The Listeners

Leni Zumas

touko 2012 · Tin House Books

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Leni Zumas's haunting debut novel, The Listeners, depicts a family struggling with loss and faced with the difficulty of honoring a loved one's memory while letting go of grief. 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. Sassy and smart, tough but broken, Quinn is at loose ends. She develops unique strategies for coping, but no matter what twisted tactic Quinn conjures to keep her psyche intact, 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.

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Leni Zumas’s story collection, Farewell Navigator, was published by Open City in 2008. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Quarterly West, Open City, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Keyhole, and New York Tyrant.