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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,289
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,153
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,161
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."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
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The Festival of Insignificance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 28
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 29
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.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A Review of Little Significance.
- By Darwin8u on 07-14-15
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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
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 146
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 120
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 121
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.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
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Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
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Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher (Translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story4 out of 5 stars 14
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.
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The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
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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 1,289
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,153
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 1,161
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
-
The Festival of Insignificance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 32
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 28
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 29
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
-
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 146
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 120
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 121
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
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 101
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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
-
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 17
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 14
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.
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 68
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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
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Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
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Identity
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story4 out of 5 stars 21
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.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting
- By Jamy Bee on 12-16-18
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Ignorance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 20
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 15
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 15
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."
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The Idiot
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Narrated by: Constantine Gregory
- Length: 24 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 266
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 251
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 249
Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin is one of the great characters in Russian literature. Is he a saint or just naïve? Is he an idealist or, as many in General Epanchin's society feel, an "idiot"? Certainly his return to St. Petersburg after years in a Swiss clinic has a dramatic effect on the beautiful Aglaia, youngest of the Epanchin daughters, and on the charismatic but willful Nastasya Filippovna. As he paints a vivid picture of Russian society, Dostoyevsky shows how principles conflict with emotions - with tragic results.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Moments of surprise.
- By Theo on 05-02-18
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Slowness
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story4 out of 5 stars 20
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 .
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well done
- By Liam on 05-25-19
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Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher (translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 18
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Morality and Mortality
- By bigawkwardgirl on 02-08-15
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (translator)
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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.
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Encounter
- Essays
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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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.
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The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 316
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 237
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Story4 out of 5 stars 242
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Started slow but ended great
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 12-06-09
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The Fall
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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Killing Commendatore
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 28 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,392
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,306
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,302
In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Masterpiece and A Good Novel To Start
- By Elif Kaya on 10-18-18
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The Short Stories, Volume I
- By: Ernest Hemingway
- Narrated by: Stacy Keach
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 426
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 249
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Story4 out of 5 stars 250
This definitive audio collection, read by Stacy Keach, traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style - from the plain bald language of his first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude. These stories showcase the singular talent of a master, the most important American writer of the 20th century.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful.
- By Amazon Customer on 11-24-16
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 461
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 433
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 431
Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Hmmmm.....
- By StJohn on 07-07-19
Publisher's Summary
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. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories, while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
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