Stoner cover art

Stoner

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of 900K+ titles.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto-renews for $8.99/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Stoner

Written by: John Williams
Narrated by: Robin Field
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $23.18

Buy Now for $23.18

About this listen

William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

©1965 John Williams (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Marriage

What the critics say

“A perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away." (Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review )
“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” ( New Yorker)
“An exquisite study, bleak as Hopper, of a hopelessly honest academic at a meretricious Midwestern university. I had not known…that the kind of unsparing portrait of failed marriage shown in Stoner existed before John Cheever.” ( Los Angeles Times)
All stars
Most Relevant
So deeply moving . It will take you with him into a ordinary life with all the disappointments....

Amazing book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Jeselnik Rosenthal Vanity Project podcast recommended this, suggesting Stoner to be their top recommendation for getting feedback from the listeners. I'm so glad I listened, it's been a ravenous experience, I've listened voraciously every moment I've been able to since I started. It does not disappoint.

JRVP recommended

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I heard about this book through a recommendation. I was caught by the author’s use of deep honest truths throughout the novel, and I found that the premise - the life story of an wholly unremarkable man - to be a brilliant backdrop to illuminate this aspect of the author’s writing.

Just a remarkable novel, and a beautiful telling of an otherwise mundane man.

Beautiful story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration of this book is excellent but be prepared for an oppressively heavy story. It is incredibly well written and to the very end you find yourself wishing for something good to uplift poor Stoner but alas it never happens.

Heavy

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I don’t know how to write this. The book is too realistic in depicting the faults that slip by in our daily lives, whose consequences eventually crescendo into unexpected situations that dictate our inevitable fate. Very emotional and heart wrenching.

A book everyone must read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews