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Ulysses
- Narrated by: Donal Donnelly
- Length: 42 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first authorized, unabridged release of this timeless classic and exclusively available from Recorded Books. Ulysses records the events of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, Ireland.
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Use earphones that are light on bass
- By Tad Davis on 11-08-15
By: Victor Hugo
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Watt
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Dermot Crowley
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor.
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An Exercise
- By jdk on 08-07-21
By: Samuel Beckett
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Finnegans Wake
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Barry McGovern, Marcella Riordan
- Length: 29 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.
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The keys to. Given!
- By hyand on 06-16-21
By: James Joyce
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The Golden Hour
- A Novel
- By: Beatriz Williams
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bahamas, 1941. Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the duke and duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? Or so Lulu imagines.
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Stick with it!
- By Colleen on 07-17-19
By: Beatriz Williams
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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My Name Is Resolute
- By: Nancy E. Turner
- Narrated by: Mhairi Morrison
- Length: 25 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1729, and Resolute Talbot and her siblings are captured by pirates, taken from their family in Jamaica and brought to the New World. Resolute and her sister are sold into slavery in colonial New England and taught the trade of spinning and weaving. When Resolute finds herself alone in Lexington, Massachusetts, she struggles to find her way in a society that is quick to judge a young woman without a family. As the seeds of rebellion against England grow, Resolute is torn between following the rules and breaking free.
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A life well lived!
- By Anonymous User on 06-20-23
By: Nancy E. Turner
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Dombey and Son
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 36 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.
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Perfect pair
- By Philip on 03-25-08
By: Charles Dickens
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Death in Venice
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A stunningly beautiful youth and the city of Venice set the stage for Thomas Mann’s introspective examination of erotic love and philosophical wisdom.
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A problem with the narration
- By Erez on 03-19-12
By: Thomas Mann
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The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, Volume 1
- By: Anton Chekhov
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, (1860-1904), was born in Russia at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His name has become synonymous with a certain literary style much admired and widely copied since his death. Typically, a Chekhov story is a "mood", a state of mind, usually with regard to relations between one person and another. Under the influence of the constant, infinitesimal, and unforeseen pinpricks of life, there occurs a gradual transformation of that state of mind.
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A Box of Chocolates
- By Darlene on 02-08-05
By: Anton Chekhov
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Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.
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The keys to. Given!
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Audible version of The Dubliners
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This wonderful collection of 18 short stories includes work by some of literature's most treasured names, including Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, and many more. This superlative treasury includes "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; "A Piece of String" by Guy Le Maupassant; "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf; "Nuns at Lunch" by Aldous Huxley, and many more!
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Another great selection of stories
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The Odyssey
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Greek poet Homer established the standard for tales of epic quests and heroic journeys with The Odyssey. Crowded with characters, both human and nonhuman, and bursting with action, The Odyssey details the adventures of Ulysses, king of Ithaca and hero of the Trojan War, as he struggles to return to his home and his waiting, ever-faithful wife, Penelope.
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Don Quixote
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Don Quixote, the world's first novel and by far the best-known book in Spanish literature, was originally intended by Cervantes as a satire on traditional popular ballads, yet he also parodied the romances of chivalry. By happy coincidence he produced one of the most entertaining adventure stories of all time and, in Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, two of the greatest characters in fiction.
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Three BBC radio productions of major works by James Joyce - plus Gordon Bowker’s fascinating biographical account of his life.
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The archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo, falls in lust with Esmerelda, a gypsy dancer who is much admired in Paris. At his instruction, Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre Dame who he has befriended, kidnaps her. Esmerelda is rescued by Phoebus de Chateaupers (Captain of the Royal Archers) and she falls mistakenly in love with his bravery when he is, in reality, something of a rogue and a braggart.
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Excellent Story, Fantastic Narration
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By: Victor Hugo
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Finnegans Wake
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Cyril Cusack, Siobhan McKenna
- Length: 1 hr
- Abridged
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Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna read from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This idiosyncratic novel is full of multilingual puns and portmanteau words, intended to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.
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Only part of the book
- By Vikki on 06-03-16
By: James Joyce
What listeners say about Ulysses
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dan Harlow
- 08-02-13
Ulysses is Life
Any additional comments?
Ulysses is a big long book with a lot of words and it hurts when you drop it on your toe. Mind you, Ulysses isn't the first book I've dropped on my toe: A King James Bible, my family's Masonic Bible (which is exactly like the King James version except the word God had been completely edited out), Gravity's Rainbow (unironically), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being whose sharp corner wounded my little toe. However, aside from Pynchon, I've read every book that has fallen on my foot and so I have now moved on from being a person who has not read Ulysses to that rare breed of a bore who has. I now belong to a group that not even Joyce belonged to because, according to my edition's afterword, once the novel was printed (aside from some very minor errata) he finally gave up and stopped editing (and thus reading) the text all together. I can now claim the company to that special soggy breed of individual who drags their significant other to a day walking tour of Bloom's Dublin (minus the ocean-side masturbation) and who (aside from the people already from Ireland) are at least happy to be in Ireland.
