Down to the Dirt by Joel Thomas Hynes now in Audio: The book that was written out loud finally is out loud!
Rattling Books celebrates its third birthday with the audio release of Down to the Dirt by Joel Thomas Hynes. Narrated by the author Joel Thomas Hynes, Sherry White and Jonny Harris, (all previous crew on Mary Walsh’s TV show Hatching, Matching and Dispatching) the book that was written out loud is finally out, loud! With pitch perfect dialogue and thinking out loud that never misses a beat Down to the Dirt should have been an audio book from the get-go. Finally, you can hear it from the horse’s mouth.
Becoming well known where ever he goes for his riveting and provocative live readings, Canadian author Joel Thomas Hynes is a born writer and performer. Hynes wrote Down to the Dirt because he was sick of telling it. In the best way possible Down to the Dirt is a rebellious child of Newfoundland’s oral tradition, kicking the arse out of romantic myths of bucolic outport Newfoundland life and creating contemporary fiction for the modern ear.
"I kind of wrote this book out loud, on it's feet and I guess it kind of
comes from the oral tradition," Hynes says about the creation of Down to the
Dirt.
It's a very autobiographical book. These are stories that people got
sick of me tellin' and embellishin' on and then I finally actually wrote down
these stories from my life. About the time I nearly set Calvert on fire, or when
I got my skin off some fucking woman when I was 13, shit like that. A lot of the
novel was developed through readings, and if it didn't really work or go over
well on an audience then I could do on-the-spot editing, stuff like that,
re-work it, you know. So that's what I find gives it that kind of quality when
people say it kind of jumps off the page at you, in a sense, right? Because it's
more like a transcription than an actual piece of writing."
- Joel Thomas Hynes in an interview with Jon Symons of The Uniter
Down to the Dirt by Joel Thomas Hynes, Unabridged Audio Edition 2006 Rattling Books
(Print edition published in Canada by HarperCollins, 2005, Carroll & Graf in the U.S. 2005)
ISBN 0-9737586-2-7, a single MP3 CD or Digital Download, 6 ½ hours duration
Joel Thomas Hynes, irresistibly saucy author of Down to the Dirt, winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award, also co-wrote the acclaimed stageplay The Devil You Don’t Know and his recent play Say Nothing Saw Wood, won the Best Dramatic Script Award at the 2005 NL Arts and Letters. Also an actor, Hynes has performed leading roles in numerous stageplays, films and television productions, and recently received the prestigious Golden Sheaf Award for Best Actor at the Yorkton Film Festival. He was a series regular and contributing writer for the CBC’s Hatching, Matching and Dispatching. His new novel, Right Away Monday, is due for release in spring, 2007 by HarperCollins in Canada. Hynes lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
