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Tropic of Cancer
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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Henry Miller's Nexus was censored fifty years ago, while Miller and his publishers fought for freedom of speech. Nexus II was never published, and looks at his first trip to Paris and Europe in 1928, a world on the edge of the Great Depression. Paris 1928 collates these unpublished memoirs as Henry Miller wished, together with the censored pages from Nexus.
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Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.
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Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.
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An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
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In 1937, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight", For Whom the Bell Tolls.
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Don't "Clean Up" Hemingway
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Paris 1928
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On the Road
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Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free”.
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Overall
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Performance
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One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.
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Enjoyable
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Amazing reader of classic great novel
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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This is not unabridged
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Performance
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Story
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Great book, great narration, but not for everyone
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Don't expect an in depth story
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Performance
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Story
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Great Content; Would benefit from chapter names
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By: George Orwell
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The Handmaid's Tale: Special Edition
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.
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Wait! It Mightn't Be What You Think--
- By Gillian on 04-05-17
By: Margaret Atwood, and others
Editorial reviews
Campbell Scott's narrative style has a unique stamp. His baseline technique in Tropic of Cancer is the dampening of his voice, joined with a masterly expressive control that emanates from this restriction. The effect is a quite strong sense of, and control over, mood and an intimate narrative connection with the individual listener. Scott's approach is suggestive of sotto voce, literarily "under speaking", similar to that bit of news spoken by a friend through a cupped hand in lowered tones into your ear in the Age of iPod, the narrator speaking through your earphones. Scott moves fluently from this baseline into the very lively stuff of Miller's tropes, riffs and rhetoric, and comically charmed outrages. Scott hits the marks, even as a tonal resonance of intimate communication remains constant. And Henry Miller's narrative voice? George Orwell observed, in his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale", "Read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,' you feel. 'It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you...with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike.'"
With their production of Tropic of Cancer, Harper Audio and Campbell Scott have reached an elusive artistic benchmark: that point where the voice of the author and the voice of the narrator converge. David Chasey
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This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. This is no ordinary novel. This is the story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I - he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact.
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READ THE INTRODUCTION LAST
- By Carollynn7 on 11-27-11
By: Dalton Trumbo
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A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
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A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Humboldt's Gift
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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A Woman in Berlin
- Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
- By: Anonymous, Philip Boehm - translator
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
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Interesting
- By northwoods woman on 06-25-20
By: Anonymous, and others
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House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
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Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
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The Satanic Verses
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their airliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations.
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Use an audiobook to really enjoy Satanic Verses
- By David Edelberg on 11-24-12
By: Salman Rushdie
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Fragile Things
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Marvelous creations, including a short story set in the world of The Matrix and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction, can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his entertaining (and dark) sense of humor.
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Perhaps a different format?
- By Karen on 11-03-10
By: Neil Gaiman
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In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.
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I am one of the lucky few to live here in Big Sur
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Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.
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Confusing Narrator
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Paris 1928
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Henry Miller's Nexus was censored fifty years ago, while Miller and his publishers fought for freedom of speech. Nexus II was never published, and looks at his first trip to Paris and Europe in 1928, a world on the edge of the Great Depression. Paris 1928 collates these unpublished memoirs as Henry Miller wished, together with the censored pages from Nexus.
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Narrator is too cherubic to read Miller
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Sexus (Danish edition)
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"Sexus" er første bind i Henry Millers selvbiografiske trilogi om sit kærligheds- og sexliv, efter han forelsker sig i den mystiske danserinde Mona, som han forlader sin første kone, Maude, for. Bogen er hudløst ærlig og fortæller også, hvordan hans begær for Maude blussede op igen, mens skilsmissen stod på. "The Rosy Crucifixion"-trilogien består af romanerne "Sexus", "Plexus" og "Nexus" og regnes for et af hovedværkerne inden for den erotiske litteratur.
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The Delta Of Venus
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Anais Nin is undoubtedly a great writer. In Delta of Venus she welcomes us into a world of new experiences where she demands that 'sex be mixed with tears, laughter, promises....new faces, dancing and wine.' This ground breaking collection of stories explores aspects of female sexuality long unexposed until Anais opened what she herself was to call 'that Pandora's box.' It is brave, fearless and compelling.
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good, but not complete
- By AshleyJ on 02-14-20
By: Anais Nin
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The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Lagelee
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin is the published version of Anaïs Nin's own private manuscript diary, which she began at age 11 in 1914 during a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. Nin would later say she had begun the diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.
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Beautiful perspective from an incredible woman, surrounded by difficult and incredible men
- By Richard McKown on 12-11-23
By: Anais Nin
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
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- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
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In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.
