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Difficult Loves
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's summary
Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them
In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition.
A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom.
Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
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In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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So enjoyed this book!
- By Mebythesea on 10-07-08
By: Patrick McGrath
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis - translator
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.
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Ironic, humorous, and restrained
- By Esther on 05-13-13
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Netherland
- By: Joseph O'Neill
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.
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Get Your Post-Colonial Gatsby ON!
- By Darwin8u on 04-13-12
By: Joseph O'Neill
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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Amerika
- The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.
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ha ha ha this is terrific
- By tom on 01-29-14
By: Franz Kafka
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Doctor Zhivago
- By: Boris Pasternak, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator, Richard Pevear - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
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Now Here's a Story
- By P. Giorgio on 09-06-03
By: Gustave Flaubert
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
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Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
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Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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The position of the feet during reading...
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
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The Cloven Viscount
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
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Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
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This is an AMAZING Book!
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
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The Complete Cosmicomics
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Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
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Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
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Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
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- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
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Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
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This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
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Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
- By: Italo Calvino, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
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Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Fantastic Tales
- Visionary and Everyday
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 23 hrs and 39 mins
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Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
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Unexpected pleasure
- By Grant on 11-06-20
By: Italo Calvino
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino
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Why Read the Classics?
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
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Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Numbers in the Dark
- And Other Stories
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
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The Road to San Giovanni
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.
By: Italo Calvino
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Into the War
- By: Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.
By: Martin McLaughlin, and others
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Invisible Cities
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Richard Higgins
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
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Such a wonderful book ruined by terrible narration
- By anonymous on 08-18-23
By: Italo Calvino
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Under the Jaguar Sun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.
By: Italo Calvino
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The Fall
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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Wow Wow Wow
- By Lauren C on 07-14-21
By: Albert Camus
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The Rebel
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he reveals how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny.
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This book is amazing
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-19
By: Albert Camus
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To Have or to Be?
- By: Erich Fromm
- Narrated by: Adriel Brandt
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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To Have or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Fromm's thesis is that two modes of existence struggle for the spirit of humankind: the having mode, which concentrates on material possessions, power, and aggression, and is the basis of the universal evils of greed, envy, and violence; and the being mode, which is based on love, the pleasure of sharing, and in productive activity.
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I recommend listening carefully
- By JL Bate on 07-02-22
By: Erich Fromm
What listeners say about Difficult Loves
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JBeirens
- 10-10-24
classic
a series of stories of people living parts of a life that each could be their own novel. calvino was wonderful
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