The Catholic School
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Camponeschi
About this listen
A semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, framed by the harrowing 1975 Circeo massacre
Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, the winner of Italy’s most prestigious award, The Strega Prize, is a powerful investigation of the heart and soul of contemporary Italy.
Three well-off young men - former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno - brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.
It is this environment, the halls of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject. His experience at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy are painstakingly and thoughtfully rendered, producing a remarkable blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel, and true-crime story. Along with indelible portraits of his teachers and fellow classmates - the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max - Albinati also gives us his nuanced reflections on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.
©2016, 2019 Text copyright by RCS Libri S.p.A., Milan; Translation copyright by Antony Shugaar (P)2019 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. It includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript.
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Almost perfect reading
- By Paul on 04-02-20
By: Andrea Dworkin, and others
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Demian
- The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent - led by precocious schoolmate Max Demian - into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.
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Demian
- By Debra on 12-08-08
By: Hermann Hesse
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The Diary of a Country Priest
- By: Georges Bernanos
- Narrated by: Kris Dyer
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A young, shy, sickly priest is assigned to his first parish, a sleepy village in Northern France. Though his faith is devout, he finds nothing but indifference and mockery. The children laugh at his teachings, his parishioners are consumed by boredom, rumours are spread about him and he is tormented by stomach pains. Even his attempts to clarify his thoughts in a diary fail to deliver him from worldly concerns. Yet somehow, despite his suffering, he tries to find love for his fellow humans and even a state of grace.
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A "Bucket List" Book to Read
- By S. Cremona on 05-11-22
By: Georges Bernanos
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Siddhartha
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Harish Bhimani
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Siddhartha, takes place in ancient India around the time of the Buddha (6th century BC). Siddhartha and his companion Govinda set out in search of enlightenment. Siddhartha goes through a series of changes and realizations as he attempts to achieve this goal. Siddhartha joins the ascetics, visits Gotama, embraces his earthly desires, and finally communes with nature, all in an attempt to attain Nirvana.
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Sounds rushed
- By Viviane on 10-17-11
By: Hermann Hesse
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Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
- A Novel
- By: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Jull Costa Margaret - translator, Robin Patterson - translator
- Narrated by: Ramon De Ocampo
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Machado de Assis’ classic novel, the precursor of Latin American fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for 21st-century audiences. In eloquent, contemporary prose, Costa and Patterson breathe new life into the dynamic character of Brás Cubas and reveal the vivid, tempestuous Rio de Janeiro of his time. The recently deceased Cubas narrates his life story, admitting glibly: “I am not so much a writer who has died, as a dead man who has decided to write.”
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Incredible story from an incredible author
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-21
By: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and others
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No Place for the Weak
- A True Story of Deviance, Torture and Social Cleansing
- By: Ryan Green
- Narrated by: Steve White
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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On 20 May 1999, the South Australian Police were called to investigate a disused bank in the unassuming town of Snowtown, in connection to the disappearance of multiple missing people. The police were not prepared for the chilling scene that awaited them. The officers found six barrels within the abandoned bank vault, each filled with acid and the remains of eight individuals. The smell from inside the vault was so stifling that the police required breathing equipment.
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NO PLACE FOR THE WEAK (of stomach)…
- By txdoc on 05-08-21
By: Ryan Green
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Reading Like a Writer
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire listeners to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
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Practical, literate, generous
- By Gare on 04-13-08
By: Francine Prose
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No Name in the Street
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
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A strange and terrible vehicle
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-20
By: James Baldwin
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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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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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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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The Yellow Wallpaper
- By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Narrated by: Jo Myddleton
- Length: 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness.
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A Visceral Reaction
- By Em on 05-02-12
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The Prophet
- By: Khalil Gibrán
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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World-famous 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer. It was originally published in 1923. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history.
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Literally the best book!
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-20
By: Khalil Gibrán
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The Fire Next Time
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Jesse L. Martin
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
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Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 09-17-15
By: James Baldwin
What listeners say about The Catholic School
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Quinn
- 10-22-22
I thought the narrator was pranking me
The story is interesting, but it does not need to be this long. I started excited and eager to dive into the story, and I was impressed with the writing style, but by the time I got to around 500 pages, I started growing angry and frustrated because the "story" still hadn't been told because it was suffocated by excessive psychobabble. So I tried the audiobook version and, at first, I thought the narrator was pranking me because it is literally the worst I've ever heard! He sounds like Dracula trying a bad impression at an Italian accent--the r's are rolled so hard that it is almost comical. It was almost impossible to listen to this audiobook in its entirety because the narrator was comically and frustratingly distracting. I am trying to understand, trying to comprehend, why this is the voice and style they wanted for this book.
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