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On Being Different
- What It Means to Be a Homosexual
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
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Publisher's Summary
The groundbreaking work on being homosexual in America - available again only from Penguin Classics and with a new foreword by Dan Savage.
Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” in response to a homophobic article published in Harper’s Magazine. Described as “the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade”, it carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different - one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.
For more than 65 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Audiences trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Critic Reviews
“Forty years after Miller’s article and book his eloquent voice is still poignant, still relevant to the ongoing struggle, our struggle for dignity and equal rights.” (Jonathan Ned Katz, founder, codirector, OutHistory.org)
“Forty years later, the story Miller tells remains important and necessary to read, not only for both gay and straight readers to understand ‘the way it used to be,’ but because the issues Miller raised are still being discussed and argued about.” (Nancy Pearl)
“Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a searing indictment of social hypocrisy, written with a quite but burning passion.... This book is not only a valuable historical document about the gay civil rights movement, but it is an American classic because of the beauty it achieves through its unflinchingly honest portrayal of the raw pain of rejection.” (David Carter, author Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution)
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- Narrated by: Aze Fellner
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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William Sidis, 1897-1944, was the world's greatest child prodigy. His IQ was an estiamted 50 to 100 points higher than Einstein's, the highest ever recorded or estimated. His father, a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology, believed that he and his wife could create a genius in the cradle. They hung alphabet blocks over the baby's crib-and within six months little Billy was speaking. At 18 months he was reading The New York Times; at three, Homer in the original Greek. At six he spoke at least seven languages.
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A tarnished national treasure lost forever
- By Tom B. on 05-13-12
By: Amy Wallace
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Changing My Mind
- Occasional Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.
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There may be truths on the side of life
- By Darwin8u on 02-18-20
By: Zadie Smith
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Here and Now
- Letters (2008–2011)
- By: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....
By: Paul Auster, and others
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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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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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Cast of Characters
- Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker
- By: Thomas Vinciguerra
- Narrated by: Tony Pasqualini
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country's most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine's cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, and brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine.
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But...Where's Dorothy Parker
- By Constant Reader on 06-05-18
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The Counterlife
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
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Eros, Thanatos, and the Male Yenta
- By G. Benett on 10-03-19
By: Philip Roth
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Salinger
- By: David Shields, Shane Salerno
- Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
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Ingenious novel or biography? Hard to tell....
- By Melinda on 09-05-13
By: David Shields, and others
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Pretty Bitches
- On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women
- By: Lizzie Skurnick, Rebecca Traister
- Narrated by: Andrea Lopez, Shayna Small, Carolyne Leys, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Words matter. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. They have nuance and power. "Effortless", "Sassy", "Ambitious", "Aggressive": What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise, and blame, bearing an outsized influence on women's lives - to say nothing of our moods.
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Such a good listen.
- By Laurie Ann on 08-31-22
By: Lizzie Skurnick, and others
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Philip Roth
- The Biography
- By: Blake Bailey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 31 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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"I don't want you to rehabilitate me," Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. "Just make me interesting." Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost 10 years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth's own breathtakingly candid confessions. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.
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moved
- By Michael on 08-18-21
By: Blake Bailey
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We Learn Nothing
- Essays
- By: Tim Kreider
- Narrated by: Tim Kreider
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? How do you react when someone you've known for years unexpectedly changes genders?
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Shouldn't have been written but glad it was
- By Warren Taryle on 05-08-15
By: Tim Kreider