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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
From Colm Tóibín, the formidable award-winning author of The Master and Brooklyn, an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history, and literature told through the lives and work of three men - William Wilde, John Butler Yeats, and John Stanislaus Joyce - and the complicated, influential relationships they had with their complicated sons.
Colm Tóibín begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university - a wide-eyed boy from the country - and where three Irish literary giants also came of age. Oscar Wilde, writing about his relationship with his father, William Wilde, stated: “Whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind...you loathed each other not because you were so different but because you were so alike.” W.B. Yeats wrote of his father, John Butler Yeats, a painter: “It is this infirmity of will which has prevented him from finishing his pictures. The qualities I think necessary to success in art or life seemed to him egotism.” John Stanislaus Joyce, James’ father, was perhaps the most quintessentially Irish, widely loved, garrulous, a singer, and a drinker with a volatile temper, who drove his son from Ireland.
Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Story
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
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JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
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Melville in Love
- The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his legacy, we know very little about Melville, and even less about what he called his "wicked book". Scholars still puzzle over what drove Melville to invent Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of the great white whale.
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intriguing
- By Jean on 06-18-16
By: Michael Shelden
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker
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The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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Marmee and Louisa
- The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother
- By: Eve LaPlante
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa May Alcott's professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence. But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, drawing on unknown and unexplored letters and journals to show that Louisa's "Marmee", Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her path.
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Hardworking women and the man they supported
- By Chris on 04-26-13
By: Eve LaPlante
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Louisa
- The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
- By: Louisa Thomas
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century.
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Insightful
- By Jean on 05-18-16
By: Louisa Thomas
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Lara
- The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- By: Anna Pasternak
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
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A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
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Kierkegaard
- A Single Life
- By: Stephen Backhouse
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An accessible, expert introduction to one of the greatest minds of 19th century. Whether you're completely new to him, or if you're already familiar with his work, Kierkegaard: A Single Life presents a fresh understanding of his life and thought. Kierkegaard was a brilliant and enigmatic loner whose ideas permeated culture, shaped modern Christianity, and influenced people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Martin Luther King Jr. Though few people today have read his work, that lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is changing with this biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse.
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Great!
- By Will on 07-11-17
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Magnificent Rebels
- The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
- By: Andrea Wulf
- Narrated by: Julie Teal
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free? It all began in the 1790s in a quiet university town in Germany when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, writing, and their lives.
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fascinating overall, too much drama
- By soup cook on 11-27-22
By: Andrea Wulf
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The Prince and the Pauper
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.
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Wonderful author, terrific narrator, splendid book
- By Rahni on 10-01-17
By: Mark Twain
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Proust's Duchess
- How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris
- By: Caroline Weber
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 29 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style."
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Enthralling, entertaining and brilliant
- By Uli Baer on 01-14-19
By: Caroline Weber
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In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tibn delineates with a tender and unique sensibility, lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals often willingly cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town, to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Tibn's stories manage to contain whole worlds.
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During the winter solstice, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, the ancient burial chamber at Newgrange is empowered. Its mystifying source is a haunting tale told by locals. Professor O’Kelly believes an archaeologist’s job is to make known only what can be proved. He is undeterred by ghost stories, idle speculation, and caution. Much to the chagrin of the living souls in County Meath. As well as those entombed in the sacred darkness of Newgrange itself. They’re determined to protect the secret of the light, guarded for more than 5,000 years.
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Terrible
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The South
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In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew. The South is a novel of classic themes - of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom - to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.
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Waste of time
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“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality. A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.
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Excellent writing and interesting insights.
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Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland’s high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings. With effortless fluency, Colm Tóibín reconstructs the history of Eamon’s relationships - with his father, his first "girl", his wife, and the children who barely know him - and he writes about Eamon’s affection for the Irish coast with such painterly skill that the land itself becomes a character. The result is a novel of stunning power.
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Power. Control. Restraint.
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In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tibn delineates with a tender and unique sensibility, lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals often willingly cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town, to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Tibn's stories manage to contain whole worlds.
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- Unabridged
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During the winter solstice, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, the ancient burial chamber at Newgrange is empowered. Its mystifying source is a haunting tale told by locals. Professor O’Kelly believes an archaeologist’s job is to make known only what can be proved. He is undeterred by ghost stories, idle speculation, and caution. Much to the chagrin of the living souls in County Meath. As well as those entombed in the sacred darkness of Newgrange itself. They’re determined to protect the secret of the light, guarded for more than 5,000 years.
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“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality. A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.
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Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late 19th century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. With stunningly resonant prose, “The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, moving, and very beautiful” (The New York Times Book Review). The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.
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What a Terrible Disappointment!
