The Listeners

Tin House Books, May 2012

Finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award

 

Selected for Indiespensable, the subscription book club of Powell's Books

• Read some reviews here.
• Read a profile of LZ in Flaunt Magazine.
• Read an interview with Jill Owens at Powell's Books.
• Read an interview with Genevieve Hudson at HTML Giant. 
• Read an interview with Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
• Read an interview with Devan Schwartz at The Rumpus. 
• Read a Q&A with the Washington Independent Review of Books.
• Read a Q&A with Tin House.

the special-edition hardcover!

"Just listen to The Listeners. You'll hear the prose of one of our most exciting young writers. Zumas has already proven herself a remarkable maker of short stories. Now she has sustained and heightened the exhilaration of her writing in this striking novel." 

                          —Sam Lipsyte, The Ask

"Leni Zumas's visceral debut novel is a darkly funny and disturbing rager. Weaving a dreamlike coming-of-age story with the melancholic tale of a rock band self-destructing and a family's loss, Zumas's deft language careens through the lives of her characters with killer sentence after killer sentence. It's a crushing, dazzling performance."  

  —Kevin Sampsell, A Common Pornography

"Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners explores a far-out world where a patchwork of memory, sensation, and imagination maps the flickering presence of ghosts.

"This is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Quinn is thirtysomething, a survivor of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Twenty years later, she is in the midst of a decade-long slide down the other side of punk-rock stardom after her successful music career was abruptly halted. Quinn develops unique strategies for coping, but she cannot keep the past away. The Listeners is about what lurks in the shadows and what happens when what's lurking insists on being seen.

"Leni Zumas portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss, in all its grotesque beauty. From the first line the prose is glorious: pricklingly honest and hallucinatory, a lucid dream world realized. The Listeners marks the debut of a major American writer." 
                                                                                                                     —Tin House


Luca Dipierro's magical book trailer. . .


The Listeners from Luca Dipierro on Vimeo.