-
The Year of Magical Thinking
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $16.23
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
-
-
Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
-
A Grief Observed
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 1 hr and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments", A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period.
-
-
Read This One
- By James on 11-26-11
By: C. S. Lewis
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
-
-
Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
-
Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
-
-
California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
-
South and West
- From a Notebook
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Nathaniel Rich
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.
-
-
"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
By: Joan Didion
-
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman, Barbara Caruso, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, wowed critics on its way to winning several literary prizes, including Book of the Year honors from the Los Angeles Times. It has been published in 24 countries and will soon be a major motion picture. Foer's talent continues to shine in this sometimes hilarious and always heartfelt follow-up.
-
-
Hard book to review
- By Jbug on 12-27-09
-
Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
-
-
Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
-
A Grief Observed
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 1 hr and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments", A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period.
-
-
Read This One
- By James on 11-26-11
By: C. S. Lewis
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
-
-
Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
-
Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
-
-
California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
-
South and West
- From a Notebook
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Nathaniel Rich
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.
-
-
"Notes" Are Not a Book
- By Carole T. on 03-11-17
By: Joan Didion
-
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman, Barbara Caruso, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, wowed critics on its way to winning several literary prizes, including Book of the Year honors from the Los Angeles Times. It has been published in 24 countries and will soon be a major motion picture. Foer's talent continues to shine in this sometimes hilarious and always heartfelt follow-up.
-
-
Hard book to review
- By Jbug on 12-27-09
-
The Metamorphosis
- A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky
- By: Franz Kafka, Susan Bernofsky - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Victor Bevine, Christa Lewis
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Franz Kafka's 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle millions of readers.
-
-
Mysterious and beautiful
- By Tad Davis on 05-02-15
By: Franz Kafka, and others
-
Zikora
- A Short Story
- By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Narrated by: Adepero Oduye
- Length: 1 hr and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Zikora, a DC lawyer from Nigeria, tells her equally high-powered lover that she’s pregnant, he abandons her. But it’s Zikora’s demanding, self-possessed mother, in town for the birth, who makes Zikora feel like a lonely little girl all over again. Stunned by the speed with which her ideal life fell apart, she turns to reflecting on her mother’s painful past and struggle for dignity. Preparing for motherhood, Zikora begins to see more clearly what her own mother wants for her, for her new baby, and for herself.
-
-
Great quick listen.
- By Tally on 11-09-20
-
Ayiti
- By: Roxane Gay
- Narrated by: Roxane Gay
- Length: 2 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From New York Times best-selling powerhouse Roxane Gay, Ayiti is a powerful collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. A married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood.
-
-
A Glimpse of Real
- By Lovesmuffins2 on 08-18-18
By: Roxane Gay
-
The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
-
-
Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
-
Stories by Heart
- By: John Lithgow, Ring Lardner, W. W. Jacobs, and others
- Narrated by: John Lithgow
- Length: 2 hrs and 6 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award-winning actor John Lithgow (The Crown, Dexter, 3rd Rock from the Sun) brings his latest critically acclaimed Broadway performance to Audible. Stories by Heart celebrates the transcendent power of great literature and serves as a touching tribute to Lithgow’s late father, actor and director Arthur Lithgow.
-
-
Longing To See Him In Person
- By Comet Kid on 07-02-18
By: John Lithgow, and others
-
Firefly Lane
- A Novel
- By: Kristin Hannah
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 17 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all - beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn.
-
-
Beachy Fare
- By FanB14 on 04-29-13
By: Kristin Hannah
-
What Alice Forgot
- By: Liane Moriarty
- Narrated by: Tamara Lovatt-Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Love is 29, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital, where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over - she’s getting divorced, she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time.
-
-
Unforgettable! I loved this story!
- By Judy on 03-04-13
By: Liane Moriarty
-
A Widow's Story
- A Memoir
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Ellen Parker
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a work unlike anything she's written before, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unveils a poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of her husband of 46 years and its wrenching, surprising aftermath.
-
-
Breathless!
- By Pamela Harvey on 02-18-11
-
These Precious Days
- Essays
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
-
-
Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
-
Option B
- Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
- By: Sheryl Sandberg, Adam Grant
- Narrated by: Elisa Donovan
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in 'the void,'" she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe." Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.
-
-
Books is ok but completely misadvertised
- By Alex Carpenter on 10-08-17
By: Sheryl Sandberg, and others
-
The Lost Wife
- A Novel
- By: Alyson Richman
- Narrated by: George Guidall, Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In pre-war Prague, the dreams of two young lovers are shattered when they are separated by the Nazi invasion. Then, decades later, thousands of miles away in New York, there's an inescapable glance of recognition between two strangers. Providence is giving Lenka and Josef one more chance. From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the Occupation, to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and the strength of memory.
