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    God is Dead
    God is Dead
    God is Dead
    Audiobook5 hours

    God is Dead

    Written by Ron Currie Jr.

    Narrated by Gabriel Baron

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From a mind-blowing new talent, an audacious novel that imagines the world after God descends to Earth as a Dinka woman from the Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert. The result is a world both bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Currie’s provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God’s demise; a group of young men who, fearing the end of the world, take fate into their own hands; mental patients who insist that a god still exists; armies taking up the eternal war between fate and free will; and parents who, in the absence of a deity and the “lack of anything to do on Sundays,” worship their children. On the surface, this world utterly transformed-yet certain things remain unchanged: protective parents clash with willful, idealistic teenagers; idols are exalted; small town rumor mills run unabated; and children often don’t realize how to forgive their parents until it’s too late. In God Is Dead, Currie brings together a prescient satirical gift worthy of Jonathan Swift, the raw appeal of Chuck Palahniuk’s blackest comedy, and the thought-provoking ethical questions of Kurt Vonnegut, all with a light touch, empathy, and wisdom that make for an exhilarating reading experience. Off beat yet accessible, God Is Dead is an exciting debut from a fresh new voice in contemporary fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherListen & Live Audio
    Release dateMar 28, 2024
    ISBN9781593163761
    God is Dead
    Author

    Ron Currie Jr.

    Ron Currie, Jr., is the winner of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the New York Public Library Young Lion’s Award. The author of God Is Dead, Everything Matters!, and Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, he lives in Waterville, Maine.

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    Reviews for God is Dead

    3.5/5

    142 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      You wouldn't think of the situations in this book, considering the title. Most of them, at least. A wonderful exercise that brings out interesting things from ye olde human nature.
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful book that should be getting more recognition than it has. It's a collection of interrelated short stories detailing what happens after God takes human form and then dies. Each story is amazing and leaves you with a lot to think about. Great concept, great writing, great book!
    • 5/5
      God came to Earth and died. He took a mortal form and got killed in the Sudan.This is not a spoiler though - the rest of the book is where the majority of the story lies. It follows different groups and people on how they replace their Worship of God with other things.This ranges from desperation and no answers to worshiping children and then having to learn not to and treat them as the small human beings that they are.This book is irreverant, funny but also eye opening. How would you deal with this if it occured which group would you fall into? Blasphemy can be fun!!
    • 2/5
      I liked what was basically being attempted here - slowly unveiling a radically changed world through the experiences of individual lives - but the poorly judged and racist tone of the first story ruined the experience of the rest of the book.
    • 3/5
      Best stories: ""The Bridge", Indian Summer" and "Interview With..." being the stand-outs.