Speaking of Bloom, he's the main character and he's as boring as the people who follow around in his imaginary footsteps and walk right past all the good drinking spots (because Bloom doesn't drink). All the people in the book who are not boring are all the sort of people in the world who would not ever read Ulysses - Molly (Bloom's wife), she gets around with every guy in town and doesn't even wash the sheet stains after, Simon Deadalus, Stephen's father, who is a real Irish piece of work and makes fun of Bloom every chance he gets, and there is a rat in the cemetery that gnaws away on the corpse of a dead main character, Dignam. To give you an idea of what sort of guy Bloom is, well if you ever find yourself in his company and look up at the sky and wonder aloud why is the sky blue, Bloom will give you the absolute correct scientific principle regarding the scattering of light and nitrogen and the rods and cones in our eyes and ... he'll take all the living fun out of the whole thing, regardless if the question was rhetorical.
But let's talk about the guy who wrote the book, James Joyce. Joyce is, as we all know, the greatest comedic novelist of all time and Ulysses is his grand comedic masterpiece. See, what Joyce does is he tricks a lot of really pretentious people into thinking that he is actually a genius because he knows a lot of big words and that there seems to be an awful lot of literary, artistic, historical, even mathematical references imbued into every ink stain of a sentence on every page. Those of us who know, however, know better. You see, Joyce cast the widest net possible when framing this uproarious little ditty - he cast it all the way back to ancient Greece (the founding of all western society) and then wrote his book in a western language! Isn't that hilarious? Oh, you don't quite see what I'm getting at? Well, it is a touch obscure at first, but bear with me. Since Joyce wrote the book in a western language he was forced to have to use words and phrases and cultural references that, in effect, date back to ancient Greece and thus connect to all of western civilization. No matter what Joyce wrote, it would always have a connection to some other thing in history! Now the trick Joyce uses is that by titling the book 'Ulysses' (there is no Ulysses in the book, by the way) he tricks a certain type of person's brain into thinking that every word he writes is a deliberate reference to some aspect of history, or art, or math, or philosophy, or some such over-education. For example, when he mentions a river (doesn't matter which one), some egg-headed scholar will add a footnote to the back of the book (and they'll do it as you're reading it, which is very annoying and you have to keep shooing these annoying pests away with the promise of some grant money or a recent tenure possibility) saying that what Joyce REALLY means by the river is the stream of consciousness, or the river Styx, or the passage of time - they'll relate it to anything EXCEPT whatever river Joyce mentions. Basically Joyce gets a lot of stupid-smart people to do all the work for him and all he had to do was give the book a famous Greek name, make the book really long, throw in some Latin, and there-you-have-it! And this has been going on for over 100 years now! Funniest damn thing in the history of literature. Hell, he even says in the book that the priests hold a lot of their power because the congregation doesn't even speak the Latin the mass is said in! It's like Joyce is daring us!!
His other great comedy routine is his stated desire to re-invent the novel (and even attempt to give the Irish their masterpiece) but then he just only goes about copying the styles of writing done by other people! In one chapter we get a bunch of newspaper headline, another is a really bad play that goes on for 200 pages and is about nothing at all, another is a series of Socratic questions ... goes on and on. He literally does nothing new yet manages to trick a lot of well-meaning people into thinking that copying is actually inventing!
Anyway, you might be wondering if I even liked the book. Well, yes, I did. In fact I loved it, but in that way a mother loves a child that has grown up to be a serial rapist and murderer who is currently serving ten consecutive life sentences in San Quentin - you love them, but it's not easy and you do it because you sort of can't help it and because they need you to love them and because you feel like God is making sure you love them or else He'll send you hell if you give up on them.
It's also the most positive book about humanity ever written. Joyce connects every aspect of our humble, daily lives and shows us how epic and rich even one, simple life can be. The novel even ends with the most positive word in English "yes" because Joyce is saying that no life is too unimportant, too small, no person is too marginalized or morally bankrupt, or sleazy, or noble, to not not deserve respect. No other book does this - no other book connects our own ordinary lives to that of Homer, or 5000 years of history, art, culture, religion - all of it, we're a part and product of everything that came before and life is brief and we should be grateful for it. That's why it's a 5-star book because it doesn't just say life is precious - he proves it. It's like nothing ever written. Yet it's a tough book to love, it's difficult, it's obtuse, it's obscure, it will make you want to throw it across the room out of frustration and confusion, it wont make any sense half the time, it will challenge every nerve ending in your brain - but that's why it's worth it. Life is difficult and this book is difficult. Life isn't a Nicholas Sparks, life-affirming, tell us what we want to hear sort of thing - life is Ulysses. The book is for everyone, and it's for nobody, too. I don't know who I'd ever recommend the book too because you just gotta find your own way to and through it. I will say that it's worth all the pain, like giving birth to an fitful child.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-25-16
Masterful performance. Forty hours of poetry.
