Beep, Bill Roorbach
Beep, Bill Roorbach
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Beep
A Novel

Author: Bill Roorbach

Narrator: Bill Roorbach

Unabridged: 8 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/16/2024

Synopsis

An ebullient, funny, and hugely original novel told from the perspective of Beep, a squirrel monkey who—with the help of a brilliant young girl— forges the way forward for a planet in crisis.​

In this immensely enjoyable and wise novel, it takes a sweet and personable squirrel monkey, Beep, to help us see the world we live in more clearly. While intending only to go deeper and higher into the Costa Rican rain forest to find a mate, he instead meets Inga, a kindly American tween on vacation with her family. Inadvertently, Beep travels to Manhattan with Inga. With her devoted help—and a bit of inspiration from a visiting Greta Thunberg, along with a dramatic zoo liberation—Beep manages to change the destiny of the world. He even finds his monkey love. Along the way, a vast cast of engaging and perceptive animals have a great deal to say about humanity and the divisions among us, our alien cities, our strange practices, our folly, as well as our beauty, and our promise, unfulfilled.

For fans of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures and Dave Eggers’s The Eyes and the Impossible, Beep is full of humor, inspiration, and remarkable new ways of understanding how we live. Urgent but never earnest in the face of the increasing threats to our planet, Beep the monkey inspires us all to stop being the problem and start being the solution, loving and laughing all the way.

About Bill Roorbach

Bill Roorbach is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend, Into Woods, Temple Stream, and the bestselling Life Among Giants. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used in writing programs around the world. His work has been published in Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. Life Among Giants was an Editor's Pick for Amazon's Best 2012, a Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction for 2012, and a winner of the Maine Literary Award for Fiction.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Makenna on February 19, 2024

i wubbed this book πŸ’šπŸ’......more

Goodreads review by Amy on April 19, 2024

Oh Bill Roorbach! A few years ago I stumbled across The Cure for Love and then my writing group dove into Writing Life Stories, but in characteristic fashion, I managed to forget how solid, generous, and supple a writer he is. Enter Beep, a charming if difficult to characterize novel with a squirr......more

Goodreads review by Karen on July 06, 2024

3.5 I really wanted to love this book but couldn't reconcile myself to the ending. I think there were other ways to get the message across. I also found there were times that I didn't understand the monkey speak. That said, I hope that I am a worthy you-men.......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on March 27, 2025

The last book I read, coincidentally, also had an animal protagonist/narrator, Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch. And I've read a couple of others: Open Throat by Henry Hoke, and a few years ago, the incredibly popular and remarkably sweet Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pel......more

Goodreads review by Ravay on December 07, 2024

Three stars because the writing was beautiful and funny and brilliant and the book has an amazing creative narrative voice! The author pulled off something admirable in creating Beep’s character and Monkeyspeak here! And I was all in for the first 100 pages or so! Unfortunately, somewhere in the midd......more

Quotes

"With a lexicon worthy of Anthony Burgess, our small but mighty hero is quick to recognize the perils facing our fragile world. But Beep is a love story most of all, told with the poetry of a pure heart."β€”Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

"BEEP is a wonder, both monkey and novel, our hero's curious, questing soul, the ebullient brilliance of Roorbach’s prose. Wildly beautiful, funny, moving, entrancing, and hopeful, this is a story for our times, a ray of warm and generous light, a stern warning, a triumph of storytelling."β€”Kate Christensen, author of Welcome Home, Stranger

"BEEP is a work of glorious strangeness, invention, and hope.  In this, Bill Roorbach's most original book yet, his simian hero makes monkeys of us all."β€”Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey

"Hilarious and heartfelt in equal parts, and Beep’s slow uptake of human ways is a revelation. Both the finely tuned rhythm of the humor and the crackpot vocabulary put me in mind of George Saunders—I love the kind of tweaked language that reminds me continuously as I read of the blind trust we put in words to reflect the world as it is, rather than creating it as we would like it to be.”β€”Kate Colby, author of Reverse Engineer and I Mean

“How do I love Beep? Let me count the ways. A novel for a new era, with a monkey serving as transmitter of the knowledge our species desperately needs. Full of heart, brilliantly written, with the wild Roorbachian humor and grace we've come to expect. Delight in Beep, Monkey. Hold tight.”
 β€”Sarah Braunstein, author of Bad Animals

“Roorbach masterfully imbues his simian narrator with a voice full of innocence and trepidation… [He] expertly balances the whimsical with the philosophical as Beep describes the world with a sense of wonder… An inspiring quest tale and imaginative bildungsroman that celebrates the natural world.”β€”Booklist

“In this good-natured fantasy… well paced and exciting… Roorbach’s vision of a world despoiled by human waste and carelessness is grimly plausible, and his hope for a better future is no doubt shared by all.”β€”Kirkus Reviews

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