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The Traces
- An Essay
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
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The Traces
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Publisher's summary
The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life.
Mairead Small Staid’s debut, The Traces, is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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So Much Longing in So Little Space
- The Art of Edvard Munch
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Good start
- By Barbara O on 11-08-23
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Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 212
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 176
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Story4 out of 5 stars 180
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Geography of Genius
- A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
- By: Eric Weiner
- Narrated by: Eric Weiner
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 491
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 428
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 426
In The Geography of Genius, acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. He explores the history of places, like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley, to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Very, very disappointing
- By Tamara Greer on 06-08-16
By: Eric Weiner
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Walking
- One Step at a Time
- By: Erling Kagge, Becky L. Crook - translator
- Narrated by: Atli Gunnarsson
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 63
A lyrical account of an activity that is essential for our sanity, equilibrium, and well-being, from the author of Silence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A delightful and essential book
- By Yogans on 05-02-19
By: Erling Kagge, and others
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Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
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3 out of 5 stars
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#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
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The Seven Storey Mountain
- By: Thomas Merton
- Narrated by: Sidney Lanier
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,416
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,201
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,192
The Seven Storey Mountain is the extraordinary spiritual testament of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a man who experienced life to its fullest in the world before entering a Trappist monastery. By the end of his life, he had become one of the 20th century's best-known and beloved Christian voices. This autobiography deals...not with what happens to a man, but what happens inside his soul.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Letter to Audible
- By Victoria A. McCargar on 08-06-17
By: Thomas Merton
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Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- By: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 183
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 163
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 162
Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Glad to have existed to enjoy reading this book!
- By mohammed on 08-11-21
By: Jean-Paul Sartre
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Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story5 out of 5 stars 77
This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great insight
- By Kelly Houske on 02-02-19
By: Jan Morris
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A Severe Mercy
- By: Sheldon Vanauken
- Narrated by: Peter Chanice
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 625
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 554
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Story5 out of 5 stars 555
Beloved, profoundly moving account of the author's marriage, the couple's search for faith and friendship with C. S. Lewis, and a spiritual strength that sustained Vanauken after his wife's untimely death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding
- By Jeffrey on 12-03-16
By: Sheldon Vanauken
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Time Pieces
- A Dublin Memoir
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.
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5 out of 5 stars
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‘loved it!
- By SandyK on 02-24-24
By: John Banville
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The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 21
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Yet another Gornick masterpiece
- By Lo on 01-14-23
By: Vivian Gornick
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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 Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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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