Mildred Pierce

Product Description [This is the MP3CD audiobook format.] Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable. Review ''[James M. Cain is] the poet of the hard-boiled school of the American novel.'' --The Washington Post ''Nobody has quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemmingway, and not even Raymond Chandler.'' -- Tom Wolfe''Cain can get down to the primary impulses of greed and sex in fewer words than any writer we know of.'' --The New York Times''A novel that, once begun, will almost surely be read to the end . . . it reflects no codes, no restrictions, and none but the primordial necessities. It is a bath in sensation.'' --New York Times Book Review''[Mildred Pierce] take[s] on new life under Williams's direction . . . [the story] flourishes under her steady, patient, ever-so-slightly melancholic gaze. Williams's reading . . . amplifies our sense of Cain's heroine as an abandoned woman who finds her own way, on her own terms.'' --Publishers Weekly About the Author JAMES MALLAHAN CAIN (1892-1977) worked as a reporter during World War I and was managing editor at the New Yorker before going to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. His novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, became film noir classics. In 1974, he was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.