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A Wagner Matinee
- Narrated by: Walter Zimmerman
- Length: 19 mins
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A Wagner Matinee
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Editorial reviews
"Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you." Willa Cather, the great pioneer writer of the first half of the 20th century, puts those words into the mouth of one of her earliest creations: a homesteading woman in 1890s Nebraska. Performed in a simple, slow pace by Walter Zimmerman, the short story "A Wagner Matinee" reveals this homesteader, Georgiana, through the eyes of Clark, a self-described former "gangling farmer-boy...with chilblains" who has left his Nebraskan home for the considerably more exciting Boston. As the high music of Wagner contrasts with the cold and desolate American plains, the listener is introduced to a woman of hard determination, stoic acceptance, and a great capacity for human feeling.
Publisher's summary
Willa Cather is considered to be one of the best chroniclers of pioneer life in the 20th century. She had a long and distinguished career writing essays, poems, short stories, and novels. This story is a powerful example of a frequent theme: the haunting, sometimes painful, contrast between city and country life.
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The Innocents Abroad
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: David McCallion
- Length: 18 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
In June 1867, Mark Twain set sail for Europe and the Holy Land. Twain recorded this adventurous trip and later turned it into The Innocents Abroad. This book became so popular overseas that it would propel him into an international star. The Innocents Abroad is Twain’s account of his thoughts of the Old World, including Paris, Venice, Pompeii, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem, as well as many other noteworthy cities. His disbelief and wonder are told with humor that endeared Twain to American audiences.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Big Mistake
- By Megg on 12-18-18
By: Mark Twain
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Watt
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Dermot Crowley
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4 out of 5 stars 33
Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Exercise
- By jdk on 08-07-21
By: Samuel Beckett
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The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Varina
- A Novel
- By: Charles Frazier
- Narrated by: Molly Parker
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 799
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 693
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Story4 out of 5 stars 690
With her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a landowner. He instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history - culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Read it rather than listen
- By Anonymous on 08-31-18
By: Charles Frazier
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The Sheep Queen
- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 81
Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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The Story of Lucy Gault
- By: William Trevor
- Narrated by: Katherine Borowitz
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 62
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 50
The Story of Lucy Gault traces the repercussions of a child’s attempt to remain in her beloved home.Threatened with a move from Ireland to England, 9-year-old Lucy runs away, setting off a series of misunderstandings that will eventually touch each inhabitant of her village.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Most Heart warming read
- By Elizabeth K. Morse on 12-12-11
By: William Trevor
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The Girl from Montana
- By: Grace Livingston Hill
- Narrated by: Anne Hancock
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
Elizabeth is utterly alone in her Montana cabin, shocked by the sudden, brutal death of her brother, the last of her family. His killer has threatened to return and claim her, and she has only one thought: to flee across country to the East and search for relatives she has never known. With the villain and his gang in pursuit, she rides across perilous terrain, encountering those who help her and those who, in their own way, are just as dangerous as the men she is fleeing.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful book by Ms hill
- By Martha on 06-07-17
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The Loved One
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 104
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Story4 out of 5 stars 86
Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday - and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Satire? Or just mean spirited?
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 02-08-23
By: Evelyn Waugh
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Mother Carey's Chickens
- By: Kate Douglas Wiggin
- Narrated by: Anne Hancock
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 76
The sudden death of the father of the family results in the drastic reduction of the Careys' income and they must leave their comfortable home in Boston. Nancy Carey, the eldest, recalls a vacation in Maine when they all picnicked in the garden of a big, vacant house that her father loved. She discovers that the house is available, the rent is cheap, and persuades her mother that life in The Yellow House in Beulah, Maine is the perfect place to begin their new life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A very cozy book =)
- By Camilla on 03-01-17
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Ghosts: Edith Wharton's Gothic Tales
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin, Jonathan Epstein, Corinna May, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 158
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Story4 out of 5 stars 143
Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
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5 out of 5 stars
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Ghastly Shadows of the Feminine Condition
- By Diane on 10-16-12
By: Edith Wharton
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Independent People
- By: Halldór Laxness
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 385
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 347
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 347
This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I am so confused about this introduction
- By George M on 09-10-18
By: Halldór Laxness
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Orlando
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Clare Higgins
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,033
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 867
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Story4 out of 5 stars 872
Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Magical
- By Mayca on 05-31-05
By: Virginia Woolf
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- By: Muriel Spark
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 353
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 274
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Story4 out of 5 stars 272
In the classic work that launched a play, a movie, and a song, Muriel Spark tells the darkly intriguing story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher and the intense relationship she develops with six of her students. The scandalously outspoken Miss Brodie makes big waves in the conservative Scottish school, preaching the value of art, passion, and daring.
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5 out of 5 stars
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creme de la creme
- By Kathleen on 01-04-08
By: Muriel Spark
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So Big
- A Novel
- By: Edna Ferber
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 79
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and widely considered to be Edna Ferber’s greatest achievement, So Big is a classic novel of turn-of-the-century Chicago. So Big is the unforgettable story of the indomitable Selina Peake DeJong and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity in the face of a challenging marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood.
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5 out of 5 stars
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History of Chicago via One Family
- By Julie Gaunky on 01-03-21
By: Edna Ferber
What listeners say about A Wagner Matinee
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- James
- 08-01-09
Wonderful story
Wonderful story. Very emotional and thought provoking.
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