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I am one of the lucky few to live here in Big Sur
- By Adam H Rosenberg on 05-18-22
By: Henry Miller
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Henry & June
- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Cherie Lunghi
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.
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Confusing Narrator
- By Lauren on 07-11-09
By: Anais Nin
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Paris 1928
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Henry Miller's Nexus was censored fifty years ago, while Miller and his publishers fought for freedom of speech. Nexus II was never published, and looks at his first trip to Paris and Europe in 1928, a world on the edge of the Great Depression. Paris 1928 collates these unpublished memoirs as Henry Miller wished, together with the censored pages from Nexus.
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Narrator is too cherubic to read Miller
- By Philharmonic on 08-22-19
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Sexus (Danish edition)
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"Sexus" er første bind i Henry Millers selvbiografiske trilogi om sit kærligheds- og sexliv, efter han forelsker sig i den mystiske danserinde Mona, som han forlader sin første kone, Maude, for. Bogen er hudløst ærlig og fortæller også, hvordan hans begær for Maude blussede op igen, mens skilsmissen stod på. "The Rosy Crucifixion"-trilogien består af romanerne "Sexus", "Plexus" og "Nexus" og regnes for et af hovedværkerne inden for den erotiske litteratur.
By: Henry Miller, and others
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The Delta Of Venus
- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Ingrid Pitt
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anais Nin is undoubtedly a great writer. In Delta of Venus she welcomes us into a world of new experiences where she demands that 'sex be mixed with tears, laughter, promises....new faces, dancing and wine.' This ground breaking collection of stories explores aspects of female sexuality long unexposed until Anais opened what she herself was to call 'that Pandora's box.' It is brave, fearless and compelling.
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good, but not complete
- By AshleyJ on 02-14-20
By: Anais Nin
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- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Lagelee
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin is the published version of Anaïs Nin's own private manuscript diary, which she began at age 11 in 1914 during a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. Nin would later say she had begun the diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.
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Beautiful perspective from an incredible woman, surrounded by difficult and incredible men
- By Richard McKown on 12-11-23
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A Journal of Love
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Journal of Love continues the story of Anais Nin's eventful bohemian life which began with Henry and June. Her pioneering insightful writing is considered the finest in the genre of female erotica. Maryam D'Abo, famous as a Bond leading lady, captures the honesty and sensuality of Nin's beautiful book.
By: Anais Nin
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Henry Miller on Writing
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- Unabridged
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Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.
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Reader does not speak French
- By Wingfoot CwR on 07-18-22
By: Henry Miller
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
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Werther, a sensitive young artist, finds himself in Wahlheim, a quiet, attractive village in Germany where he seeks solace from the turmoils of love. It is a young spring, and he hopes that arcadian solitude will prove a genial balm to his mind. But his romantic tendency rules otherwise, and he falls in love with Charlotte - Lotte - even though he knows she is affianced to another.
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Great performance for a classical story.
- By Brandon Shaw on 09-15-17
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The Unknown Henry Miller
- A Seeker in Big Sur
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Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned "Paris" books - beginning with Tropic of Cancer - were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. Until then he had toiled in relative obscurity and poverty.
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In-depth on the 2nd major phase of Miller's career
- By Jeremy Hatch on 12-12-17
By: Arthur Hoyle
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My Tropic of Cancer
- Living & Dying with a Dread Disease
- By: Daniel Mintie
- Narrated by: Daniel Mintie
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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My Tropic of Cancer: Living & Dying with a Dread Disease tells the story of cancer’s passage through three generations of the Mintie family. This deeply personal account relates the heartbreak, hope, and occasional hilarity that travel with any lethal diagnosis. Tropic includes gritty, day-today detail of the author's life as a cancer patient, and the wider environmental, social, and political milieus of cancer's appearance.
By: Daniel Mintie
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
- By: D. H. Lawrence
- Narrated by: Samantha Bond
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of Lady Chatterley and her love for her husband's gamekeeper outraged the sensibilities of Edwardian England. Lawrence had already been dismissed as a purveyor of the obscene for the attitudes to sex that he had shown in The Rainbow, which had been fiercely suppressed on its publication in 1915. Chatterley, written in several versions around 1928 in Italy in the final part of Lawrence's life, was a deliberate choice on the author's part to address sex head on.
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Amazing reader of classic great novel
- By Programmer on 05-02-16
By: D. H. Lawrence
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Story of O
- By: Pauline Reage
- Narrated by: Käthe Mazur
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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O is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, René, takes her to a château, where she is enslaved, with René's approval, and systematically sexually assaulted by various other men. Later, René turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality. But the final humiliation is yet to come.
