The Leftovers (Audiobook edition, read by Dennis Boutsikaris, MacMillan Audio, 2011).
Given his awards, acclaim and experience, getting Dennis Boutsakiris to perform the audiobook version of your novel must be like getting Pacino or DeNiro to star in the movie version. Boutsakiris has a string of impressive acting credits, including several awards for the recent film Calling It Quits, an Obie for the 1992 Off Broadway production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen, and appearances on TV drama series going back as far as 1980. But on his own website and elsewhere, it’s his audiobook work that dominates. He’s done over 90 of the things, entrusted with fiction from John Grisham to Philip Roth to Neil Gaiman and non-fiction from Game Change to The Smartest Guys in the Room to Slavery By Another Name.
In my fuller review of The Leftovers over at my other blog, www.scribblers.us, I note the similarities between Perrotta’s latest novel, with its atypically large cast and wondrously inexplicable supernatural set-up, and the work of Stephen King. Well, Boutsakiris won awards for his new recording of the King classic Firestarter.
No word yet on the casting for the announced HBO miniseries version of Tom Perrotta’s new book The Leftovers, but Dennis Boutsakiris is indeed the voice of the eight-CD audiobook version. As you may suspect from the range of lit he gets to tackle vocally, Boutsakiris’ talent is not in overplaying the material but in providing a measured, even tone that lets you interpret the book your own way. It’s a natural match for a writer like Perrotta, who isn’t flashy or sensational even when dealing with massive global calamities, newly minted saviors and serial killings. There’s an internalized filtering of horrors that makes his work so palatable, and Boutsakiris’ matter-of-fact tone captures that.
But Boutsakiris is also able to easily and subtly present the manifold differences in manner, background and social adeptness among Perrotta’s many Leftovers characters. He doesn’t put on accents, or overplay gender differences, yet is able to keep the voices distinct. That’s an audiobookreading talent which is highly sought—even but not flat, steady but not boring–and ideal for the equally unjumpy approach of Perrotta’s prose.
Here’s a sample of Dennis Boutsakiris reading Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, courtesy of MacMillan Audio:
Recent technology has encouraged the proliferation of free audiobooks that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech computer software, although the quality of synthesized speech may suffer by comparison to recordings by a human voice.`”;:
Check out our personal online site as well
<http://healthwellnessbook.com/