Company: Stories

Written by Shannon Sanders

Narrated by Karen Chilton

A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.

Each piece includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,” two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat” boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,” the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,” their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.

These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890592408

Reviews for Company

[kerns222 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

History as thriller/page-turner. Simplified, romanticized account of the CIA costarring many real characters from the past (some names were changed to protect someone??, but it's easy to figure out who's who with wikipedia.) Among others, Andropov drops in, Castro comes by, and Nixon is off in the wings.

Also a little mild lovey-dovey. Lots of plots, liquor, and subplots. Multiple generations of Yale-trained US spies and their counterparts from Moscow hunt each other and snoop and beget more spies.

Starts when Stalin and Truman were nose-to-nose, and plays the Great Game thru Afganistan(sound familiar, you history buffs). Hungary, Berlin, Bay or Pigs, all make an appearance, too. A hot read for a long voyage (nearly 1000 pages). The question here is what is real and what is fiction. It scares me to think so much was probably real.

[jpporter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robert Littell's The Company no doubt ranks up there as one of the best spy novels written. It is a substantial, fairly massive, undertaking (nearly 900 pages) that attempts to present a fictionalized history of the Central Intelligence Agency, from its early days (shortly after WWII) up through the dissolution of the USSR. The story revolves around a group of agents - Elliot Ebbitt, Jack McCauliffe and Leon Kritzky - recruited at the beginning of the CIA, and who spend their entire careers being involved in the major events of the Cold War: the Hungarian Revolt, the Bay of Pigs, the Russian involvement in Afghanistan, and the death throes of Russian Communism.The fictional characters go about their business, with the story weaving around historical personages such as Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan (who is portrayed rather unflatteringly), Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and other real characters. Littell makes an effort to explain some of the reasoning that goes behind intelligence activities, the reasons why presidents made some of the decisions they made, and the frustrations that arise when diplomacy, politics and national interest conflict.The story might not be as hard-edged as it might have been (I don't know that intelligence agents are as sympathetic as they are described here, and while Russian agents are portrayed as tough man capable of doing heavy-handed things with little compunction, American agents tend to be romanticized a little bit), and some parts seems somewhat melodramatic (the Hungarian uprising being the most glaring example). This is a good read, a substantial read, and an exciting read.

[crazybatcow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been reading this book FOREVER!!! It is super long - as long as Abercrombie's works, but not as engaging - so I kept putting it down and reading other novels before finishing this one. All in all I enjoyed it, but I kinda wish it hadn't been all in one novel - perhaps the first part of the novel, say to 1960 - could be book one, and the post 1960 part be book two. That way I wouldn't have felt like the book went on forever.It covers a lot of ground though: basically it follows the CIA from its inception to the modern day 'activities' it gets up to. Lots of spy vs counter-spy stuff, and lots of details regarding specific 'coups' or attempted coups, by the CIA (i.e the Bay of Pigs). Was the historical background accurate? I have no idea, but it *sounded* like it was. I am not a big follower of U.S. politics, and I don't know if I believe in the Cold War hype, so many of the BIG ISSUES in this book didn't shock or awe me because I either didn't care, or never believed it was ever a real threat in the first place.It might be hard to tell as you wade through the book, but there is a consistent thread, and a bit of a storyline outside of detailing the various CIA activities. Essentially, the book follows the entire careers (and sometimes lives) of a handful of characters. It is well written, and, for a book so long, and on such dry material, it is actually very interesting.

[mainecolonial · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Littell's book is a brick: 896 pages; 34.5 hours on audio. Littell manages to make a story about the CIA entirely human by turning it into a family saga, in more ways than one. Yale University undergrads and best friends Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky and Ebby Ebbitt are recruited to "The Company, the successor to the World War II OSS, right after its inception.The story begins in Berlin, at the start of the Cold War, and we take a time-and-distance trip through some of the key moments in the intelligence war: Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Russian war in Afghanistan, and the 1991 attempted right-wing coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Littell blends fiction so well with these historical events that I kept going back to Wikipedia and historical reference books to see where the seams were between fact and fiction.Jack, Leo and Ebby grow up in the service; they meet their wives, marry, and have children who follow their path into The Company. The book also follows key KGB agents and features regular appearances by colorful characters like the Falstaffian senior agent Harvey Torriti, aka "the Sorcerer," whose obsession with hunting moles within the CIA and British intelligence lasts even into his retirement, and the Sorcerer's old friend Ezra ben Ezra, aka "the Rabbi," of Israel's Mossad, who can be counted on to swap key information and get his hands dirty when the CIA is occasionally forced to back off. A thread running throughout the book is the mystery of Sasha, the code name for the KGB sleeper agent whom the CIA believes has infiltrated its upper echelons. Trying to figure out Sasha's identity is just one of the pleasures of this lively and intricate story.Though there is a large cast of characters, Littell's characterization skills make them easy to distinguish and remember. Mixed in with the fictional characters, and helping to ground the story, are many real historical figures, like the CIA's Bill Casey and James Jesus Angleton (whose paranoia virtually crippled the CIA during the Cold War), Kim Philby (the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring that spied for the KGB from within British intelligence), Jack and Bobby Kennedy (the latter of whom has an intense confrontation with the Sorcerer during the Bay of Pigs invasion), Ronald Reagan, and Russians Nikita Kruschev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.Littell's characters are all ideologically committed, but that doesn't mean that they all see eye to eye. Jack, who was with the rebels in Budapest in 1956, is so scarred by the US refusal to intervene when the Russian tanks came it that he forever after takes a hard interventionist line, all the way to favoring the assassination of troublesome politically powerful figures in other countries. Ebby, on the other hand, believes strongly that the CIA's sole mission is and should be intelligence, not intervention. On the KGB side, Starik, the mastermind of the KGB's efforts to undermine the CIA, is a far-right , anti-Semitic, Russian nationalist, while his protégé, Yevgeny, who spends decades in deep cover in the US, is thrilled, upon his return to Russia, with Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika initiatives.The different viewpoints of the characters help illustrate, by putting it in human terms, the checkered history of the CIA, from its thrilling feats of derring-do to its dirty tricks and political assassinations of unfriendly political figures in foreign countries. Through his characters, Littell makes us see how men who think of themselves as good guys--and who are good guys, on the whole--can use the same compromised morality as the bad guys. And, of course, we're still struggling with the issues of ends and means, and the unanticipated consequences that may result from some intelligence decisions, like the US decision to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Russians.Littell doesn't shy away from depicting the internal politics and downright incompetence that have dogged some of the Company's operations over the years, either. I could pick a few nits over some factual errors, Littell's clumsiness with female characters, and a gratuitous and repulsive subplot involving Starik's sexual perversion, but on the whole this is a standout historical novel and tale of espionage.

[literaryrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This long novel deals with the CIA from directly after World War II in Berlin and the start of the Cold War through the first Iraq War. I was surprised how engrossed I became in the maneuverings of the agents, the political games, the spycraft, the betrayals, double agents, triple agents, murders and subterfuge involved within our own CIA, let alone the Soviet Union's KGB. Extremely well developed characters, time changes and dramatic plots make this a page turner

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up because it was on a list of recommended spy thrillers. And once you pick it up, you realize one thing--this is one thick book--894 pages in trade paperback. Now, there are times I can really revel in a sprawling epic book. But the characters better grip me, or I have to find the story believable, and it helps if the style is strong. That would be a "no" on all counts.The title itself is a strike against it. What I know about the Central Intelligence Agency can fit a thimble several times over. But one thing I do know from someone who would know--whatever you've heard, the people who work there don't think of themselves as "the Company." They're "the Agency." Then there's the opening chapter. A blurb from the New York Times called the book "a gold mine for true conspiracy theorists." And what do we have? The supposed assassination of John Paul I by a Soviet agent. And good grief, it the security at the Vatican is as bad as that, it's amazing any pontiff lasted a month. If you're going to ladle out whacko conspiracy theories, at least make it more credible than an Oliver Stone film.And then there's the writing. For one, this is one of those books with really, really intrusive dialogue tagging. It's a common flaw and one I don't notice except when 1) it's really done often and ludicrously--and here it is--this one uses "crabbed" which is a first for me. 2) The book isn't reeling me in. And it wasn't. The characters and the plot just never convinced me the author had a clue. Its Kim Philby (a historical Soviet mole within British Intelligence) was chiefly characterized by a really clunkily depicted stutter. It's CIA "heroes" Jack J. McAuliffe and Harvey "Sorcerer" Torriti were unreal one-dimensional and unengaging (and if they were typical of CIA agents, it's amazing we won the Cold War). Cheesy dialogue, adverb abuse, overwrought descriptions, stock phrases, frequent misspellings and factual errors (particularly dealing with DC...uhm ConEd is New York City's electric service--not DC's phone company) and no ethnic stereotype left behind. Eric Ambler or Alan Furst this guy is not.

[neilsantos_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. This was probably the best book I read this year. It was fantastic. I have recently rediscovered an old love for spy thrillers and this is an epic spy thriller. It isn't thrilling like an action movie, it uses a very slow burn to get through the operations. Warning: the book itself is huge, and heavy to carry around. The Wall, Hungary '56, Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, the coup against Gorby. It had all the old friends of the era, Kim Philby, Allen Dulles, Bill Casey. I am totally going to read more of this guy's stuff.

[storyjunkie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is my first encounter with real people being used in fiction. Fictionalization of real people is distasteful to me - no matter how well done. This book has a lot to do with that reaction.

[mbowen_51 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

or someone accustomed to reading ludlum, littell's book is a very pleasant turn. it weaves a complex and compelling history of the cia as told through three generations of american and russian spies.as compared to ludlum, littell's characters are motivated by a patriotism that goes beyond the sometimes cynical and self-serving desire to be at peace with a lover and family. litell's characters are made of sterner stuff. if you've read ludlum, never once does one imagine that a son would want to follow his father into the spy business, but littell's families follow just as surely as there are army brats, there are real spy kids.in evaluating the value of reading 900 page spy books, you have to deal with 'truth' on many levels. there is nothing quite as arrogant as the intellect of someone whose knowledge approaches comprehensiveness, and no simple way to step into the conversations of such people without a great amount of preparation. for this reason it is almost impossible to inject the form of the spy novel with much more accuracy or detail than littell provides. it seems to me that you have a fundamental constraint: (dramatic value, historical accuracy, compelling characters,

[shliz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

if you like spy books, this is a must read!

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Bildungsroman follows the careers of three American and one Russian spying for the CIA and KGB from the 1950s to the 1990s. The main stations are Berlin 1950, Budapest 1956, Cuba 1961, Washington 1974, Afghanistan 1983 and Moscow 1991. Apart from the Bay of Pigs invasion, the novel stresses the CIA successes and mentions only en passant the disastrous actions in South America and Asia. The ivy-league and family clan-oriented recruiting (is it true that whole families work for the CIA?) defeat their main adversary by default, as the Soviet empire collapses.