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This is not 50 Shades
- By Kimberlykate on 10-15-12
By: Pauline Reage
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Fire
- From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1934--1937
- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 18 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.
By: Anais Nin
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
- By: D. H. Lawrence
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The last and most famous of D. H. Lawrence's novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in 1928 and banned in England and the United States as pornographic. While sexually tame by today's standards, the book is memorable for better reasons---Lawrence's masterful and lyrical prose, and a vibrant story that takes us bodily into the world of its characters.
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Perfect Perfidy.
- By J.B. on 11-01-17
By: D. H. Lawrence
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
- By: D. H. Lawrence
- Narrated by: Margaret Hilton
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- Unabridged
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Lady Chatterley’s husband returns from the War paralysed from the waist down. Frustrated by his attitudes as much as his disability, she begins a love-affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. She realises that to be fully alive she must live the life of the body as well as the mind, but in doing so she angers the conventions of her day. Banned for over 30 years for the explicit nature of its language and descriptions of sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover also exposes the dehumanisation of the mechanical age, and underlines the profound power of tenderness.
By: D. H. Lawrence
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Harlot's Ghost
- A Novel
- By: Norman Mailer
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 48 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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With unprecedented scope and consummate skill, Norman Mailer unfolds a rich and riveting epic of an American spy. Harry Hubbard is the son and godson of CIA legends. His journey to learn the secrets of his society - and his own past - takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the "momentous catastrophe" of the Kennedy assassination. All the while, Hubbard is haunted by women who were loved by both his godfather and President Kennedy.
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Timely & Terrific
- By Gingoldj on 05-26-17
By: Norman Mailer
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Insatiable Wives
- Women Who Stray and the Men Who Love Them
- By: David J. Ley
- Narrated by: Rose Caraway
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before the term cuckold was a common word thrown around in the media, Dr. Ley explored the history and science of cuckolding. This groundbreaking work explores why and how some men not only allow, but encourage, their wives to pursue sexual relationships with other men.
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interesting
- By Rodney Nash on 09-13-23
By: David J. Ley
What listeners say about Tropic of Cancer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dhananjay
- 08-11-21
Sexual Explicit Parts Blasé, but Angst Real
The novel is notorious for being sexually explicit, and was definitely so for that time. But today that detail was yawn-inducing. However, slogging through the sexual excesses was still relevant to the angst, hopeless desparation and objectification of humans that pervades much of the book.
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- Heather OBrien
- 09-07-22
Raw, Bold, Mesmerizing
I wish I knew and was honest enough with myself to write such an in-your-face novel. Unapologetic and circumspect. I was blown away.
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- rfi123158
- 04-05-16
outstanding outstanding outstanding
What an incredible book! Henry Miller was brilliant. His mixture of filth and fantasy was perfect. I'll never be the same. I recommend this 100%.
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5 people found this helpful
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- David C.
- 04-30-21
Profane but compelling
Much has been written about Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's semi-autobiographical novel, documenting his time as a struggling American writer in France. It is as vulgar, misogynistic and racist as imagined. It is also extremely engaging and beautifully written.
Moving to Paris in 1930 after the lesbian lover of his second wife died and having left his wife in New York, he lived the life of the quintessential starving writer in Paris for a year before being hired by the Paris bureau of the Chicago Tribune as a proofreader. His lecherous, hard partying life with fellow Ex-pats served as much of the framework of Tropic of Cancer. Greatly Inspired by James Joyce, he employed a stream of consciousness style. But he carried it to a new level, unabashedly and in great detail recounting the highly charged sexual lifestyle into which he wallowed while in France. His writing style and persona attracted the attention of French-Cuban-American writer and essayist Anais Min, who along with her husband Hugh Guiler, provided much of the funding for Miller's Paris decade.
As well as becoming one of his countless sexual partners, she was also his editor and arranged for Tropic of Cancer to be published in France in 1934. It was immediately branded as pornographic and banned from importation into the United States by the Customs Service. This ban stood for 30 years and numerous legal challenges, inevitably becoming a landmark 1964 Supreme Court case that determined it was not pornographic. This allowed legal importation, though countless tens of thousands of copies had been smuggled into American throughout the decades.
Having recently endured a couple of novels by D.H. Lawrence as part of the Modern Library's Top 100 books of the 20th Century, it was refreshing to have Tropic of Cancer come up on my list. Personally, I found Lawrence more annoying rather than titillating. In Miller, his brand of literary sexuality, though more pointed and brutal, also felt more honest. Candor, as well as captivating prose, elevates Miller head and shoulder above Lawrence.