I tried (and failed) several times to comprehend what was touted as perhaps the finest novel in the English language. I had given up until I heard, rather than tried to read Ulysses. Now I understand: the epic courage it takes to survive the death of a child (Bloom's and Molly's son Rudy) played out iin a single Dublin day. Beyond moving.. Everyone who has given up on Ulysses deserves a chance to get it. Thanks to the Joyce family, the narrator and Recorded Books.
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- GUY
- 03-01-14
Outstanding reading of Ulysses by James Joyce
If you could sum up Ulysses in three words, what would they be?
Deepens the experience
What other book might you compare Ulysses to and why?
Homer's Odyssey -- it has as intricate plot and more - of course Joyce based his novel on the Odyssey - I also enjoyed the Odyssey as an outstanding Audiobook
What about Donal Donnelly’s performance did you like?
Donal Donnelly understands the book and conveys its meaning magnificently
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No - stretch it out - and let it sink in
Any additional comments?
I have wanted to enjoy Ulysses for over 40 years -- this Audiobook has at last made it possible -- reading the Audiobook with the text in front of me enriches the experience further -- it is one of the profounder experiences of life and that is a fact -- thanks for bringing it to me!
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35 people found this helpful
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- Marjan
- 10-15-13
A masterly performance
Ulysses is one of those books of which you tend to feel you should read it, if you're at all interested in literature. But many of us readers fail to get very far. I tried several times. Encouraged myself by going to a (fantastic) course, which helped a lot. But it was this audiobook that really got me right into Ulysses, loving it, admiring it and then returning with much better understanding to the written word. I am now a total fan of Ulysses, intend to read other works by Joyce (Portrait of the Artist, As a Young Man and The Dubliners) and I also intend to read this book and listen to the audiobook over and over again. In fact, I will start my own Bloomsday tradition and start from the beginning once a year on June 16.
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28 people found this helpful
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- D. Hile
- 09-08-13
A marathon stream of consciousness
The book seemed to me to be an enjoyable stream of consciousness. It was very well read but hard to follow. This would be better read than listened to. Seemed hard to follow and I ended up backing up to figure out the current setting several times. In the end I resigned myself to not closely following the story and just enjoying the dialog.
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14 people found this helpful
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- JM
- 05-21-17
Never again
Thank you James Joyce for reminding me that stream of consciousness is terrible. I won't make that mistake again.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jordan
- 03-20-15
Amazing performance brings Ulysses to life
I had read the book in college and have always wanted to revisit, but was daunted by the length and complexity. This performance really brings the characters, the story, the whole day to life. Can't say enough about what an achievement this performance is. Even when not understanding something it gives you the opportunity to admire Joyce's linguistic finesse.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Lucas
- 04-28-21
Best Book for torture and forced confessions
There are two kinds of people that have read this book; those that say they like this book, and those that aren't lying. I whole heartedly believe that those people who like this book are the same ones that are on trial for lewd acts with fish.
I was okay for the first three hours. Hours 4-10 was akin to talking a walk with a tiny pebble in my shoe. Eleven through twenty I can say was exactly like running with a giant blister on my heel yet nothing I could do about it. Those hours between twenty one and thirty one caused the same kind of gut ripping pain as giving birth to my eight pound son without pain medication, but took longer. The last eleven hours were so monotonous that my brain shut down, woke up, realized I was still listening and began to pulse with such pain I thought I might have a tumor...I decided to call it James.
Seriously, if someone tells you to read this, don't. Quit the class, change professors, or even majors, become a doctor, they don't have to read this.
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7 people found this helpful
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- JJH
- 09-14-14
I had to go through it twice but I loved it.
Would you consider the audio edition of Ulysses to be better than the print version?
Don't know. I never would have stuck with it if I had to read it on paper.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Ulysses?
Molly Bloom at the end. If I wasn't married...
Have you listened to any of Donal Donnelly’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
First time but I immediately downloaded 'A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. He's terrific.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Fear and Loathing in 1904 Dublin. (with sex)
Any additional comments?
Reading all the stuff I should have read in college. Well most of it anyway. This was quite an experience.
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- Christopher
- 09-09-15
A classic that goes straight over my head.
Joyce's classic work, to me, is really just hard work. It was written and published in segments, which really does show. There are a lot of lists in it, some of which are interminably long, and which remind me of secondary school students trying to get the word count up in their essays. We all have off-days, and I guess in 2 years, Joyce must have had more than a few migraines, or subclinical viral infections not severe enough to keep him away from the pen altogether. Or maybe his submission deadlines were a bit too stringent to allow the occasional departure into sick leave.
The reader does very well portraying the characters, and did help me make it through most of the work. However, eventually, I gave up. Just so you know, I have read war and peace twice, so it's not an aural stamina thing. It's just that the original Ulysses seems much better to me than this languid one-day trip around Ireland. However, there are some excellent descriptive elements. Too few, however, to keep me interested to the end of the book.
I do hope others can enjoy this. I was disappointed.
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6 people found this helpful