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Open City
- Narrated by: Teju Cole
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
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Open City
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-
Story5 out of 5 stars 451
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 209
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
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Story4 out of 5 stars 178
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 318
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 238
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Story4 out of 5 stars 238
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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5 out of 5 stars
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Vatican Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Roland Merullo
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 138
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4 out of 5 stars 127
Cynthia Piantedosi lives a quiet, unassuming life with her elderly father just outside of Boston. When she loses her beloved grandmother as a child, her faith takes a turn for the devout, and she begins experiencing what she describes as "spells" - moments of such intense prayer that she loses herself. Uninterested in boys and a social life, she develops a deep friendship with the parish priest, whose ideas are often seen as too provocative by his congregation but who encourages her to explore her spells.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I enjoyed it until the last page.
- By Pam on 08-15-16
By: Roland Merullo
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Doesn't capture the creepiness of the text
- By andrew ross on 01-07-18
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 59
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 214
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 183
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Story4 out of 5 stars 182
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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River Town
- Two Years on the Yangtze
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 541
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 424
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 424
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Peter Berkrot Again?
- By Abstraction on 07-10-11
By: Peter Hessler
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Strength in What Remains
- A Journey of Remembrance and Forgetting
- By: Tracy Kidder
- Narrated by: Tracy Kidder
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 333
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 183
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 182
In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My Favorite of Kidder's Books
- By Roy on 08-31-09
By: Tracy Kidder
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 142
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Story4 out of 5 stars 127
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 253
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 225
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 225
This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4 out of 5 stars 51
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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All Our Names
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Korey Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 81
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 84
All Our Names is the story of a young man who comes of age during an African revolution, drawn from the hushed halls of his university into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, and the path of revolution leads to almost certain destruction, he leaves behind his country and friends for America. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into the routines of small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past....
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Tale of Two Continents
- By David on 07-31-14
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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Netherland
- By: Joseph O'Neill
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 322
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 139
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 140
Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Get Your Post-Colonial Gatsby ON!
- By Darwin8u on 04-13-12
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4 out of 5 stars 61
In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16