-
-
Love, Strength & Survival
- By Sara on 01-27-14
By: Alyson Richman
-
Still Alice
- By: Lisa Genova
- Narrated by: Lisa Genova
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At 50 years old, she's a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she begins to grow disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life - and her relationship with her family and the world - forever.
-
-
Please pay for a professional Reader
- By sunstan on 12-07-14
By: Lisa Genova
Publisher's summary
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.
Critic reviews
- 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Biography/Memoir
- National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee, Autobiography, 2005
"Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays....This is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature." (Publishers Weekly)
"The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative." (The New York Times)
Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
Related to this topic
-
Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
-
-
A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
-
This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
-
-
I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
-
10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
-
-
A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
-
-
Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
-
-
Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
-
Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
-
-
A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
-
This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
-
-
I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
-
10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
-
-
A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
-
Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them)
- A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying
- By: Sallie Tisdale
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
-
-
I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
-
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
-
-
Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
-
-
Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
-
Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
-
-
Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
-
Forever Ours
- Real Stories of Immortality and Living from a Forensic Pathologist
- By: Janis Amatuzio
- Narrated by: Janis Amatuzio
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio first began recording the stories told to her by patients, police officers, and other doctors because she felt that no one spoke for the dead. She believed the real experience of death, namely the spiritual and otherworldly experiences of those near death and their loved ones, was ignored by the medical professionals, who thought of death as simply the cessation of breath. She knew there was more.
-
-
Forever Ours
- By Londa on 01-04-06
By: Janis Amatuzio
-
Little Matches
- A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark
- By: Maryanne O'Hara
- Narrated by: Maryanne O'Hara
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?
-
-
Powerful Story of Tribulation and Love
- By Bob on 05-21-22
By: Maryanne O'Hara
-
The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
-
-
Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
-
Truth Doesn't Have a Side
- My Alarming Discovery About the Danger of Contact Sports
- By: Dr. Bennet Omalu, Mark Tabb, Will Smith - foreword
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One day in 2002 the 50-year old body of former Pittsburgh Steeler and hall of famer Mike Webster was laid on a cold table in front of pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu. Webster's body looked to Omalu like the body of a much older man, and the circumstances of his behavior prior to his death were clouded in mystery. But when Omalu cut into Webster's brain, it appeared to be normal. Something didn't add up.
-
-
Truly Enlightening
- By Marie on 01-31-20
By: Dr. Bennet Omalu, and others
-
A Stitch of Time
- The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
- By: Lauren Marks
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lauren Marks was 27 when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, dramaturg, and pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up...different.
-
-
Absolutely wonderful book
- By SJMT on 01-27-19
By: Lauren Marks
-
Nothing Was the Same
- A Memoir
- By: Kay Redfield Jamison
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison---who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with writerly elegance and passion---could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. In spare and at times strikingly lyrical prose, Jamison looks back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled severe dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia.
-
-
Liked the story better than the narrator
- By Pamela Harvey on 07-22-11
-
The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
-
-
Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
-
Messenger
- The Legacy of Mattie J. T. Stepanek and Heartsongs
- By: Jeni Stepanek
- Narrated by: Jeni Stepanek
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.
-
-
Loved Jeni telling Mattie’s story
- By Hello Mrs. on 12-29-22
By: Jeni Stepanek
-
Mother Daughter Me
- A Memoir
- By: Katie Hafner
- Narrated by: Katie Hafner
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....
-
-
Listen and be swept away!
- By Barbara Quick on 06-02-22
By: Katie Hafner
-
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
- My Tale of Madness and Recovery
- By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle - contributor
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.
-
-
Be Prepared To Feel Insane--
- By Gillian on 04-11-18
By: Barbara K. Lipska, and others
-
Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
-
-
Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
-
-
Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
By: Joan Didion
-
Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
-
-
Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
-
The White Album
- Essays (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
-
-
You Feel Like You Are There
- By Kelly Jo on 07-15-24
By: Joan Didion
-
Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
-
-
To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
-
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- By: Joan Didion
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
By: Joan Didion
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
-
-
Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
-
The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Vanessa Redgrave
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
-
-
Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
By: Joan Didion
-
Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
-
-
Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
-
The White Album
- Essays (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
-
-
You Feel Like You Are There
- By Kelly Jo on 07-15-24
By: Joan Didion
-
Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
-
-
To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
-
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- By: Joan Didion
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
By: Joan Didion
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- An Essay Collection
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr, Hilton Als
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.
-
-
Didion deserves a better narrator
- By Pamela on 02-03-21
By: Joan Didion
-
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
-
-
Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
-
-
"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
-
Atonement
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
-
-
An amazing book about complex human perception
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-04
By: Ian McEwan
-
H Is for Hawk
- By: Helen Macdonald
- Narrated by: Helen Macdonald
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Helen MacDonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer captivated by hawks since childhood, she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral anger mirrored her own.
-
-
Mabel The Hawk--The Fire That Burned The Hurts Away
- By Sara on 04-09-15
By: Helen Macdonald
-
Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
-
-
Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
-
Play It as It Lays
- A Novel (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.
-
-
Exquisite 🤌🏻
- By Connor on 07-24-24
By: Joan Didion
-
The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
-
-
A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
-
Underground Railroad
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Aïssa Maïga
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cora, seize ans, est esclave sur une plantation de coton dans la Géorgie d'avant la guerre de Sécession. Abandonnée par sa mère lorsqu'elle était enfant, elle survit tant bien que mal à la violence de sa condition. Lorsque Caesar, un esclave récemment arrivé de Virginie, lui propose de s'enfuir, elle accepte et tente, au péril de sa vie, de gagner avec lui les États libres du Nord. De la Caroline du Sud à l'Indiana en passant par le Tennessee, Cora va vivre une incroyable odyssée.
-
-
Wrong language
- By David Osler on 07-25-22
By: Colson Whitehead
-
A Visit from the Goon Squad
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
-
-
Deep and dazzling novel, brilliantly read!
- By J. W. Coop on 06-29-19
By: Jennifer Egan
-
A Book of Common Prayer
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little.
-
-
Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
-
Gilead
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Otto Mellies
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Auf dem Sterbebett schreibt John Ames einen Brief an seinen siebenjährigen Sohn. Dem Kind will er alles erklären: Die Einsicht, mit der man das eigene Leben auf einen Schlag begreift, den Trost, der in einer einzelnen Berührung liegen kann, und den Ort, der sein Ende beschließt: Gilead, die kleine Stadt unter dem unermesslichen Himmel des Westens, leicht wie Staub und so schwer wie die Welt.
What listeners say about The Year of Magical Thinking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- M. Greene
- 08-27-06
once you've been there, you know
This book can be extremely comforting to anyone who lives through the death of a loved one. I can see from reading other reviews that some people don't get it; 3 years ago I wouldn't have either. When you're in "the twilight zone" of grief, you appear to be recovering from loss in a straight-forward, linear fashion--from the outside. Didion captures the jumbled emotions, guilt, irrational thought patterns, dreams, paralysis and flashbacks that she and others have lived through with the presence of mind of a gutsy, professional writer. Thanks, Joan, I'm not crazy after all.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
40 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Noreen
- 02-03-06
Magical Thinking
THis was the first audiobook I've ever listened to and it was an excellent introduction to the genre. The reader, Barbara Caruso, was wonderful. I listened while on jury duty and I'm sure the other members of the jury pool must have wondered why that woman sitting in the corner of the room was listening to her ipod and weeping.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Lylye
- 05-04-06
Excellent
Grief has never been so cutting, truthful and eloquent as this book shows. Ms. Didion's account of the year after her husband's sudden death is an elegant, sentimental journey that those shed to light all those feelings of despair, loneliness and emptiness that a death of a dear one cause on the living.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- telson
- 12-22-18
Beautiful and heartbreaking
I recognized many of my own thoughts and feelings in this book, and it brought me both tears and comfort.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Barbara L Shumer
- 12-28-19
The Year of Magical Thinking
Beautifully written memoir of the year following her loving husband John’s unexpected death which was made all the more difficult as their only daughter was deathly ill and in the hospital. The audio is extremely well done.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jennifer Y.
- 10-24-17
Highly recommend
I love the narrator of this book. The story of Joan and her husband, John and their life together was an amazing life. Her grief is understandable and we have a right to grieve our losses. She is a wonderful author. A must read for anyone who has lost a loved one.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Con
- 12-11-16
Overproduced: why the music?
I've seen the author interviewed a few times and I didn't feel like this was her voice, her presentation of her own work. I also didn't feel like spirit of a number of passages was captured. Finally, there is music fading in & out at chapter breaks. this was terribly distracting and the sound mix was bad so narrator was competing with music.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Placeholder
- 05-10-13
Loving Joan Didion. A Year of Magical Thinking
This small book is magical. Anyone who has lost a family member will say "oh the same thing happened to me." Having lost too many people in my family I found this book at times funny, because I did the same thing, sad, not maudlin and educational. I have always liked Joan Didion's books but this one is my favorite. She recalls the small details one would experience after a death. She could not give his shoes away because he might come back and need them. That is a perfect example of magical thinking whether you are thinking like a sociologist or a psychologist or have lost a loved one.
Joan Didion's book Blue Nights is about the death of her daughter. I think of them as companion books but not alike. Read A Year of Magical Thinking. Sometimes it will make you smile.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 06-15-16
I listen to this many times a year.
Narrator is perfect. The emotional level is always how I would imagine that the author intended. I listened to this many times before my own child was in a coma, and now I really relate to the year of magical thinking.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Heather
- 12-15-21
A rough year
Enjoyed the story. Very touching & sad at times. Character was a little unrelatable for me.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!