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Exteriors
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
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Exteriors
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In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 6
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This extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother - and of both women’s strength and resiliency - recounts Annie’s attempt to first help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease and, then, when that proves futile, bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I Remain in Darkness is a new high-water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 31
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Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Superb
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4 out of 5 stars
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- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
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- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2
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5 out of 5 stars
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By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 6
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4 out of 5 stars
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2 out of 5 stars
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A stiff and uninteresting story
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
This narrative charts Annie Ernaux's teenage awakening and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, a mother of two infant sons.
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In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits a night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It was the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18, and the man she had given herself to had moved on. She'd submitted her will to his and then found that she was a slave without a master.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
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For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An innovative and fresh listening experience
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It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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2 out of 5 stars
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1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Publisher's summary
In Exteriors, Annie Ernaux concentrates not on the essential details of a relationship with a family member or lover as before but on ephemeral encounters within the larger circle of one's environment and the hundreds of strangers who inhabit it. Here, she captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is, in many ways, the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books, the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, the first in which she is able to leave her past behind.
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After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
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2 out of 5 stars
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A stiff and uninteresting story
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By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,121
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 91
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 81
From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
A Feminist Romp
- By annkpowers on 07-02-22
By: Margaret Atwood
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Life for Sale
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 75
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 60
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
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1 out of 5 stars
-
Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Vyacheslav Varlakov on 03-12-21
By: Yukio Mishima
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 149
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 125
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Godmother
- By: Hannelore Cayre, Stephanie Smee - translator
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 66
Meet Patience Portefeux, 53, an underpaid Franco-Arab judicial interpreter for the Ministry of Justice who specialises in telephone tapping. Widowed after the sudden death of her husband, Patience is now wedged between university fees for her two grown-up daughters and nursing home costs for her ageing mother. She’s laboured for 25 years to keep everyone’s heads above water.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Had me at "my family were crooks."
- By Patricia on 03-04-23
By: Hannelore Cayre, and others
-
Myra Breckinridge
- A Novel (Myra and Myron, Book 1)
- By: Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia - introduction
- Narrated by: Michelle Hendley, Camille Paglia
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 69
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 54
"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Well performed
- By Kenny D on 06-08-19
By: Gore Vidal, and others
-
Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- By: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 176
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 158
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 157
Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Glad to have existed to enjoy reading this book!
- By mohammed on 08-11-21
By: Jean-Paul Sartre
-
Fault Lines
- A Novel
- By: Emily Itami
- Narrated by: Lydia Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 127
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 113
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 115
Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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2 out of 5 stars
-
Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
By: Emily Itami
-
The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 219
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 175
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 176
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
-
Almost French
- By: Sarah Turnbull
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 184
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 160
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 157
After backpacking her way around Europe journalist Sarah Turnbull is ready to embark on one last adventure before heading home to Sydney. A chance meeting with a charming Frenchman in Bucharest changes her travel plans forever. Acting on impulse, she agrees to visit Fredric in Paris for a week. Put a very French Frenchman together with a strong-willed Australian girl and the result is some spectacular - and often hilarious - cultural clashes.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Almost Terrific
- By Elizabeth on 02-05-13
By: Sarah Turnbull
-
Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 87
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 78
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 77
This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Great insight
- By Kelly Houske on 02-02-19
By: Jan Morris
-
Paris to the Moon
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 4 hrs and 44 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 149
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 108
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 108
Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner: in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Wish this wasn't abridged!!
- By Sarah D. on 03-25-17
By: Adam Gopnik
-
Tender Is the Night
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,037
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 919
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 912
Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character - lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Subtle yet grand
- By jb on 10-12-15
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 320
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 240
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 240
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.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
My Mrs. Brown
- A Novel
- By: William Norwich
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 55
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 49
When the grand dame of Ashville passes away, Mrs. Brown is called upon to inventory her estate and comes across a dress that changes everything. This isn't a Cinderella confection; it's a simple yet exquisitely tailored Oscar de la Renta sheath and jacket - a suit that, Mrs. Brown realizes with startling clarity, will say everything she has ever wished to convey. She must have it. And so Mrs. Brown begins her odyssey to purchase the dress.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Sweet story
- By Pam Hewitt on 05-01-20
By: William Norwich
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- John A.
- 10-19-22
A great book
A fantastic book that I found to be developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age such as myself. I found this book to be relatable and highly intelligent. I further found great relation with the protagonist and I further highly recommend this book.
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