Hey, you know who we haven’t talked about for a long time? HighBridge Audio! Here is the Fall 2011 HighBridge Audio catalogue |PDF|
There’s plenty of cool stuff in there and on their website. And while I’m very dubious of the enhanced audio track featured in the preview clip |MP3| of their upcoming audiobook of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I have very high hopes for Highbridge Audio’s production of this gem (it’s slated for release at the end of November):
Dancing Aztecs
By Donald E. Westlake; Read by Brian Holsopple
MP3 Download – Approx. 12 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Published: November 29, 2011
Specialist in the scam, the con, and the rip-off, Jerry Manelli is running around New York hot on the trail of a priest—a thousand-year-old, two-foot-tall, ugly, misshapen, dancing Aztec priest made of solid gold, with eyes of pure emeralds, worth a million dollars. Somebody stole it from its museum home in South America and smuggled it through U.S. Customs in a shipment of plastic imitations. But the wrong one got delivered, and the million dollar statue, mixed with the fifteen copies, is somewhere in New York. Jerry Manelli is searching for it, as are Wall Street financiers, New Jersey union thugs, Manhattan aristocrats, college professors and PR men, liberated women and unliberated wives, tough guys and conmen, and sharpshooters of every kind. From Harlem to Greenwich Village, from Long Island to Connecticut, the motley group races in and around New York in this comic adventure of the 1970s.
[Thanks Trent!]
Posted by Jesse Willis
That’s an old Hobbit full cast production. I think it’s the NPR Hobbit, or anyway something from American radio. Mind’s Eye did it, if Wikipedia is to be believed and my identification is correct. (I think it aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1979 as part of the post-Star Wars fantasy/sf boom — not to be confused with the 1968 all-BBC adaptation, which used medieval instruments.)
Anyway… I like all the Hobbit full cast adaptations pretty well (it’s very actor-friendly, as I think Jackson has discovered), but some UK folks really were disconcerted by the American accent of the narrator, and the various UK-and-otherwise accents of the various characters. It’s somewhat influenced by the Rankin-Bass voicings, I think.
If you want unabridged audio, Mr. Inglis is still the only one I know of, unless you go to various private persons who periodically post their versions on the Internet. (Because of course it’s primarily a book for parents to read to their kids, and parents periodically rediscover this.)
Indeed, that may be the best audiobook of all time, my dad reading a chapter from The Hobbit to my sister and me each night. Pure gold!