Exhalation
Stories
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Exhalation
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Ballerini
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Dominic Hoffman
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Amy Landon
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Ted Chiang
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Written by:
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Ted Chiang
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others
Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory.
Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.
In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.
©2019 Ted Chiang (P)2019 Random House AudioYou may also enjoy...
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Brilliant
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5 out of 5 stars
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Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 3
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Max Maurey should be on top of the world. He's a famous horror director. Actors love him. Hollywood needs him. He's making money hand over fist. But it's the 80s, and he's directing cheap slashers for audiences who only crave more blood, not real art. Not real horror. And Max's slimy producer refuses to fund any of his new ideas. But when Max discovers an old camera that filmed a very real Hollywood horror, he knows that he has to use this camera for his next movie. The only problem is that it came with a cryptic warning and sometimes wails.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stories of Your Life and Others
- Written by: Ted Chiang
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Todd McLaren
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 111
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 94
Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Brilliant
- By Langer MD on 2018-06-21
Written by: Ted Chiang
-
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
- Written by: Ken Liu
- Narrated by: Corey Brill, Joy Osmanski
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 28
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 22
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 22
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
fantastic read
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Written by: Ken Liu
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Gnomon
- Written by: Nick Harkaway
- Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe
- Length: 29 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 9
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
In the world of Gnomon, citizens are constantly observed and democracy has reached a pinnacle of "transparency". Every action is seen, every word is recorded, and the System has access to its citizens' thoughts and memories - all in the name of providing the safest society in history. When suspected dissident Diana Hunter dies in government custody, it marks the first time a citizen has been killed during an interrogation. The System doesn't make mistakes, but something isn't right about the circumstances surrounding Hunter's death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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In every way a success
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Written by: Nick Harkaway
-
The Light Eaters
- How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
- Written by: Zoë Schlanger
- Narrated by: Zoë Schlanger
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
so fascinating
- By Brittany on 2024-07-31
Written by: Zoë Schlanger
-
Orange World and Other Stories
- Written by: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 3
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 3
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 3
Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.
Written by: Karen Russell
-
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- A Novel
- Written by: Craig DiLouie
- Narrated by: Garrett Michael Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 3
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2
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What the critics say
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • TIME MAGAZINE • NPR • ESQUIRE • VOX • THE A.V. CLUB • THE GUARDIAN • FINANCIAL TIMES • THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
“Lean, relentless, and incandescent.” —Colson Whitehead
“Illuminating, thrilling. . . . Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways. . . . Individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal. . . . It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that explores counterfactual worlds like these with . . . ardor and earnestness. . . . Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker
“Delirious and exciting as hell . . . [Chiang’s] stories brim with wonder and horror, spectacle and mundanity, philosophy and religion. Tapping into a range of speculative traditions, from pulp and fantasy to the rigorous scientific accuracy of hard sci-fi and the popcorn thrills of soft sci-fi, his work has a profound richness.” —Stephen Kearse, The Nation
What listeners say about Exhalation
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Hmmmm
- 2020-02-03
Delightful collection of thought-provoking stories
I really enjoyed listening to this collection of Ted Chiang stories. I have long appreciated Chiang's approach to storytelling, which is both emotionally sensitive and scientifically rigorous.
Some of these stories I have read before, but the appreciated them anew because of the strength of the performances here.
My only complaint about this particular audiobook is that the final story is mislabeled in the Audible player.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Thomas Buckland
- 2020-11-29
Some fantastic ideas. Some stories could be shorter
I found a couple of the stories ran on a bit too long (especially the one about Digians) but there were some fantastic pieces in there as well, and even the overly long stories had interesting premises. Most of the narrators were similarly excellent.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ian R. Graham
- 2020-08-16
Super Stories that make you got hmmpf....
Outstanding, easily accessible stories that all many of the big questions of life. Make you think and question all you hold sacred and dear.....
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Langer MD
- 2019-06-05
Wow. Great Science Fiction
Ted Chiang is a fantastic writer. Each short story in this compendium is accompanied by a note from the author explaining how he was thinking when he wrote the story. The guy is brilliant. Love how he thinks.
Readers are great. Only a couple of annoying accents while reading. Well worth a listen. 9 stars out of 10.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chanklin
- 2022-07-20
Wonderful Listen
The only problem with this collection is that there aren’t more stories! Ted Chiang is brilliant and the readers are easy to listen to. These stories can be listened to over and over and are great conversation starters as well.
Very happy to have this as part of my collection.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- C. Joseph
- 2022-08-19
wonderful, thought provoking, richly imaginative
I start many more books than I finish. I am also one to read far more non-fiction than fiction. After some research around how to dip my toe into sci-fi, this book was recommended, and I am so thankful I got it! Each story is an incredible works of imagination, Chiang's mind creates vast, rich, compelling visions of the future. After each story I found myself exploring the moral implications and possibilities that were raised. There are several different readers. All but one are excellent. The female reader employs repetitive intonation, and her way of doing male voices was... at times comical and other times annoying. But the stories were enough to keep me going. Well worth the credit and the time!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Vebond
- 2021-09-16
Fantastic!!
In this compilation, you will find clever, interesting stories that are bound to captivate sci-fi lovers.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Herbert Law
- 2024-06-18
Amazing
Ted Chiang is an amazing writer who has the ability to distill complex issues into entertaining and thought provoking stories. Highly recommended! You will not be disappointed.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Kayla
- 2024-08-11
It’s not for everyone, but I loved it
I got so excited when I saw the author’s name on the list of actors, but he doesn’t actually read the stories, he just explains the author’s note at the end. At first it was disconcerting because the performances are so good, and the author’s voice sort of jerked me out of the story. But I ended up liking it cause it gave me a clear break in between stories.
I loved the stories so much that I shared it with my sisters, but they didn’t really connect with it. He has a very particular way of writing that I didn’t realize can be hard to connect with. But I would recommend giving it a try.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Leo
- 2024-10-13
Interesting stories
Creative stories, fairly captivating but I fundamentally disagree with some of the messages in the book.
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