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Artful
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
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Artful
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Publisher's Summary
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that art and life are never separate.
Artful is a celebration of and meaningful contribution to literature’s enduring worth in the world. There has never been a book quite like it.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ellen K.
- 11-14-18
#Reality/Loss/Mythology
I loved the premise of the loss of your life partner so sweetly. How that tied into mythological history. Both characters are wordsmiths. Lots of quotes from so many important authors. Maybe too many. The journey of discovering of truth through words.
#Loss #Mythology #Truththroughwords #Philosophy #tagsfiving #sweepstakes
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
Following the success of several recent inspirational and practical books for would-be writers, Poemcrazy is a perfect guide for everyone who ever wanted to write a poem but was afraid to try. Writing workshop leader Susan Wooldridge shows how to think, use one's senses, and practice exercises that will make poems more likely to happen.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Her Words, Her Voice...
- By S. Schultz on 11-21-14
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Possession
- By: A. S. Byatt
- Narrated by: Virginia Leishman
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 790
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 584
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 583
As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Absolutely Excellent
- By Loujujoe on 05-12-09
By: A. S. Byatt
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History of the Rain
- By: Niall Williams
- Narrated by: Jennifer McGrath
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 172
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 147
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 144
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces, and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her father.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The language is astoundingly beautiful.
- By Kindle Customer on 05-30-17
By: Niall Williams
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Feel Free
- Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Nikki Amuka-Bird
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 218
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 194
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 190
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
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5 out of 5 stars
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great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
- By Mary E. Magin on 03-09-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Art of X-Ray Reading
- How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 227
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 191
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye and many more.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So Good I Bought the Print Version
- By Jan on 04-25-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Dancing at the Edge of the World
- Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 77
From modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos - in this classic collection of essays, Ursula K. Le Guin roves with her customary audacity over the intersecting arenas of literature, feminism, and social responsibility, exploding any received notions she comes across and revealing visionary possibilities in their stead.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Not my favorite Le Guin collection, but...
- By Cameron on 05-11-19
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The Anthologist
- A Novel
- By: Nicholson Baker
- Narrated by: Nicholson Baker
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 47
The Anthologist follows Paul Chowder - a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering; his girlfriend, Roz, has recently left him; and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Ramblings of a narcissist
- By Orson on 09-29-10
By: Nicholson Baker
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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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My Struggle, Book 1
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 882
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 777
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 777
My Struggle: Book One introduces American listeners to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Anatomy of the Disease of the Self
- By Joe Kraus on 05-06-16
By: Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others
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Things I Don't Want to Know
- On Writing
- By: Deborah Levy
- Narrated by: Henrietta Meire
- Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 8
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Story4 out of 5 stars 8
Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.
By: Deborah Levy
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Thunder and Lightning
- Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story5 out of 5 stars 39
The challenge we face as writers, Natalie Goldberg says, begins with the process of turning inward and then trying to communicate what we find. From the secret of letting characters and stories "write themselves" to finding mentor sources and responding to criticism to writing's one essential ingredient, which is the mind - here are all-new Zen-based lessons and reflections, refined and proven at Natalie's acclaimed national writers' workshops.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Inspiring
- By StoryDtechtive on 02-11-17
By: Natalie Goldberg
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The Poets' Corner
- The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family
- By: John Lithgow
- Narrated by: Morgan Freeman, Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,103
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 952
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 922
John Lithgow has compiled an outstanding collection of memorable poems and has gathered his famous friends to read them. The wide variety of carefully selected poetry in this audiobook provides the perfect introduction to reel in those who are new to poetry, and for poetry lovers to experience beloved verses in a fresh, vivid way. Lithgow offers insightful and sometimes poignant commentary to accompany each poem. His essential criterion is that "each poem's light shines more brightly when read aloud".
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Painless Crash Course in the Great Western Poets
- By Brazilgirl on 10-27-14
By: John Lithgow
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 52
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 125
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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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Greek to Me
- Adventures of the Comma Queen
- By: Mary Norris
- Narrated by: Mary Norris
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 49
Greek to Me is a charming account of Norris’s lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, seeks the fabled Baths of Aphrodite, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine - and more than a few Greek men - Greek to Me is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and its exotic yet strangely familiar language.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love!
- By Syd Young on 07-01-19
By: Mary Norris