The Diary of a Rapist, Evan S. Connell
The Diary of a Rapist, Evan S. Connell
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Diary of a Rapist

Author: Evan S. Connell

Narrator: Andrew Karst

Unabridged: 8 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/16/2016


Synopsis

The 1960s: news of riots, war, unheard-of behavior, and rampant crime crowds the papers and the airwaves. Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, Earl Summerfield hunkers down in his cramped San Francisco apartment and keeps a diary that is a scratched record of a world going to pieces. The words he overhears, the words he wants to say, swim in his head, turning into fantasies of ambition, love, and retribution. He is sorry for himself. He is angry at everyone. He takes to going out at night, slipping into other people's houses. He is looking for something, and he fixes on one woman.

About Evan S. Connell

Evan S. Connell (1924–2013) was named a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction. He received numerous prizes and awards for his writing and was the author of more than twenty books of fiction, poetry, essays, and history, including the biography of General Armstrong Custer, Son of the Morning Star.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Daisy on March 23, 2025

Probably not the best title to choose if you wanted to have a best seller, I don’t know how it would have been received in the 60’s when it was written but you would have to be in possession of a lot of self assurance to read this in public. The title itself has shock value but is perhaps misleading.......more

Goodreads review by Simon A. on April 30, 2009

Wow. This was a damn good book. Disturbing? Yes. Frightening? Abso-fucking-lutely. Unnerving and breathtaking? You bet. But this has got to be the most daring, bold, courageous book I have ever read. Published in 1966, Connell took an enormous chance publishing this creepy, unorthodox story about a......more

Goodreads review by Kathleen on December 28, 2021

Evan S. Connell is a genius. Brutal, bleak, funny and brilliant, this disturbing novel exquisitely captures a certain strain of masculine self-loathing and misogyny, just this perfectly calibrated depiction of the kind of man who is absolutely twisted and destroyed by his own sour self-regard and ha......more

Goodreads review by Anita on January 26, 2010

My god, I am a sucker for depictions of madness, and Earl Summerfield runs the gamut of many ways human madness can express itself. This is not the tale of someone descending into madness. It is the tale of a full-bore madman from the very beginning. I generally do not read reviews of books before I......more

Goodreads review by Nick on May 25, 2008

This book is amazing. Oh my god, this thing scared the hell out of me. It's a beautiful testament to the struggle and strife that everyone feels. We are all capable of this kind of violence and hatred. You find yourself in Earl and you just seem to understand where he is going. You dont like it, you......more