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The Receptionist
- An Education at The New Yorker (Digital Edition)
- Narrated by: Susanna Burney
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
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The Receptionist
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Publisher's Summary
Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at The New Yorker magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum - watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer, she never advanced at the magazine.
This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth's fascinating relationships with John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, as well as E.J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter DeVries, Charles Addams, and many other New Yorker contributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday. Eventually, Groth would have to leave The New Yorker in order to find herself.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
-
Performance1 out of 5 stars
-
Story1 out of 5 stars
- nancy
- 09-27-13
don't bother
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
this is not ;a well written book it is like a book report . . it is difficult to care about her travails she starts out saying she wanted to be one and stopped could and gives us no reason to pay attention to anything she thinks if one has read aboutt hese people already there appears to be an absence of insight...yup she had fun, well, I don't have 7 hours for htis.
Has The Receptionist turned you off from other books in this genre?
what genre being a receptionist?
How did the narrator detract from the book?
dull
What character would you cut from The Receptionist?
the writer
Any additional comments?
nope, I would like to know how to get another, I find the website uncomfortable
1 person found this helpful
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 158
When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship - at age 18 - with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age 53, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Narration Distracted From Beautiful Writing
- By AMANDA on 04-18-16
By: Joyce Maynard
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Dorothy Parker
- By: Marion Meade
- Narrated by: Grace Conlin
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 154
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4 out of 5 stars 110
She was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories. But there was another side to Dorothy Parker, a private life set on a course of destruction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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heartbreaking and hilarious
- By h and l on 01-05-10
By: Marion Meade
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Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin
- Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
- By: Marion Meade
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 275
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 193
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Story4 out of 5 stars 196
This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber, whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating lives!
- By Diana on 02-19-05
By: Marion Meade
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Spinster
- Making a Life of One's Own
- By: Kate Bolick
- Narrated by: Kate Bolick
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 288
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 254
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Story4 out of 5 stars 255
Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not what I expected.
- By Anita on 04-23-15
By: Kate Bolick
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Daring
- My Passages - A Memoir
- By: Gail Sheehy
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
Candid, insightful, and powerful, Daring: My Passages is the story of the unconventional life of a writer who dared - to walk New York City streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British paratroopers opened fire; to seek out Egypt's president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for death after making peace with Israel.
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4 out of 5 stars
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ok if new york publishing world interests you
- By alice edwards on 11-30-15
By: Gail Sheehy
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A House Among the Trees
- A Novel
- By: Julia Glass
- Narrated by: Mary Stuart Masterson
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 152
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 134
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Story4 out of 5 stars 132
When the revered children's book author Mort Lear dies accidentally at his Connecticut home, he leaves his property and all its contents to his trusted assistant, Tomasina Daulair, who is moved by his generosity but dismayed by the complicated and defiant directives in his will. Tommy knew Morty for more than four decades, since meeting him in a Manhattan playground when she was 12 and he was working on sketches for the book that would make him a star.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Glass Fan
- By G Eliot on 07-17-17
By: Julia Glass
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 69
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 64
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Story4 out of 5 stars 65
In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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The Farewell Symphony
- A Novel
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 20 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 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
Named for the work by Haydn in which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until only a single violin remains playing, this is the story of a man who has outlived most of his friends. Having reached the six-month anniversary of his lover's death, he embarks on a journey of remembrance that will recount his struggle to become a writer and his discovery of what it means to be a gay man.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Tremendous book
- By William Thomas on 11-26-18
By: Edmund White
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Logical Family
- A Memoir
- By: Armistead Maupin
- Narrated by: Armistead Maupin
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 194
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 194
In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the best-selling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco and his evolution from curious youth to groundbreaking writer and gay rights pioneer. Also included is an exclusive conversation between Maupin and best-selling author Neil Gaiman.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Ends Abruptly
- By Robert R. on 10-13-17
By: Armistead Maupin
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Once Upon a Secret
- My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath
- By: Mimi Alford
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 287
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 247
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Story4 out of 5 stars 250
In the summer of 1962, 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley arrived by train in Washington, D.C., to begin an internship in the White House press office. The Kennedy Administration had reinvigorated the capital and the country - and Mimi was eager to contribute. For a young woman from a privileged but sheltered upbringing, the job was the chance of a lifetime. Mimi made an impression on Kennedy's inner circle and, after just three days at the White House, she was presented to the President himself....
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4 out of 5 stars
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Disturbing
- By faye on 03-06-12
By: Mimi Alford
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The Vanity Fair Diaries
- 1983-1992
- By: Tina Brown
- Narrated by: Tina Brown
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 491
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 443
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 440
The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her 20s who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding.
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5 out of 5 stars
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There is something about the Brits...
- By Sylvia on 12-11-17
By: Tina Brown
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 61
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Brightness Falls
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
In the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, set against the world of New York publishing, McInerney provides a stunningly accomplished portrayal of people contending with early success, then getting lost in the middle of their lives.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Absolutely floored!
- By InVinoVeritas on 11-26-21
By: Jay McInerney
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What Falls Away
- By: Mia Farrow
- Narrated by: Mia Farrow
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 152
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 117
Told with grace and deep understanding, as well as humor, Mia Farrow's exquisitely written memoir goes beneath the surface of her amazing life, with all its drama, success, and pain, and exposes the inner workings of a mind and spirit for whom truth, compassion, and faith are essential.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Humanitarian effort?
- By Mary on 10-19-14
By: Mia Farrow
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Dropped Names
- Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them
- By: Frank Langella
- Narrated by: Frank Langella
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 376
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 335
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 326
Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad encounters with some of the past century's most famous human beings are profoundly affecting, funny, wicked, sometimes shocking, and utterly irresistible. With sharp wit and a perceptive eye, Mr. Langella takes us with him into the private worlds and privileged lives of movie stars, presidents, royalty, literary lions, the social elite, and the greats of the Broadway stage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Delightful
- By Kathy on 04-03-12
By: Frank Langella