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    Audiobook11 hours

    Next

    Written by James Hynes

    Narrated by L.J. Ganser

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    One of America's most distinctive voices, James Hynes taps his dark humor for this startling novel. In the wake of a terrorist attack, neurotic Kevin Quinn flies to Austin, Texas, for a job interview. But when he lands, he finds himself following the beguiling young woman who sat next to him on the plane. ". this funny, surprising, and sobering novel [is] unlike anything in the recent literature of our response to terrorism-a tour de force of people ennobled in the face of random horror."-Publishers Weekly, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 11, 2011
    ISBN9781449866969
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    Author

    James Hynes

    James Hynes is the author of Sparrow, Next, Kings of Infinite Space, The Lecturer's Tale, Publish and Perish, and The Wild Colonial Boy. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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    Reviews for Next

    3.5/5

    89 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 2/5
      The concluding 30 pages redeemed the book, but only to a degree. The nude model of Mrs Dalloway bothered me. The arc's return was deft and I didn't expect that.

      Next should've had an enormous impact. Stray meteors in the tundra turn more dirt than this. It did garner the best novel from The Believer.

      I suppose the dodge heralds an auspice.
    • 5/5
      If ever a book was "A Day in the Life," this is it. At first I wanted to read James Hynes' NEXT because he grew up about 15 miles from where I grew up, although he's about a dozen years younger. But his day-in-the-life of Kevin Quinn quickly sucked me in. Yeah, just one day, but we pretty much get Kevin's whole screwed-up life by way of his inner monologue, stream of consciousness patter. This is a story rich in detail and 'location.' Ann Arbor and Austin are almost characters in the novel. I already knew something of the former city, and came away knowing plenty about the latter. The story builds slowly - patience is required - but inexorably to a shattering conclusion that will leave you breathless and, well, shattered. (And you'll also suddenly 'get' the significance of the cover photo.) This is fiction of the first order. Bravo, Mr Hynes. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 4/5
      With only three sections and no chapters, this book is a wall of text. But it's a clever and rather fascinating book. Kevin Quinn is our narrator--really, we spend the book in his head. We spend a day his last day with Kevin as he heads to a job interview for a job he's not even sure he wants. And as he spends the day in Austin--a rather ridiculous day, yet not ridiculous at all--we meet the people he meets, and get a glimpse of life in Austin.

      Of course, we also learn all about his past--past loves, his childhood, the choices he has made and how he feels about those choices now that he is middle aged.

    • 3/5
      A huge shout out to all GR reviewers who mentioned how stellar the last section of the book was. I've had a severe case of reading ADD this year and have abandoned more than my fair share of books because I wasn't enthralled from page one. I might have done it with this book too, but I was encouraged by the "it gets better" theme running through many of the reviews. It did get better, although it wasn't until about halfway through (right around the lunch scene at the mexican restaurant) that I felt like I was fully engaged and invested in the story. And they were right about the ending. Part 3 of this book ripped out my insides, just absolutely fucking gutted me.
    • 4/5
      Holy shit... this was the book I'd been avoiding for 9 years. But I'm glad I read it, and I think it was so well done. Very well-controlled plotting, and the end just knocked me sideways -- I don't really want to say more because it would be a big old spoiler. Definitely unsettling, but in the best way, and very worth reading.
    • 5/5
      It's hard to breathe new life into the well-worn ground of the middle-aged life crisis of the typical white American male, but James Hynes succeeds wonderfully in this amazing, hard to stop reading tale.Kevin Quinn is our narrator and we are living almost entirely inside his head for the majority of this book, privy to a stream-of-consciousness inner dialogue of lust, guilt, action, inaction, sexual memory, and a kind of ultimate epiphany that will leave you breathless.This is one of those stories where not much happens by way of plot (until the final third of the book, in which everything explodes at once), but in between we get a sense of Quinn as a character so fully developed, it's hard not to feel for him, even if you aren't entirely enamored of him or his motivations. Heading from Ann Arbor Michigan, where he lives, to a job interview in Austin, Texas, Quinn tells no one--not even his live-in girlfriend, where he is going or why. He is seeking not so much a new life as a new and unexpected possibility to break him from the rut of his existence. (He finds the unexpected, but really, it finds him, an outcome he is totally unprepared to deal with.) Even within this literal flight of fancy, Quinn deviates from his expected routine, impulsively following a beautiful young woman from his plane when it lands in Austin, knowing he is risking missing his job interview but unable to stop himself from doing something he knows is self-destructive.That's a motif that continues throughout the rest of Quinn's fateful day, and in between the reader encounters meditations on modern confrontations with terrorism since 9/11, and a stark view of how Americans view these events compared with those who are connected in even deeper ways. There's also one of the greatest, truly erotic sex scenes ever depicted in modern fiction, so even though there's not as much driving plot as some may like, there's never a dull moment.The ending may be one of the best I've read in recent memory, but not for the faint of pulse. This book will stick with you long after the final page.
    • 3/5
      A brisk Dalloway-style story that's readable enough and tackles the paranoia of post-9/11 air travel. At its best when the action heats up - the author's introspection and character-development was pretty boring, frankly. The deliberate use of authorly language (micturates? Nobody 'micturates') was especially grating.
    • 5/5
      What an amazing read. As a woman I'm not sure that James Hynes gets it right for all men, but I think and fear that he has. Kevin's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day has the randomness of a tornado and I was completely sucked up into it and propelled forcefully forward.Hooray for CPCL reader, who shared my immersion. Boo to the rest of you.Now please excuse me while I go and read the rest of James Hyne's novels.DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!
    • 5/5
      Wow, this novel really blew me away. Don't be lulled into thinking it's just a day in the life of an unpleasant womanizer who flies to Austin for a job interview. In the first half, I mainly rolled my eyes and asked myself why I should care about Kevin's memories and inner monologues as he wanders the streets chasing women much too young for him. But then, the tension starts to build, and remarkably I start to care about this man. Don't give up on this novel. The final 50 pages are so beautifully and amazingly intense. bravo, James Hynes
    • 2/5
      The book starts out pretty good, but then lost it's air and I lost interest. It was very discriptive and sometimes humorous, but it was repetitive, which is something I'm not good with at all. I started skipping pages. Reading it is like listening to the thoughts inside someones head, someone that forgot that he'd thought that a few pages back. With that said, I did like the authors writing style and for that reason would try another of his books. This one however, at least for me, was not a page turner.
    • 1/5
      Save your money and your time and just read “How late it was, how late” by James Kelman, the Mann Booker prize winning book that uses this same style. This book is a story of an ordinary man who finds himself reflecting back though his life due to fear of possible terrorism. This ordinary man intersperses his drab life self-depreciating reflections with his exceptional sex life. What is wrong with this writer? This is a book of the writer’s fantasy that he has decided to share with us. The writer skips many facts and fails to keep the flow of the book going except when describing his bedroom skills. The book is a great navel - grazing book for men.Read James Kelman instead.