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The Situation and the Story
- The Art of Personal Narrative
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
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The Situation and the Story
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Publisher's summary
All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
This book is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.
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To know your true calling - your dharma, as the yogis say - is perhaps the greatest desire within each of us. And yet, few can say we know our purpose with absolute certainty. Fortunately, there is a time-tested guide - an ancient map - for discovering and fulfilling your unique calling. In The Great Work of Your Life, Stephen Cope walks you through each step of the journey.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Jungian Zen Psychoanalytical Retired Meditation Teacher
- By Glenn Guillory, SFO on 06-13-20
By: Stephen Cope
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Letters to a Young Poet
- By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell - translator
- Narrated by: Stephen Mitchell
- Length: 1 hr and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 261
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 165
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 165
Ranier Maria Rilke challenges you, "...to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers." Rilke's ability to combine the sensual and the spiritual into an inspired vision of the art of living is brought to vivid life in his letters. Through his eyes, the everyday difficulties of love, sex, solitude, sadness, and doubt are seen as the archetypal elements of the drama called life.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Priceless Recordings of Intense Feeling
- By David on 10-08-04
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, and others
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 54
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 86
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 77
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 76
This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great insight
- By Kelly Houske on 02-02-19
By: Jan Morris
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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
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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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 329
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 286
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 284
Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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The Awakening
- By: Kate Chopin
- Narrated by: Susie Berneis
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 337
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 286
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 284
Unsatisfied with the expectations of Creole society and unhappy with her family life, Edna Pontellier begins to fall in love with the dapper Robert Lebrun. Lebrun's flirtations, along with the lifestyle of renowned musician Mademoiselle Reisz, rejuvenates Edna's sense of freedom and independence. However, an affair with the womanizer Alcee Arobin provides Edna with a taste of the danger that comes with living outside of social convention.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Good story, great reading.
- By Donald on 03-14-17
By: Kate Chopin
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On Elizabeth Bishop
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
In this book novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences - the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.
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5 out of 5 stars
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ELIZABETH BISHOP
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 05-19-16
By: Colm Tóibín
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 22
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 22
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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The Consolations of Philosophy
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 665
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 493
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 491
Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cheering, empathic, helpful
- By Austin on 11-11-09
By: Alain de Botton
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Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 266
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 236
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 232
Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,048
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 922
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 916
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,308
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,129
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,125
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
-
My Bright Abyss
- Meditation of a Modern Believer
- By: Christian Wiman
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 31
Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith - responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition - might look like.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Meditative Poetry in Prose
- By Marianne Murphy Zarzana on 07-21-19
By: Christian Wiman
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3 out of 5 stars
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The Art of Memoir
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Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant!
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On Writers and Writing
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 228
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 200
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 199
What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?
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5 out of 5 stars
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l just love Margaret Atwood.
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Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Maybe changed my writing life
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Fierce Attachments
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fabulous!!!
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not a guide on writing personal essays
- By A. Yoshida on 08-07-13
By: Phillip Lopate
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The Art of Memoir
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 703
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The Odd Woman and the City
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A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
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Yet another Gornick masterpiece
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Good Prose
- The Art of Nonfiction
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
Good Prose is an inspiring book about writing - about the creation of good prose - and the record of a warm and productive literary friendship. The story begins in 1973, in the offices of the Atlantic Monthly, in Boston, where a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder came looking for an assignment. Richard Todd was the editor who encouraged him, and from that article grew a lifelong association. Before long, Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, the first book the two worked on together, had won the Pulitzer Prize.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Tendentious
- By Despair at the State of the Republic on 05-15-23
By: Tracy Kidder, and others
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The Best American Essays 2022
- By: Alexander Chee
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 15
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 15
Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent writing and essays; disappointing narration
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The Liars' Club
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The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Awful narration
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The Collected Schizophrenias
- Essays
- By: Esmé Weijun Wang
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- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 897
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An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Narration way too slow
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Bird by Bird
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- By: Anne Lamott
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 175
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 149
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For a quarter century, more than a million readers and listeners—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Why oh why did she narrate this?!
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