Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow
Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow
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Billy Bathgate

Author: E.L. Doctorow

Narrator: Mark Deakins

Unabridged: 11 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/04/2014


Synopsis

To listen to this audiobook is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Fred Ahlert Music Corporation and Henderson Music Company: Excerpts from the lyrics to “Bye Bye Blackbird,” lyrics by Mort Dixon, music by Ray Henderson. Copyright 1926. Copyright renewed 1953. All rights for the extended term administered by Fred Ahlert Music Corporation for Olde Clover Leaf Music and Henderson Music Company, c/o William
Krasilovsky, Feinman and Krasilovsky. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Bourne Co./New York Music Publishers: Excerpt from the lyrics to “Me and My Shadow,” words by Billy Rose, music by Al Jolson and Dave Dreyer. Copyright 1927 Borune Co. Copyright renewed, International Copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The Songwriters Guild of America and CPP Belwin, Inc.: Excerpt from the lyrics to “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” by Gus Kahn and Isham Jones. Copyright 1924. U.S. rights renewed 1980 Gilbert Keyes Music and Bantam Music. Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpt from the lyrics to “Limehouse Blues,” by Philip Braham and Douglas Furber. Copyright 1922 Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

About The Author

E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, Homer & Langley, and Andrew’s Brain. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction. In 2014 he was honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

This picaresque novel about Bronx-born “Billy Bathgate” Behan, a street urchin and errand-boy for the Dutch Schulz mob, memorably evokes the tough urban streets of the early '30's, but its principal achievement is the voice of the first person narrator, “Billy Bathgate” himself. Like his literary anc......more

Goodreads review by Fabian

Only one other writer in my mind can spin out such golden tresses, long sumptuous sentences that runonandon & imbue an actual soul, a literary ghost that moves on and on & that's Latin America's Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Billy Bathgate is one. Outstanding. Fu***ng. Read. E. L. Doctorow gives us another......more

Goodreads review by Jack

(Updated 1/8/17) After having recently binge-watched the last couple seasons of Boardwalk Empire, I was in the mood for some more 1920s/30s gangster action, and Billy Bathgate scratched that itch nicely. It's more of a coming-of-age story as opposed to straight-up mobster violence and crime, though t......more

Goodreads review by Maziyar

بیلی باتگیت ، کتابی ایست از ادگار لورنس دکتروف ، نویسنده مشهور آمریکایی که در ایران بیشتر به خاطر رگتایم شناخته شده . کتاب او داستان نوجوانی به نام بیلی ایست که در محله برانکس نیویورک ، با گانگستری بدنام و خشن به نام داچ شولتس آشنا شده و کم کم عضوی از گروه گانگستری شولتس شده و این گونه با دنیای خلاف......more


Quotes

“A wonderful addition to the ranks of American boy heroes . . . Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with more poetry, Holden Caulfield with more zest and spirit . . . The kind of book you find yourself finishing at three in the morning after promising at midnight that you’ll stop at the next page.”New York Times Book Review

“A modern American masterpiece . . . Doctorow takes up the legacies of Fitzgerald and Cheever and adds to them a savage and erotic splendor of his own.”—John le Carré

“Indelible in its fierce energy, its relentless irony, its rawness.”Philadelphia Inquirer

“Riveting . . . mesmerizing . . . unforgettable.”Time

“Enthralling.”Los Angeles Times