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Agape Agape
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 3 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas.
For more than 50 years, Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career - long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts - Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.
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In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody.
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-16
By: Julian Barnes
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of his 90th birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit - he has purchased hundreds of women - he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to a master's work.
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-the consolation you have when you can't have Love
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
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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 Earth Will Shake
- The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Vol. I
- By: Robert Anton Wilson
- Narrated by: Scot Crisp
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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They have been with us throughout the ages: the "Invisible College" of wisdom and their adversaries, the destroyers. Naples, Italy, circa 1764: A young aristocrat is about to stumble onto one piece of the great pattern. As witness to a vicious assassination and victim of his passion for the beautiful daughter of his enemy, young Sigismundo Celine is forced to begin a mystical odyssey amidst an ageless clash of Freemasons, Mafia, and the Illuminati.
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Hugely entertaining and informative.
- By Andrew on 07-13-07
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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Magical Negro
- Poems
- By: Morgan Parker
- Narrated by: Morgan Parker
- Length: 1 hr and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
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Waste of time
- By Lida on 07-19-20
By: Morgan Parker
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter Gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission.
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Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering it's own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
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Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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What the hell just happened?
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..everybody's a hero at least once...
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What listeners say about Agape Agape
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 05-04-19
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST
"whole stupefied mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron..."
- William Gaddis, Agapē Agape
"PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE
PIANIST
HE IS DOING HIS BEST"
Agapē Agape, the Last of Gaddis' novels, the musings of a dying man, a looking back swan song, wondering how he's going to be remembered. Since before The Recognitions Gaddis has been fixated, playing with, tuning his ideas about technology and art; politics and art; money and art all centered on the player piano. Similar to J R, in rambling dialogue with quotes and facts and related errata thrown in, but different in that here at the edge of mortality, Gaddis has it thinned down to a monophonic monologue from the dying "man in the bed". Most of the spine of this novel was from research he had done on the Player Piano for 50 years. In the 60s he had written an essay, titled 'Agapē Agape: the Secret History of the Player Piano' some of which found its way into Agapē Agape. Gaddis has been Agapēing and Agaping through most of his novels.
At this point, Gaddis had written several fantastic novels:
1. J R
2. The Recognitions
3. Carpenter's Gothic
4. A Frolic of His Own
and now:
5. Agapē Agape
I've now read 3/5 of his novels and this is my least favorite (and it still gets 4 stars, perhaps 3.75). It is interesting, strange, and electric all at once. I love how the whole novella (because, come on, even with the afterward, it is barely over 100 pages and without the afterward it is less than 100). I'm still trying to wrestle his abstraction into a form that can fit or be made sense of in a GR review. Probably impossible. More probable, no one really cares. Whoa is me. Who is me? You say Agapē and I say Agape.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Conrad
- 02-09-19
Good God!
I almost passed this over because it was only 3 hours long (including the introduction and afterword). Do not get caught up in thinking "Nothing true and passionate and meaningful could happen in 3 hours"! Like punk rock, it gets its point across urgently, enthusiastically and superbly. And bravo to Nick Sullivan. Who else could pull off Gaddis' diatribe? Superior!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-18-23
The performance was phenomenal
I absolutely loved the narration, it was the best I have seen so far on any title. The story was fine.
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