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Here We Are
- My Friendship with Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Benjamin Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.
I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement.
So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.
Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
Critic Reviews
"If you never met Philip Roth, you can now, for Ben Taylor’s new hook enacts a kind of resurrection. In addition to bringing a mastery of the writer’s work, Taylor has somehow managed to conjure the living man - someone I found wholly at odds with his public persona. Here is the Roth I knew rendered at his most antic, hilarious, rancorous, tender. Forget the work of Boswell's Johnson, I have never read a more touching portrait of literary friendship. Smart, moving, wise - Taylor’s page-turning book sets a new standard for both memoir and literary biography." (Mary Karr)
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What listeners say about Here We Are
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- K. King
- 06-10-20
Thankful
As an avid fan of Mr.Roth’s novels, I have immensely enjoyed this intimate look at a special friendship we all could be so lucky to have. Ben’s unique style of writing often made me feel as though I was in the room with them. It doesn’t get much better than that. “Thank you” Ben for sharing Here We Are with the world. Now, I look forward to your book on PROUST! Regards, Kenny King- Mobile, AL
1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Mark Stein
- 05-20-20
Fantastic!
I have experienced many of these things & will definitely listen again! Did Tanglewood in 1976. Know Lenox/Pittsfield well. Read many of Roth's others particularly "The Human Stain"
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- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as a father, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
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Terrible
- By Ken on 10-14-09
By: Michael Chabon
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Still Writing
- The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Dani Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Dani Shapiro, best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers - and anyone with an artistic temperament - will find inspiration and comfort here.
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Inspiring but dark, better to read than listen
- By Raquel on 10-22-21
By: Dani Shapiro
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Capote
- A Biography
- By: Gerald Clarke
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 25 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
First published in 1988 - just four years after Capote's death - Clarke paints a vivid behind-the-scenes picture of the author's life, based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the man himself and the people close to him. From the glittering heights of notoriety and parties with the rich and famous to his later struggles with addiction, Capote emerges as a richly multidimensional person - both brilliant and flawed.
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the brightest stars can self destruct
- By Jared_S on 09-22-21
By: Gerald Clarke
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Zora and Langston
- A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
- By: Yuval Taylor
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Let America Be America Again", first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other.
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Fascinating Story
- By Amazon Customer on 08-19-19
By: Yuval Taylor
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The Great Good Thing
- A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ
- By: Andrew Klavan
- Narrated by: Andrew Klavan
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How did a New York-born, Jewish, former-atheist novelist and screenwriter - a winner of multiple Edgar Awards, whose books became films with Clint Eastwood and Michael Douglas - find himself at the age of 50 being baptized and confessing Jesus as Lord? That's a tale worth telling.
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Profound and Beautiful
- By Jason Hague on 09-30-16
By: Andrew Klavan
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Pity the Reader
- On Writing with Style
- By: Kurt Vonnegut, Suzanne McConnell
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition.
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Unlistenable
- By Grant Swalwell on 01-06-20
By: Kurt Vonnegut, and others
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Quichotte
- A Novel
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.
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The Best Narration I have Ever Heard
- By Bubikon on 12-12-19
By: Salman Rushdie
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This Is Not My Memoir
- By: André Gregory, Todd London
- Narrated by: André Gregory
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This Is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This Is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the listener from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India.
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A life beautifully led, written, and read.
- By Elana SJ on 09-01-21
By: André Gregory, and others
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Touched by the Sun
- My Friendship with Jackie
- By: Carly Simon
- Narrated by: Elizabeth McGovern
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A chance encounter at a summer party on Martha’s Vineyard blossomed into an improbable but enduring friendship. Carly Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made an unlikely pair - Carly, a free and artistic spirit still reeling from her recent divorce, searching for meaning, new love, and an anchor; and Jackie, one of the most celebrated, meticulous, unknowable women in American history. Nonetheless, over the next decade their lives merged in inextricable and complex ways, and they forged a connection deeper than either could ever have foreseen.
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Self absorbed!
- By Stephanie l. on 03-19-20
By: Carly Simon
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Borges and Me
- An Encounter
- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir”, Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland - in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.
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Super Sexist
- By Reader on 05-18-21
By: Jay Parini
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Fish Out of Water
- A Search for the Meaning of Life: A Memoir
- By: Eric Metaxas
- Narrated by: Eric Metaxas
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What happens when one of America’s most beloved biographers writes his own biography? For five-time New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas, the answer is Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life - a soaring, lyrical, and often mischievous account of his early years, in which the astute Queens-born son of Greek and German immigrants struggles to make sense of a world in which he never quite seems to fit.
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Reliving my childhood
- By Rhinocermom on 02-18-21
By: Eric Metaxas
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The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
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Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth