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The Black Book
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 16 mins
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The Black Book
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The Black Book is Orhan Pamuk's tour de force, a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture which confirmed his reputation as a writer of international stature. Richly atmospheric and Rabelaisian in scope, it is a labyrinthine novel suffused with the sights, sounds and scents of Istanbul, an unforgettable evocation of the city where East meets West, and a boldly unconventional mystery that plumbs the elusive nature of identity, fiction, interpretation and reality.
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 42
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 117
Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4 out of 5 stars 76
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 339
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 298
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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1 out of 5 stars
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4 out of 5 stars 36
A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 59
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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3 out of 5 stars
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 178
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 158
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Story4 out of 5 stars 154
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.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 983
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 875
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 876
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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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
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 636
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 563
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 558
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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5 out of 5 stars
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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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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
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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5 out of 5 stars
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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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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 172
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4 out of 5 stars 142
Ethiopian émigré Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who offers a colorful debut work of fiction. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It's the `70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos - a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized by themilitary. He hopes for new prospects in D.C.'s gentrification process.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book, wonderful reader
- By Lisbeth on 11-22-11
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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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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Overall4 out of 5 stars 231
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 157
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Story4 out of 5 stars 156
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 227
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 140
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 142
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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5 out of 5 stars
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A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz