Lo disfruté mucho. Muchas de las historias son fantásticas y tiernas y muchas otras me dieron la sensación de echarle demasiada crema a los tacos pero, resultó una lectura muy fluida y agradable.

This was a great collection of stories. I had read a few before but this time I went cover to cover. There are some real gems in here; also some I'd never read again. My favorite is the second to last.

Paul Auster had successful and sporadic participations on a radio show. When he was asked to appear more frequently, he refused. He was not ready to give up his peaceful life, but when he told his wife about the offer she gave him an idea. Instead of him doing the talking and the thinking why not ask the audience to share their stories. The response was overwhelming, and from thousands of stories sent, he included his favorite ones in this book. An interesting way to learn how Americans think and react.

This book was very entertaining and presented many themes. Nearly every page was a different story from a unique person. The stories were organized into categories including food, love, death, and more. This book shifted my perception of the world in many ways, and is a great read for anyone who wants to expand their horizons.

This book is very intriguing and is definitely different than your average book. All the issues I had with this were on my part in the sense of feeling uncomfortable reading things about other peoples lives. I would for sure recommend this to anyone who wants to read stories that cover any topic you could imagine.

با توجه به اینکه داستانها نوشته افراد عادی هستند نوع نگاهها و بعضا داستانپردازیها جالب توجه هستند

Creía que mi padre era Dios es una recopilación de relatos de oyentes del programa de radio de Paul Auster. Hay unas cuatrocientas historias breves, algunas maravillosas, otras divertidas y otras totalmente prescindibles. Aún así, merece la pena porque, tal y como afirma la reseña, se trata de un retrato de la cultura y la vida norteamericana vista desde cuatrocientos puntos de vista. Todo un espectáculo.

Algunas historias me han hecho llorar a moco tendido, otras me han parecido desternillantes y otras, sin más, increíbles. Lo mejor de todo es descubrir que no somos tan diferentes a esos malvados yankis de los que tanto renegamos. Las historias cotidianas, los recuerdos de niño, las reflexiones desde la perspectiva de la edad. Igualitos, somos igualitos.

¿Que si recomiendo el libro? Por supuesto.

Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.

WOW! What a great collection of stories this is! Paul Auster collected them from people from all over the USA and reads them himself! What a real pleasure to listen to his deep voice and to those so interesting and sad, beautiful, magic and strange and lovely stories! I am so glad I found this book on Storytel. I have never heard of it before.

I found the audio verison of this book while browsing a "book sale" on Christmas Eve. I noticed it was edited and read by Paul Auster, a favorite author of mine. It is a collection of true stories from NPR's National Story Project. Most of the stories are brief, under four minutes in length, but a couple are about fifteen minutes. The topics are: animals, objects, families, strangers, war, love, death, dreams, and meditations. Though these topics may sound dull, the stories are the best few from thousands of submissions. Auster reads each one aloud. The stories are good; that they are true makes them great. Each one could be the seed for an Auster novel. The fact that Auster reads them on the audio books is a bonus.

Producto de la recopilación de narraciones que sus radioescuchas le enviaron a Paul Auster, el cual sabiamente eligió y agrupó, estos casi 200 relatos , vivencias o interpretaciones de hechos o sucesos extraordinarios en la vida de cada uno de sus participantes. Algunos son terroríficos, otros llenos de drama y los más son ejemplos de vivencias para recordar y compartir. Vale la pena releerlo. Me permitió ejercitar mi memoria y preguntarme si yo hubiera podido enviar una aportación de mis experiencias y ... creo que hubiera enviado varias. las que más me impactaron fueron los relatos de la guerra y de la muerte.

Collection of true stories submitted by NPR listeners. Many of them are stranger-than-fiction episodes (which Paul Auster obviously has a penchant for) and make for a good bedtime read.

There were a handful of stories that left an impression deep enough to make me want to jot down the story synopsis, but apparently not deep enough for me to remember when I failed to actually write them down :p Except for one. There was this story, towards the very end of the book, about a woman in her 60s who who purposely downshifted her lifestyle and became a homeless.

She sold her house and all her possessions, invested the money in some fund from which she receives a few hundred dollars a month (she makes it clear that she's not on welfare), moved to another state where it's warmer, rented a spot in someone's backyard where she pitched a tent, and she spends her days reading at the library, watching dress rehearsals at the local theater for free, goes to gallery openings where she can both enjoy art and free appetizers. She doesn't explain what led her decision and what kind of life she's led before (except she does have a daughter who she talks to occasionally on the phone), but she comes across as an intelligent, decent and responsible American citizen.

She ends her piece by noting she does have anxiety and fear about what'd happen if she got sick, about the imminent winter season, about the future. Her closing sentence is "Wish me luck."

Ever since I heard this story, she's stuck in the back of my mind, and every so often, I send her my best wishes and hope that she is doing well.

On a side note, purchasing this audiobook on iTunes made me realize how iPod app is very audiobook-unfriendly. Lack of chapter divisions and bookmark functionality make it difficult to re-listen to stories that you liked or even to find the spot where you left after re-launching the app. It annoyed me enough to swear I'd never buy an audiobook on iTunes and to go sign up on Audible.com. Their app is soooo much better.

I dont think I ever would have picked this up but me and a few friends picked out books for each other to read from a bookstore here in the phl and it was actually quite beautiful. It was right up my alley of reading the perspectives of lots of different people, seeing how they see the world, experiences they've had, or just anything that they thought was worth putting in writing.