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The Testament of Mary
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Meryl Streep’s performance of Colm Tóibín's acclaimed portrait of Mary is hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “an ideal audiobook,” presenting the three-time Academy Award-winner in “yet another great role.” Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary presents Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel. They are her keepers, providing her with food and shelter and visiting her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was "worth it"; nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone, in a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
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hated it
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By: Colm Toibin
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Nora Webster: A Novel
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father.
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Contrived & Overreaching
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By: Colm Toibin
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Mothers and Sons
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Overall
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Performance
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This beautifully written, intensely intimate collection explores a subject of nearly universal experience: the psychological push and pull between a mother and a son.
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Good Reader, Odd Endings
- By Deborah on 06-11-08
By: Colm Toibin
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The Magician
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- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the 20th century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice.
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Terrific listening experience
- By M. Mead on 09-17-21
By: Colm Toibin
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On Elizabeth Bishop
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this book novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences - the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.
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ELIZABETH BISHOP
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 05-19-16
By: Colm Tóibín
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother
- Writers and Their Families
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the best-selling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers’ relationships to their families and their work.From Jane Austen’s aunts to Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature’s greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín traces and interprets those family ties.
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A Literary Box of Chocolates
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By: Colm Toibin
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Brooklyn
- A Novel
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.
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Loved every word
- By J. P. Fitzpatrick on 02-24-17
By: Colm Toibin
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Long Island
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: Katja Danowski
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Erste Liebe, zweite Chancen: Ein Mann und eine Frau treffen sich nach fast zwanzig Jahren wieder - und stehen noch einmal vor der Entscheidung ihres Lebens. Eilis lebt in Long Island mit ihren Kindern und Tony, für den sie ihre Jugendliebe Jim in Irland zurückließ. Als sie erfährt, dass Tony sein uneheliches Kind in der gemeinsamen Familie aufziehen will, bricht sie in ihre Heimat auf.
By: Colm Tóibín
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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A Reader's Pleasure!
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By: Rebecca Mead
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The Hand That First Held Mine
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Lexie Sinclair yearns for more than her parents’ genteel country life. She makes her way to the city, where she meets a magazine editor, Innes, a man unlike any she has ever imagined. He introduces her to the thrilling world of Bohemian postwar London, and Lexie learns to become a reporter, to know art and artists, to live fully, unconventionally, and with deep love. And when she finds herself pregnant by a man wholly unsuitable for marriage or fatherhood, she doesn’t hesitate a minute to have the baby on her own.
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Enjoy as much as I did.
- By Anonymous User on 11-09-21
By: Maggie O’Farrell
What listeners say about Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
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- Anonymous User
- 07-08-23
Beyond expectations
I entered this book without prejudice and I ended it with something rich, rewarding. I have the highest regard for this author as well as for his subject.
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- 0
- 09-02-24
Mad, bad, dangerous to know.
This is an excellent book, and the author’s narration makes it even better. The first chapter is a brilliant tour through Dublin. All three authors’ fathers are interesting, but if you are into Ulysses or James Joyce, this is a wonderful book to have.
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- Ellen-A
- 01-02-19
Eminently re-readable
Beautiful, compelling, and glowing throughout with the brilliance and humanity of the author and his subjects. I will reread (i.e., re-listen to) this book and also return to the works of Wilde, Yeats, and, particularly, Joyce, whose father—I now know—lives and breathes in the pages of his novels.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Tbaley
- 06-11-19
Breathless
Why did the author go from a quiet whisper almost as if out of breath to full volume. The sound engineer really earned his pay on this one.
I wish there had been more depth in each of the portraits and comparisons and contrasts, which were excellent. What the author presented was marvelous and insightful, though. Recommended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom
- 11-18-23
Such an interesting mission.
To create a biographical portrait of three of Ireland’s greatest writers by sketching the lives of their Fathers. And not by focusing on the Father-Son relationships necessarily, but by honing in on the Fathers’ features and flaws and letting their effects rain down on their progeny.
I chose this book for Toibin’s words and voice and not because I knew the works of the Sons all that well. I came away with a better understanding of what the whys and wherefores of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce arose from. I think Toibin has accomplished what he set out to do. Four Stars. ****
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- Julia Grant
- 08-11-19
I am mad, sad, and disappointed in this book.
This author simply did not use his prodigious character insights as previously revealed in, for example, Testament of Mary. I was hoping for a strong understanding of the character of the three fathers, and instead got a rather awestruck presentation of how their awfulness (and they were, indeed, awful) influenced their sons' works. The book thus is more literary analysis than character analysis, and I was looking for the latter. These three fathers got very gentle treatment from Toibin. I gave the performance three stars only because I enjoy listening to his voice, but I would not recommend this book, except to someone who is looking for the aforesaid literary analysis.
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1 person found this helpful