-
The Art of the Novel
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Prime members: New to Audible?Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
The Art of the Novel
Buy for $17.09
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 215
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 174
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,116
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,845
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,852
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Curtain
- An Essay in Seven Parts
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 12
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 11
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Opinionated and interesting
- By Daniel on 11-18-15
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 109
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 109
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
-
Testaments Betrayed
- An Essay in Nine Parts
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 13
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 39
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Really hard to follow
- By Ingrid on 02-07-24
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 215
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 174
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,116
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,845
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,852
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Curtain
- An Essay in Seven Parts
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 12
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 11
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Opinionated and interesting
- By Daniel on 11-18-15
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 109
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 109
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
-
Testaments Betrayed
- An Essay in Nine Parts
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 13
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 39
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Really hard to follow
- By Ingrid on 02-07-24
By: Milan Kundera
-
Slowness
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 38
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 37
Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show .
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Well done
- By Liam SR on 05-25-19
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 149
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 129
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 83
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 85
Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
-
Tristram Shandy
- By: Laurence Sterne
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 219
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 199
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 194
Laurence Sterne’s most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary 18th-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandyis commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram’s characteristic digressions on a whole range of unlikely subjects (including battle strategy and noses!) are endlessly surprising and make this one of Britain’s greatest comic achievements.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Like discovering Frank Zappa in 250 years
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-14
By: Laurence Sterne
-
Illuminations
- Essays and Reflections
- By: Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 27
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 22
Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
finally
- By Anonymous User on 12-08-21
By: Walter Benjamin, and others
-
The Decameron
- By: Giovanni Boccaccio
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale, Gunnar Cauthery, Alison Pettitt, and others
- Length: 28 hrs and 5 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 229
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 199
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 200
The Decameron is one of the greatest literary works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Not Up to the Usual Naxos Standard
- By John on 11-15-17
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 28
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 28
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Structure
- By Amazon Customer on 01-02-24
By: Matt Bell
-
The Magic Mountain
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 37 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 950
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 828
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 822
Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. The year is 1912 and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. But when Castorp arrives he is surprised to find an established community of patients, and little by little, he gets drawn into the closeted life and the individual personalities of the residents.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A Magical Journey
- By Paul on 08-20-20
By: Thomas Mann
-
The Sleepwalkers
- How Europe Went to War in 1914
- By: Christopher Clark
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 24 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 849
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 739
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 741
The Sleepwalkers is historian Christopher Clark's riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I. Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Very interesting take on a complex problem
- By Steve on 01-24-15
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 476
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 405
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 405
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Myth of Sisyphus
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 901
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 753
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 754
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Brilliant work, excellently narrated
- By Richard B. on 04-30-19
By: Albert Camus
-
The Fun Stuff
- And Other Essays
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 24
Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works - books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation - The Fun Stuff confirms Wood’s preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In 23 passionate, sparkling dispatches - which range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov - Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Read this book and you’ll want to read more.
- By Andre on 01-30-24
By: James Wood
Publisher's summary
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.
Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
Related to this topic
-
Irrational Man
- A Study in Existential Philosophy
- By: William Barrett
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 63
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
heady
- By A. Antine on 07-28-22
By: William Barrett
-
The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 229
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 132
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 134
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
-
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
- By: Friedrich Nietzsche
- Narrated by: Duncan Steen
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 168
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 148
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 148
One of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a remarkable source of inspiration. It is here that the philosopher expresses his frustration with the contemporary world and urges man to embrace Dionysian energy once more. He refutes European culture since the time of Socrates, arguing that it is one-sidedly Apollonian and prevents man from living in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
The Apollonian vs The Dionysian
- By JCW on 02-05-18
-
How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- By: Spencer Klavan
- Narrated by: Spencer Klavan
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 169
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 154
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 152
It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Spectacular! A must read!
- By M.A. on 02-15-23
By: Spencer Klavan
-
Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 136
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 111
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 110
The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
By: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
-
The Discarded Image
- An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Richard Elwood
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 143
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 117
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 117
The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval worldview, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the middle ages and renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later years as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe". This, Lewis' last book, has been hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind".
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
I hope more of Lewis's scholastic stuff is coming
- By James on 04-01-21
By: C. S. Lewis
-
Irrational Man
- A Study in Existential Philosophy
- By: William Barrett
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 63
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
heady
- By A. Antine on 07-28-22
By: William Barrett
-
The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 229
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 132
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 134
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
-
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
- By: Friedrich Nietzsche
- Narrated by: Duncan Steen
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 168
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 148
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 148
One of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a remarkable source of inspiration. It is here that the philosopher expresses his frustration with the contemporary world and urges man to embrace Dionysian energy once more. He refutes European culture since the time of Socrates, arguing that it is one-sidedly Apollonian and prevents man from living in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
The Apollonian vs The Dionysian
- By JCW on 02-05-18
-
How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- By: Spencer Klavan
- Narrated by: Spencer Klavan
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 169
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 154
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 152
It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Spectacular! A must read!
- By M.A. on 02-15-23
By: Spencer Klavan
-
Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 136
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 111
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 110
The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
By: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
-
The Discarded Image
- An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Richard Elwood
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 143
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 117
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 117
The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval worldview, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the middle ages and renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later years as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe". This, Lewis' last book, has been hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind".
