Balladz
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $11.25
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Sharon Olds
-
By:
-
Sharon Olds
About this listen
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle).
"At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: "she was our Girl—our Woman—/ Man enough—for me") and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm. Olds sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and maturity all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her whiteness, seeing her privilege; seeing her mother (whom her fans will recognize) "flushed exalted at Punishment time"; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden.
It is Olds's gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.
©2022 Sharon Olds (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
Stag's Leap
- Poems
- By: Sharon Olds
- Narrated by: Sharon Olds
- Length: 1 hr and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, Olds opens her heart to the listener, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world.
By: Sharon Olds
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Musical Tables
- Poems
- By: Billy Collins
- Narrated by: Billy Collins
- Length: 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.
-
-
Master Mind
- By Tara D. on 10-04-24
By: Billy Collins
-
Runaway
- New Poems
- By: Jorie Graham
- Narrated by: Jorie Graham
- Length: 2 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity”.
By: Jorie Graham
-
Dog Songs and A Thousand Mornings
- Deluxe Edition
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Mary Oliver
- Length: 1 hr and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beloved by her fans, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet’s relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts.
-
-
I listened over and over
- By Polyhymnia on 02-21-18
By: Mary Oliver
-
Stag's Leap
- Poems
- By: Sharon Olds
- Narrated by: Sharon Olds
- Length: 1 hr and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, Olds opens her heart to the listener, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world.
By: Sharon Olds
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
-
The real real
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-24
By: Diane Seuss
-
Musical Tables
- Poems
- By: Billy Collins
- Narrated by: Billy Collins
- Length: 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.
-
-
Master Mind
- By Tara D. on 10-04-24
By: Billy Collins
-
Runaway
- New Poems
- By: Jorie Graham
- Narrated by: Jorie Graham
- Length: 2 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity”.
By: Jorie Graham
-
Dog Songs and A Thousand Mornings
- Deluxe Edition
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Mary Oliver
- Length: 1 hr and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beloved by her fans, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet’s relationships to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts.
-
-
I listened over and over
- By Polyhymnia on 02-21-18
By: Mary Oliver
-
Many Miles
- Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Mary Oliver
- Length: 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following the success of At Blackwater Pond, this second CD from best-selling poet Mary Oliver contains a selection of 37 previously published poems and four as yet uncollected, read by the poet in her steady, magnetic voice. Oliver recites from the full range of her poetry - from her classic nature writing, to her verses for her mischievous bichon Percy, to her ever-deepening spiritual poems. Many Miles will be a most welcome addition to the collections of her fans.
-
-
Thank you for being slow & speaking of beauty.
- By Maggie Hess on 02-18-17
By: Mary Oliver
-
The Poems of T. S. Eliot
- Read by Jeremy Irons
- By: T. S. Eliot
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons, Dame Eileen Atkins
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Irons' perceptive reading illuminates the poetry of T. S. Eliot in all its complexity. Major poems range from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' through the post-war desolation of 'The Waste Land' and the spiritual struggle of 'Ash-Wednesday', to the enduring charm of 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.
-
-
Horribly Frustrating to Follow
- By AVS on 06-18-18
By: T. S. Eliot
-
Judas Goat
- Poems
- By: Gabrielle Bates
- Narrated by: Gabrielle Bates
- Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love.
-
-
Unforgettable Images…and more
- By EB on 02-04-23
By: Gabrielle Bates
-
And Still I Rise (Unabridged Selections)
- A Book of Poems
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. “It is true poetry she is writing,” M. F.K . Fisher has observed, “not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity.... It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night...it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes.”
-
-
Amazing
- By Jean on 06-04-14
By: Maya Angelou
-
My Trade Is Mystery
- Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing
- By: Carl Phillips
- Narrated by: Carl Phillips
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this intimate and eloquent meditation, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about what he calls an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, through 40 years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers. He weaves together his experiences as a poet and prose writer with discussions of underexplored elements of the writing life, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.
-
-
Useful framework of tools for Writers and the rest of us
- By Tom on 05-28-24
By: Carl Phillips
-
Poetry Unbound
- 50 Poems to Open Your World
- By: Pádraig Ó Tuama
- Narrated by: Pádraig Ó Tuama
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama's appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives.
