The American Review, and Saul Bellow's famous literary magazine, The Nobel Savage, Hoagland's stories amazed readers with their precise language and finely etched characters. He has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Short Stories. Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to today. Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese launder in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a mauling grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed out boxer trying to hang onto his career, and dozens of others rich characters. From the cramped and gritty streets of New York City to the wide open spaces of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, create, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.

©2014 Edward Hoagland (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Bought this book for the narrator. Love that guy. Hated this collection.

I should have read the synopsis better and realized that I would have zero interest in circus and carnival stories. Just not my style. But I love the narrator and figured he’d be able to bring the story into my heart. I was so wrong. Narrator is amazing and hilarious, as always, hence the 5 stars for performance. I love his variety and accents and tone and inflection. I have now listened to everything he has read. He’s absolutely great.

But Author is not good. Very bad. The stories don’t make any sense, and they all end very abruptly, without any resolution or indication of how the characters might continue. They just stop, like in the middle of a sentence, middle of a thought, it seems. Next story starts and you’re left hanging, wondering if this story is related to the last. Phrasing is clunky, and vernacular is not explained for the uninitiated - not even a little bit - again, perhaps my fault for buying a book about circus and carnival. But I can almost always get into any story, if I’m drawn in even a little bit. Unfortunately that was not the case here.

This collection took me about twice as long to listen to because I kept having to rewind and listen over and over. I still don’t know what any one of the stories was about. Author should stick with nonfiction, which is apparently his strength, according to the internet.

Unfortunately you can’t return an audiobook for the whole monthly credit ($15!) that I wasted on this book.

Not for me

Long winded explanations got boring around chapter 5 it finally started moving but I was bored with it