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
I hope more of Lewis's scholastic stuff is coming
- By James on 04-01-21
By: C. S. Lewis
-
The Romantic Manifesto
- A Philosophy of Literature
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 269
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 170
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 166
In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned collection of essays, Ayn Rand throws new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again, she demonstrates her bold originality and her refusal to let conventional ideas define her sense of the truth. Rand eloquently asserts that one cannot create art without infusing it with one's own value judgments and personal philosophy - even an attempt to withhold moral overtones only results in a deterministic or naturalistic message.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Essential AYN
- By Mica on 07-15-08
By: Ayn Rand
-
The Hedgehog and the Fox (Second Edition)
- An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
- By: Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy - editor, Michael Ignatieff - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
The Fox Who Tried To Be A Hedgehog
- By Rich S. on 12-14-21
By: Isaiah Berlin, and others
-
Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 148
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 103
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 102
From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
-
Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 32
Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
-
The Year of Our Lord 1943
- Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
- By: Alan Jacobs
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 61
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
The Audible is a Train Wreck
- By John on 09-04-18
By: Alan Jacobs
-
Machiavelli
- The Art of Teaching People What to Fear
- By: Patrick Boucheron
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 48
In a series of poignant vignettes, a preeminent historian makes a compelling case for Machiavelli as an unjustly maligned figure with valuable political insights that resonate as strongly today as they did in his time.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Great Tester
- By Iván on 04-09-24
-
The Courage to Create
- By: Rollo May
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 4 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 198
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 163
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 164
What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms rather than the other way around? In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement. A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
May takes on the Creative Act
- By Lowball on 01-16-19
By: Rollo May
-
To Show and to Tell
- The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
- By: Phillip Lopate
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 75
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 62
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Not a guide on writing personal essays
- By A. Yoshida on 08-07-13
By: Phillip Lopate
-
William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 87
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 74
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 74
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
-
Stories We Tell Ourselves
- Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
- By: Richard Holloway
- Narrated by: Richard Holloway
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 52
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 47
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 47
Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of what it all means: our place in a small corner of one of billions of galaxies, at the end of billions of years of existence. In this new book Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Effortlessly profound
- By Consi on 09-28-21
By: Richard Holloway
-
Angels and Ages
- A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 75
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 45
Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Connecting Darwin and Lincoln
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Adam Gopnik
-
Discourse on Colonialism
- By: Aimé Césaire
- Narrated by: J. Keith Jackson
- Length: 3 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 95
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 72
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 74
This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly 20 years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Authentic Analytical Book on Colonialism.
- By Anonymous User on 07-12-23
By: Aimé Césaire
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 215
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 174
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 149
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Festival of Insignificance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 41
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 36
Listeners who know Milan Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
A Review of Little Significance.
- By Darwin8u on 07-14-15
By: Milan Kundera
-
Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 29
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 23
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile!"), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 109
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 109
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
-
Identity
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 39
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 35
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense of panic it inspires - the very fabric of this novel.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Interesting
- By Jamy Bee on 12-16-18
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 215
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 174
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 149
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Festival of Insignificance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 41
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 36
Listeners who know Milan Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
A Review of Little Significance.
- By Darwin8u on 07-14-15
By: Milan Kundera
-
Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 29
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 23
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile!"), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 109
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 109
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
-
Identity
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 39
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 35
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense of panic it inspires - the very fabric of this novel.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Interesting
- By Jamy Bee on 12-16-18
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Slowness
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 38
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 37
Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show .
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Well done
- By Liam SR on 05-25-19
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Encounter
- Essays
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 17
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 14
Milan Kundera's brilliant new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.
By: Milan Kundera
-
Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 39
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Really hard to follow
- By Ingrid on 02-07-24
By: Milan Kundera
-
Ignorance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 27
Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,116
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,845
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,852
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Testaments Betrayed
- An Essay in Nine Parts
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 13
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
What listeners say about The Art of the Novel
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars
-
Story4 out of 5 stars
- S. Schwankert
- 02-28-21
Fans of Kundera, the novel, and literature will enjoy this
Milan Kundera is my favorite novelist, so to hear one's favorite novelist discuss the novel is a real treat. People with an interest in his work, fiction, and literature will enjoy this book and his discussion of what a novel is and is not, what his job as a novelist is, and why he hasn't granted an interview since 1985. He refers to his best-known works regularly, but almost omits "Immortality" entirely, for fans of that book.
Kundera makes it clear that he sees Miguel de Cervantes as the master of the novel. Listening to this book shook up my upcoming reading list quite a bit.
I removed one star because this is not a book for everyone. He spends significant time analyzing Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers," which may not be known or read by a wider audience. The reader would be better off choosing a Kundera novel than this book if her or his knowledge of the author's work and classic novels, in general, is not reasonably broad.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars
-
Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mo
- 11-27-21
Informative and Inspiring
I recommend this to anyone interested in writing, from beginners to professionals. If you've read anything Kundera has written, you know he is a thoughtful and caring human being. Best of luck in your writing adventures.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful