Audiobooks

Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere are now available as audiobooks from Audible.com.

Swap and Tumblin' Dice should be available sometime this month and they'll all be available soon from iTunes.

All four are narrated by William Dufris and I think he does a fantastic job.

And there was a review of Tumblin' Dice in the National Post today by Sarah Weinman which said very nice things. My favourite part is: "Each of John McFetridge’s three previous novels have a rhythm to them, mixing taut dialogue, spare description and a dark sensibility with the cool calm of a master bass player."

It's funny she mentions the bass. I bought my first bass, a Hagstrom, in about 1978 but when I joined the band Smiley's People in 1985 I switched to guitar (strictly rhythm, as they say) and the bass was played by Michel Basilières, whose fantastic novel Black Bird won the Amazon/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award.

The real guitar player in Smiley's People was Clifford Schwartz and here's a clip of him playing with Cirque du Soliel:

Audiobooks!

No details yet, but ECW Press have just signed a deal with audible.com to bring out my four novels as audiobooks sometime in 2012.

I only recently started listening to audiobooks as I walk the dog and I'm enjoying the experience quite a bit. Last week I was listening to Philip K. Dick short stories and I had this odd feeling that I was closer to the future he was describing - with my "portable listening device" - than I was to the past in which he wrote the stories.