-
-
Praise to Pádraig O Tuama
- By Marilyn Hargrove on 02-01-23
By: Pádraig Ó Tuama
-
Blue Horses
- Poems
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit around in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.
-
-
Wonderful Listening Experience
- By Tom on 05-24-24
By: Mary Oliver
-
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
-
-
An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
-
Summer Snow
- New Poems
- By: Robert Hass
- Narrated by: Robert Hass
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities and expansive intellect, and tremendous listenability.
-
-
Beautiful aching poems
- By Nate on 04-18-24
By: Robert Hass
-
Wild and Precious
- A Celebration of Mary Oliver
- By: Mary Oliver, Sophia Bush - contributor, Ross Gay - contributor, and others
- Narrated by: Sophia Bush
- Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver is a first of its kind audio commemoration of one of the greatest poets in modern history. Actress and activist Sophia Bush guides listeners on a journey of contemplation and discovery into the artistry of Mary Oliver as remembered by many who were most greatly impacted by it.
-
-
I was looking for poetry
- By Dani on 08-19-23
By: Mary Oliver, and others
-
Time Is a Mother
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 1 hr and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
-
-
solomn
- By Camille on 09-05-24
By: Ocean Vuong
-
Harlem Shuffle
- A Novel
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.
-
-
Best Read/Listen on Audible
- By Henry Posner on 09-22-21
By: Colson Whitehead
Critic reviews
GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE FINALIST
“A commanding poet . . . This substantial gathering is funny, furious, discomfiting, ravishing, mythic, and sorrowful . . . As always, Olds describes herself and her loved ones in startlingly microscopic detail, finding beauty in the ravages of age and even death . . . Passionately precise, Olds unites the primordial with the scientific, the mundane with the chthonic, flesh with spirit.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“A gorgeous, introspective collection. Beginning with a series of quarantine poems, she also meditates on her own white privilege, on her mother’s abuse, and on aging, among other subjects. At once personal and political, the book perfectly encapsulates this confounding time.”—Columbia Magazine
“Ranging from quarantine to issues of whiteness, the Pulitzer and T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Olds continues her laserlike attentiveness to the life around her life as she crisscrosses childhood, young adulthood, and contemporary times, sometimes in the style of Emily Dickinson.”—Library Journal
Related to this topic
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Palimpsest
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Aasne Vigesaa
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
-
-
Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
-
Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
-
-
Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
-
She Walks in Beauty
- A Woman's Journey Through Poems
- By: Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, Jane Alexander, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.
-
-
Still struggling with poetry
- By Beatrice on 01-30-12
By: Adrienne Rich, and others
-
Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
-
-
Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
Palimpsest
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Aasne Vigesaa
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
-
-
Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
-
Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
-
-
Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
-
She Walks in Beauty
- A Woman's Journey Through Poems
- By: Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, Jane Alexander, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.
-
-
Still struggling with poetry
- By Beatrice on 01-30-12
By: Adrienne Rich, and others
-
Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
-
-
Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
-
Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
-
-
Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
-
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
- Stories
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Joy Osmanski, Kaleo Griffith, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979", a dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left in a seagull's nest. "Proving Up" and "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" find Russell veering into more sinister territory.
-
-
Stylish modern magic realism
- By Ryan on 04-10-13
By: Karen Russell
-
Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
-
-
Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
-
Deathless
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Kim de Blecourt
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.
-
-
My Favorite Fantasy Book of the Year
- By Robert on 12-29-13
-
Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
-
-
Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
-
Jagannath
- By: Karin Tidbeck
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A child is born in a tin can. A switchboard operator finds himself in hell. Three corpulent women float somewhere beyond time. Welcome to the weird world of Karin Tidbeck, the visionary Swedish author of literary sci-fi, speculative fiction, and mind-bending fantasy who has captivated fans around the world. Originally published by the tiny press Cheeky Frawg - the passion project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer - Jagannath has been celebrated by listeners and critics alike, with rave reviews from major outlets and support from lauded peers like China Mieville and even Ursula K. Le Guin herself.
-
-
Always unique, usually quite good, sometimes meh
- By Eugene on 02-13-19
By: Karin Tidbeck
-
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
-
-
Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
-
Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
-
-
I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
-
Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
-
-
Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
-
Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
-
-
well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
-
Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
-
-
Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
-
Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
-
-
Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
What listeners say about Balladz
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Profree 123
- 11-11-22
Intimate!
I feel as though I know her more than ever. Her voice is stronger than ever.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!