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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures.
That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a best seller, though. He invented a way of writing. This story is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction - and how fiction changed the world.
The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes' life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work and how his work - especially Don Quixote - radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics and science and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.
Four hundred years after Cervantes' death, William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.
Critic reviews
"William Egginton has written an engaging and enlightening book on the pivotal role of Miguel de Cervantes in the development of western literature. He provides a literary, biographical, and historical overview of Cervantes's life and work in well-written prose mercifully free of jargon, and amply justifies the truth of his wonderfully provocative title. I'm happy to recommend The Man Who Invented Fiction." (Edith Grossman, renowned translator of, among other Spanish language masterpieces, Don Quixote)
"The Man Who Invented Fiction weaves a compelling tapestry of adventures in reading. Told with great panache, William Egginton's presentation combines a unique understanding of Cervantes's life, art, times, and the cultural debates that shaped his revolutionary fiction. It is essential reading." (Marina S. Brownlee, Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Princeton University)
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Story
These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.
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Brilliant in every way!
- By Chuck Stark on 07-05-23
By: Nikhil Krishnan
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The Modern Scholar: The Novel that Invented Modernity
- Don Quixote de La Mancha
- By: Professor Ilan Stavans
- Narrated by: Professor IIan Stavans
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Original Recording
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Distinguished man of letters Ilan Stavans believes Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha “invented modern consciousness.” In these lectures, Stavans explores the work’s impact within Renaissance Spain and discusses Cervantes’ career as a soldier, tax collector, and failed playwright. Stavans also focuses on the baroque style and the way Spain has built its national identity around Don Quixote.
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Very disappointing
- By C. Sahu on 10-03-17
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Molloy
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Dermot Crowley
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Written initially in French, later translated by the author into English, Molloy is the first book in Dublin-born Samuel Beckett's trilogy. It was published shortly after WWII and marked a new, mature writing style, which was to dominate the remainder of his working life. Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer, Moran.
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Nauseating, boring, hilarious, and magnificent
- By Gene on 02-21-05
By: Samuel Beckett
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Augustine
- Conversions to Confessions
- By: Robin Lane Fox
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Saint Augustine is one of the most influential figures in all of Christianity, yet his path to sainthood was by no means assured. Born in AD 354 to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine spent the first 30 years of his life struggling to understand the nature of God and his world. He learned about Christianity as a child but was never baptized, choosing instead to immerse himself in the study of rhetoric, Manicheanism, and then Neoplatonism - all the while indulging in a life of lust and greed.
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Excellent
- By Chelsie P. on 12-06-16
By: Robin Lane Fox
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When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
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the true heir w.g. sebald
- By Thomas on 12-23-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
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Before the Big Bang
- The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse
- By: Laura Mersini-Houghton
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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What came before the Big Bang, and what exists outside of the universe it created? Until recently, scientists could only guess at what lay past the edge of space-time. However, as pioneering theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton explains, new scientific tools are now giving us the ability to peer beyond the limits of our universe and to test our theories about what is there. And what we are finding is upending everything we thought we knew about the cosmos and our place in it.
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I tried, and learned nothing
- By Gary on 07-22-22
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Thucydides: The Reinvention of History
- By: Donald Kagan
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Donald Kagan—Yale’s Sterling Professor of Classics and History—delivers a compelling new look at revisionismin Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War. To determine how accurate and dispassionate the Athenian general really was, Kagan exposes his epic to an enlightening and thorough analysis. Using contemporary and modern sources, Kagan reveals the exiled aristocrat’sbiases, prejudices, and his clear intention to spin events in his own way.
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Some lessons just don't get shared with sons
- By Darwin8u on 09-24-15
By: Donald Kagan
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Cervantes
- By: Santiago Muñoz Machado
- Narrated by: Josep Aguilar
- Length: 28 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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La vida de Cervantes está contada en este libro partiendo de los fragmentos de autobiografía que el escritor dejó en sus obras. Él es el primer narrador, por tanto. Pero la biografía aquí relatada ha sido completada añadiendo investigaciones y hallazgos de muchos autores, desarrollados durante más de un siglo y medio.
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Excelente ensayo sobre Cervantes
- By Catalino on 01-09-23
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Goethe
- Life as a Work of Art
- By: Rüdiger Safranksi, David Dollenmayer - translator
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 24 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is the first definitive biography in a generation to tell the larger-than-life story of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Drawing upon the trove of letters, diaries, and notebooks Goethe left behind, as well as correspondence and criticism from Goethe's contemporaries, Safranski weaves a rich tale of Europe in the throes of revolution and of the man whose ideas heralded a new era.
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Academic
- By tpritch on 07-06-19
By: Rüdiger Safranksi, and others
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Heidegger in Ruins
- Between Philosophy and Ideology
- By: Richard Wolin
- Narrated by: Paul Brion
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines
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Vision Undergoes Revision
- By Arturo Zendejas on 02-17-24
By: Richard Wolin
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Collected Fictions
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - translator
- Narrated by: Castulo Guerra
- Length: 27 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself.
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Borges Collected Fictions Trans Hurley
- By 0 on 09-08-23
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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Eliot After The Waste Land
- By: Robert Crawford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 29 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters.
By: Robert Crawford
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What listeners say about The Man Who Invented Fiction
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ivar Aam
- 08-21-23
Greta book horribly read
Very beautiful book that opens up the work of Cervantes. But very badly read.
Could someone else please re-record it?
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- Kare Moberg
- 11-25-23
Not really for audio
Some books should be read rather than listened to. If you are not a super fan of Cervantes, I would say that Eggintons book ”The rigor of angels” is much better
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- LCorSMT
- 06-21-23
Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
After listening to "Don Quixote" in Spanish, I next listened to "The Man Who Invented Fiction" to learn about the life and times of Cervantes. I learned much not only about Cervantes but also about "Don Quixote." The author, William Egginton, is an expert and eloquent guide to Cervantes and his writings, and I would highly recommend his book to anyone interested in "Don Quixote" or Cervantes.
As Egginton admitted in the April 2, 2023 episode of the podcast "Not Just the Tudors," his title is hyperbolic, and it felt like he overplayed his hand in crediting Cervantes with the invention of fiction and with the ushering in of the modern world. Even so, the connections he made between Cervantes and many who came after him were compelling. The book could use a little more editing, since there are at least a couple sections that are repeated, word for word.
As for the performance, it was so poor that I initially wanted to return the audiobook. There are several problems with the reading. First, the reader does not speak Spanish, so his pronunciation of the many Spanish words in the book was painful to the ear. Second, the reader fell into an unnatural pattern, especially at the end of clauses or sentences. Instead of dropping his voice as in normal English speech, he tended to elongate the last two syllables and keep the same pitch. I noticed it right away, and it didn't cease to irritate me for the rest of the book. Third, he mispronounced a surprising number of English words, reminding me of Sancho Panza himself. Some of the ones I remember are "chasm," "bureaucratization," "unrequited," "mischievous," "posthumous," and "Castilian," but there were others. Fourth, his attempts to use different voices for the different characters when reading sections of "Don Quixote" were bothersome. They seemed to my ear mischaracterizations, especially of Don Quixote, whom he portrayed as a bumbling idiot instead of the most noble and intelligent lunatic ever, and of Sancho Panza, whom he portrayed as a sniveling nincompoop, instead of an increasingly astute and loyal companion. Also, the voices for the characters did not stay the same throughout the book and started blending together. After hearing the author's voice on the podcast, I wished that he had read his own book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Cynthia
- 03-22-24
An Insightful Delight
Eggington engages his topics of Cervantes, Don Quixote's adventures and literary history in informative and delightful.way.
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