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Solid Objects
- Narrated by: Glenn Hascall
- Length: 12 mins
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Publisher's Summary
All short stories are open to interpretation and philosophical dialogue, but this memorable tale from acclaimed author Virginia Woolf might be described as a case study in the mentality of hoarding or at the very least an obsession.
What would John give up to discover and collect a very unusual group of items? Would this collection improve his life, or would it give way to madness?
Narrated by Glenn Hascall.
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 49
Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.
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3 out of 5 stars
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over-written
- By Jacqui Good on 10-19-18
By: Judith Thurman
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 20
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Story5 out of 5 stars 20
John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
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A Room of One's Own
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,141
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,016
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,012
A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Witty, Beautiful Plea for Androgynous Integrity
- By Jefferson on 08-20-14
By: Virginia Woolf
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At the Center of All Beauty
- Solitude and the Creative Life
- By: Fenton Johnson
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Learn about others and yourself
- By C. FREEMAN on 12-25-20
By: Fenton Johnson
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Paradise Lost
- A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 57
Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The newest definitive Fitzgerald biography
- By Praxia on 01-08-18
By: David S. Brown
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 307
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 271
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 269
Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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My Life in Middlemarch
- By: Rebecca Mead
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 251
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Story4 out of 5 stars 219
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch,regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Reader's Pleasure!
- By Doggy Bird on 02-17-14
By: Rebecca Mead
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Wagnerism
- Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Alex Ross
- Length: 28 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 113
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 110
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics - an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Not Just for Wagner Experts!
- By Rupert Pupkin on 09-26-20
By: Alex Ross
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Languages of Truth
- Essays 2003-2020
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Raj Ghatak, Salman Rushdie
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.
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4 out of 5 stars
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SALMAN RUSHDIE
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 07-24-21
By: Salman Rushdie
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Edith Wharton
- By: Hermione Lee
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4 out of 5 stars 43
With profound empathy and insight, Hermione Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Gardens Over Great Novels
- By Aaron Elliott on 04-26-07
By: Hermione Lee
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Coventry
- Essays
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 72
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This review is biased
- By Paul on 05-16-21
By: Rachel Cusk
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Emerson
- The Mind on Fire
- By: Robert D. Richardson
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 267
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 241
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 242
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Finally!
- By Douglas on 08-15-14
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The Last American Aristocrat
- The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
- By: David S. Brown
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. The last member of his distinguished family - after great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams - to gain national attention, he is remembered today as a historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual.
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5 out of 5 stars
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outstanding book, highly recommend it
- By D. Littman on 02-19-21
By: David S. Brown