
Letters to a Friend
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Dixon
About this listen
This epistolary memoir - rich with Diana Athill's characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty - describes a warm, decades-long friendship.
Diana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For 30 years, Athill corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely sharing jokes, pleasures, and pains with her old friend. Letters to a Friend is an epistolary memoir that describes a warm, decades-long friendship. Written with intimacy and spontaneity, candor and grace, it is perhaps more revealing than any of her celebrated books.
Edited, selected, and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own delightful notes, this collection - rich with Athill’s characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty - reveals a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humor. Covering her career as an editor, the adventure of her retirement, her immersion in her own writing, and her reactions to becoming unexpectedly famous in her old age - including gossip about legendary authors and mutual friends, sharp pen-portraits, and uninhibited accounts of her relationships - Letters to a Friend describes a flourishing friendship and offers a portrait of a woman growing older without ever losing her zest for life.
©2011 Diana Athill (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Overall
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Performance
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Overall
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Performance
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Performance
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Telling it like it is
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Clara Callan
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- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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charming intimate refreshing
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Whitethorn Woods
- By: Maeve Binchy
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When a new highway threatens to bypass the town of Rossmore and cut through Whitethorn Woods, everyone has a passionate opinion about whether the town will benefit or suffer. But young Father Flynn is most concerned with the fate of St. Ann's Well, which is set at the edge of the woods and slated for destruction. People have been coming to St. Ann's for generations to share their dreams and fears, and speak their prayers.
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Not up to par for Binchy
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By: Maeve Binchy
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Loitering with Intent
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
"How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot rejoices. Loitering about London in 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world", as secretary to the odd Autobiographical Association. Are they a group of mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing their memoirs in advance, or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? Rich material, in any case.
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As Good As Pym--Maybe Better!
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By: Muriel Spark