      I've been a fanboy of Currie Jr. since Everything Matters!, but had not read his debut until today. I wolfed this down over the course of one day up in Whistler. The imagery is powerful, the prose realistic and (mostly) steady through the interweaving stories. It's a solid read but feels like he's still searching for his voice. At times the scenes are scorching with intensity to the point of absurdity. A solid read but I will continue to point people to EM! as the place to start with his work.
    • 3/5
      There were some things about this book I really liked. There were thought provoking ideas of a so-so post apocalyptic future that was refreshing and more psychological than just everything blowing up and everyone becoming some sort of Davy Crockett survivalist. When he gets crazy, he really allows himself to go there and I liked that, too. I think Ron Currie, Jr. is smart and I will read more of his work.
    • 5/5
      Simply put, this was an amazing book. I loved it. Other people should read it. Yes, I mean you.
    • 5/5
      fascinating, grim, funny and hard to forget. One of the best short story collections masquerading as a novel I have read. Not every piece is perfect on its own, but as an arc they manage to create a post-God world that is real and frightening without resorting to the same dystopian nonsense we've seen before. A great companion piece to Coupland's Life After God, but more powerful.
    • 3/5
      This is a strange book of interconnected short stories. The first tale describes God taking human form as a refugee in Darfur and his death when the human body is killed. The rest of the stories answer some questions, such as how the world finds out God is dead, and describe how humanity reacts (quite poorly) and then how civilization recovers and what form it takes. Not a pretty picture. There's a very funny portrayal of Colin Powell, and a priceless one-sided interview with the lone survivor of the feral dogs who ate God's dead body and could then speak and think and feel as a human and had all-encompassing knowledge. Entertaining, interesting, odd.
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful book that should be getting more recognition than it has. It's a collection of interrelated short stories detailing what happens after God takes human form and then dies. Each story is amazing and leaves you with a lot to think about. Great concept, great writing, great book!
    • 3/5
      An odd little novel, which I suppose could be described as post-apocalyptic. The story begins with the guilt-ridden God wandering through war-torn Sudan in the guise of a young African woman, before being killed by the Janjaweed. When word gets around that God really is dead, all hell breaks loose, with the formerly ultra-conservative Christians in America turning to worship of their own children, mass suicide of nuns and priests, and, once society gets back on its feet, a war between Evolutionary Psychologists and Post-Modern Anthropologists. And Colin Powell makes an appearance at the beginning in what was apparently a misguided attempt by the (white) author to tap into the guilt felt by assimilationist African-Americans, or something. I'm not sure what that had to do with the rest of the book, but whatever.Anyway, if all of that sounds interesting and potentially amusing (which is what I thought), I hate to say that something goes moderately wrong in the execution. It's not terrible, but it just doesn't really make sense--I don't mean the part where God dies, but everything that follows. I mean, it's amusing to think of the followers of deterministic Evolutionary Psychology warring with the supposedly liberally open-minded PoMo Anthropologists, but I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to find any sort of real-world implications, and there's very little humor that I could detect in the writing to suggest that it wasn't meant to be taken at least somewhat seriously. I also thought it was a shortcoming of the book that it only looked at the aftermath as it occurred in parts of Africa and particularly the United States. What about the rest of the world? And why did God put himself into such a life-threatening situation anyway? Overall, I would say that God is Dead isn't bad, but it is fairly unsatisfying in its treatment of a really interesting idea and probably would have benefited from some more humor. I wouldn't write Ron Currie off though, and I'll be keeping an eye out for his sophomore effort.
    • 5/5
      God is Dead is a biting satire about humanity's dependence on faith, following the literal death of God - disguised as a starving and diseased woman caught in the violence of Darfur.In the absence of religion, people turn to alternate outlets to hang their faith upon. America exaggerates its "cult of the child" status into literally worshipping children. Others take solace in romantic connections, or the talking dogs who ate the flesh of God. A worldwide war has broken out, with philosophical ideologies replacing the traditional conflict of faiths in battle. It's a very grim but thoughtful book, and an excellent read.
    • 5/5
      God is Dead by Ron Currie is a stimulating short first novel from an author whose short stories have attracted attention previously. The basic premise of the book is simple: due to 'an implacable polytheistic bureaucracy', God is unable to intervene in any of the humanitarian crises occurring across the planet. Stricken with guilt, He takes the form of Sora, a Dinka woman in Darfur, and walks the land, asking for forgiveness. A matter of days later Sora is dead, a casualty of the Darfur genocide ... and God dies with her.What follows are a series more of linked short stories than a novel in the truest sense, as Currie jumps in place and time examining what happens when the world is given implacable proof of not just the existence of God, but of the Death of God. His characters include Colin Powell (who delivers a memorable, if sadly fictional, broadside to President Bush) through a series of essentially normal people reacting in different ways to God's death - with an aside to meet a talking dog, who ate the flesh of the dead Creator, and whose worldview has changed irrevocably as a result. We see an America wracked first by suicides, and then - as the sun continues to rise and the world continue to exist - by a Cult of the Child, as people seek for something to take the place of religion. We see lovers separated by cultural divides, teenagers rebelling against their parents, the sad inevitabilities of life and death, the power of small town rumour and backbiting to divide and destroy. Ultimately we see a world where nation-states have become secondary to their underlying philosophical differences, as the Postmodern Anthropological Marines fight a losing war against the grimly relentless forces of the evolutionary Psychologists, as what's left of America dulls itself into a chemical lobotomy, passively fleeing from the world around.Currie darts around ideas with style and flair. As befits an excellent short story writer, his characters are deftly and comprehensively drawn. His themes are both dark and weighty, with a sense of profound despair at times that recalls Carver but, again like Carver, they work because they resonate so well with the real world around us.There is ultimately little to uplift as you read; it's a bleak vision of the future that mirrors the present around us, and it offers little in the way of solution. Its strengths though make this a book well worth reading; its main weakness that it doesn't quite hang together as a novel.
    • 5/5
      Currie creates a frightening futuristic view of the world after God, in the form of a young Dinka woman in Darfur, dies. The almost plausible turn of events after God's demise run from suicide pacts to insanity, to telepathic conversations, to war, to child adoration to hopelessness. The related stories create an inventive realm for Currie's humor and detail to shine. Extremely intersting read while also disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny at almost the same time.