Tropic of Capricorn will be coming up on my list soon.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kenny
- 12-03-12
Oh Henry
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Too bad all of Henry Millers books are not audiobooks. Definitely one of the best writers I have come in contact with. Although there are massive ramblings, there are also very focused rants that hit a cord.
What does Campbell Scott bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Campbell is a good reader but I thought he could have been a bit scruffier to match the drunken nature of the character.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No, there is too much to think about, I actually wanted to roll back the audio and revisit passages; not so easy in audio format.
Any additional comments?
I read this in book format years ago and this audio version really intrigued me to go back and read all of the Henry Miller books again.
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Overall
- chris
- 09-15-08
Awesome
This is the same narrator for many audiobooks I've purchased. Initially, his voice sounds very monotone and boring but after a while it flows. I think this one is very well done. I tried to read this book several times in my life, but the audiobook makes it much easier to digest, listening to it 30 minutes here... 30 minutes there. on the way to work, while going to bed, etc. Great book.
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35 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 01-20-18
Joyce-Like with desperation instead of magic
This has much of the feel of James Joyce, but lacks a magic I always get from Joyce. Here the character expresses a desire to unmake modern capitalistic society, but has no idea what to do instead. The book is permeated with an unstated fear of death, and worse, complete non-existence. There is a lot of crude language (mostly C#&T, but a lot of S#&T and F#&K), which many may find crude and uninteresting, if not offensive.
Some reviews seem to think this is a book is a celebration of life, instead it seemed to me a desperate striving for somethinness as the alternative is too fearful to consider. Others (including the protagonist) believe this is expressing the true essence of actual life. I get that essence from Joyce and Whitman but here the striving and the crudeness and the isolation and the immorality, seemed only a mask for fear. Fear is a reality, but it is not the only reality. I suppose that is the fundamental weakness I found in this novel, it was not multidimensional. Joyce and Whitman are frank, and sometimes dark, yet wonderfully multidimensional.
While I would recommend any Joyce and novels like A Clockwork Orange to my (adult) daughter or my wife, I would not recommend this one. I am quite glad I read it, and understand why it is considered important (particularly for the time) but I don't think reading it improved me or my life.
The narration was excellent expressing the dry striving of the protagonist.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Barry
- 09-27-12
A truly frank depiction of his times
The think I have to appreciate about this book is that it tells a really honest picture of the world in the time it was written. Literature (at least in the English-speaking world) up to this time had generally circumscribed certain areas of life from being openly depicted. I suppose it's debatable whether Miller qualifies as literature. I often felt like he was merely publishing his personal journal, though whether many people were that frank even in their own journals is up for question. The point is that our impressions of those times are colored by the literature that has come down to us, and gets reinforced by the films made about those times. Miller reminds us that people then were pretty much like people now. I'd like to quote what he said in the movie Reds about that but I'm pretty sure that would violate community standards at Audible.com. Clearly, the grungy part of the world Miller inhabited at that time was not the whole world, but it was there and he documented it. I also have to appreciate that he never attempted to justify his lifestyle. He simply wrote it down and left it to other people to decide if it was worth reading. Regardless of your opinion of him or his books, there is no denying he brings a vivid energy to the page you will not find in most other authors. One other thing I have to comment on is that in this book, as in a number of other novels from that era, the real story is only vaguely alluded to and only becomes clear at the end. Those who are distracted by the narrator's language and exploits are likely to miss the point. Whether the point is worth being dragged through Paris's demimonde is up to the reader to decide.
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- TDB
- 07-10-21
perfect for our current time
Hunter S Thompson, thanks to you and Henry Miller and Bukowskis for enlightening the public about the degenerates that hold the world together.
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- Michelle
- 06-25-19
Cutting Edge for 1930's!!
this isn't a book nor a regular or typical autobiography that one is used to. This is encounters of Henry Millers life which he has written down when he exiled himself from the state and moved to London or the UK whichever way.
The interesting facts about the book - was even through the high statistic rate of STDs, in specific, syphilis ... they were still very, very much promiscuous in that time - in that part of the world.
It definitely opens your eyes to the variances of sexual aptitude, characters and achievements, not just only of himself but what he notices from the people he has encountered and befriended through the years which in itself is interesting. As it is however interesting, it is also kind of boring to a degree.
If you're looking to understand a little more of sex in history that comes from the states into the UK and Back Again this is a great start but you really have to want to listen to it or be curious enough to make it through the whole book. The language is vulgar in this context but perfect for the book and a view of the slang and the thought process of male to women - women to male points of views of the time.
My most favorite part is when he talks about going to a brothel with an Indian man and .....
Well if you listen to it.... you'll know what happens!! Very funny moment!
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