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When I Was Old
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
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Publisher's Summary
For personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of 60.
Georges Simenon's autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties and 'all the silly ideas that pass through my head', are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper.
Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships and his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find and to escape himself.
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 58
Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Medium
- By Kenneth W. Cole on 09-04-18
By: Will Schwalbe
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The World of Yesterday
- Memoirs of a European
- By: Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell - translator
- Narrated by: David Horovitch
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 620
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 548
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Story5 out of 5 stars 549
Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.
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5 out of 5 stars
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More Zweig please
- By Sully on 06-04-17
By: Stefan Zweig, and others
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Joy
- Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis
- By: Abigail Santamaria
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 77
Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis' memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to your ears in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and '40s.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A tough life for a tough woman
- By MVP on 06-25-16
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The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 313
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 275
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Story4 out of 5 stars 271
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth
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The Prodigy
- A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy
- By: Amy Wallace
- Narrated by: Aze Fellner
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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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4 out of 5 stars
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A tarnished national treasure lost forever
- By Tom B. on 05-13-12
By: Amy Wallace
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A Circle of Quiet
- The Crosswicks Journals, Book 1
- By: Madeleine L'Engle
- Narrated by: Pamela Almand
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
Set against the lush backdrop of Crosswicks, her family's farmhouse in rural Connecticut, this deeply personal memoir details Madeleine L'Engle's journey to find balance between her career as a Newbery Medal-winning author and her responsibilities as a wife, mother, teacher, and Christian.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I Love Madeleine L'Engle!!!
- By Jennifer Neyhart on 02-08-18
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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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Overall4 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 51
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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5 out of 5 stars
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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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Agatha Christie
- A Mysterious Life
- By: Laura Thompson
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 283
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 252
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 251
It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award-winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie’s books still sell over four million copies each year - more than thirty years after her death - and it shows no signs of slowing.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Your Little Grey Cells will love this
- By tru britty on 03-28-18
By: Laura Thompson
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Hitch-22
- A Memoir
- By: Christopher Hitchens
- Narrated by: Christopher Hitchens
- Length: 17 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,350
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,918
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,902
Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
- By Laura on 08-23-10
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Surprised by Joy
- The Shape of My Early Life
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,227
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,680
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,672
In this book, C.S. Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Not what I expected
- By connie on 12-21-09
By: C. S. Lewis
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 22
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
- By: Henry Miller
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I am one of the lucky few to live here in Big Sur
- By Adam H Rosenberg on 05-18-22
By: Henry Miller
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 528
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 445
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Story4 out of 5 stars 445
For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A nice petite primer on Proust
- By Darwin8u on 02-20-13
By: Alain de Botton
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Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
- The Complete and Authoritative Edition
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 851
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 523
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Story4 out of 5 stars 531
The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not what I was expecting...
- By SHolland10 on 01-30-11
By: Mark Twain
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4 out of 5 stars 48
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi