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Exhalation cover art

Exhalation

Written by: Ted Chiang
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Dominic Hoffman, Amy Landon, Ted Chiang
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Publisher's Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others

Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory.

Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.

In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

©2019 Ted Chiang (P)2019 Random House Audio

What the critics say

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • TIME MAGAZINE • NPR • ESQUIRE • VOX • THE A.V. CLUB • THE GUARDIAN • FINANCIAL TIMES • THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

“Lean, relentless, and incandescent.” —Colson Whitehead

“Illuminating, thrilling. . . . Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways. . . . Individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal. . . . It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that explores counterfactual worlds like these with . . . ardor and earnestness. . . . Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker

“Delirious and exciting as hell . . . [Chiang’s] stories brim with wonder and horror, spectacle and mundanity, philosophy and religion. Tapping into a range of speculative traditions, from pulp and fantasy to the rigorous scientific accuracy of hard sci-fi and the popcorn thrills of soft sci-fi, his work has a profound richness.” —Stephen Kearse, The Nation

What listeners say about Exhalation

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  • Overall
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    5 out of 5 stars

Delightful collection of thought-provoking stories

I really enjoyed listening to this collection of Ted Chiang stories. I have long appreciated Chiang's approach to storytelling, which is both emotionally sensitive and scientifically rigorous.

Some of these stories I have read before, but the appreciated them anew because of the strength of the performances here.

My only complaint about this particular audiobook is that the final story is mislabeled in the Audible player.

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Wow. Great Science Fiction

Ted Chiang is a fantastic writer. Each short story in this compendium is accompanied by a note from the author explaining how he was thinking when he wrote the story. The guy is brilliant. Love how he thinks.
Readers are great. Only a couple of annoying accents while reading. Well worth a listen. 9 stars out of 10.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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wonderful, thought provoking, richly imaginative

I start many more books than I finish. I am also one to read far more non-fiction than fiction. After some research around how to dip my toe into sci-fi, this book was recommended, and I am so thankful I got it! Each story is an incredible works of imagination, Chiang's mind creates vast, rich, compelling visions of the future. After each story I found myself exploring the moral implications and possibilities that were raised. There are several different readers. All but one are excellent. The female reader employs repetitive intonation, and her way of doing male voices was... at times comical and other times annoying. But the stories were enough to keep me going. Well worth the credit and the time!

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  • Overall
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Wonderful Listen

The only problem with this collection is that there aren’t more stories! Ted Chiang is brilliant and the readers are easy to listen to. These stories can be listened to over and over and are great conversation starters as well.
Very happy to have this as part of my collection.

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  • Overall
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Fantastic!!

In this compilation, you will find clever, interesting stories that are bound to captivate sci-fi lovers.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Some fantastic ideas. Some stories could be shorter

I found a couple of the stories ran on a bit too long (especially the one about Digians) but there were some fantastic pieces in there as well, and even the overly long stories had interesting premises. Most of the narrators were similarly excellent.

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Super Stories that make you got hmmpf....

Outstanding, easily accessible stories that all many of the big questions of life. Make you think and question all you hold sacred and dear.....

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