Born to Be Posthumous
The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
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Narrated by:
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Adam Sims
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By:
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Mark Dery
About this listen
The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense.
From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.
But who was this man, who lived with more than 20,000 books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known - in the late 1940s, no less - to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes - but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?
He published more than 100 books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others.
At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.
Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to Be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.
©2018 Mark Dery (P)2018 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Reading Like a Writer
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire listeners to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
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Practical, literate, generous
- By Gare on 04-13-08
By: Francine Prose
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Bookworm
- A Memoir of Childhood Reading
- By: Lucy Mangan
- Narrated by: Lucy Mangan
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.
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The author’s sarcasm
- By Phil B. on 10-01-24
By: Lucy Mangan
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
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Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Everybody Thought We Were Crazy
- Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
- By: Mark Rozzo
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple—Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—lived out the emblematic love story of ’60s L.A.
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Wonderful!
- By Rob on 06-07-22
By: Mark Rozzo
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
- A Life of David Foster Wallace
- By: D. T. Max
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
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Max avoids hagiography or a sycophant's biography
- By Darwin8u on 06-11-13
By: D. T. Max
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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Process
- The Writing Lives of Great Authors
- By: Sarah Stodola
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace, and more. In Process, acclaimed journalist Sarah Stodola examines the creative methods of literature's most transformative figures. Each chapter contains a mini biography of one of the world's most lauded authors, focused solely on his or her writing process.
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Excellent!
- By Davina Rush on 04-10-15
By: Sarah Stodola
What listeners say about Born to Be Posthumous
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David
- 01-20-24
I now feel as though I knew him as well as anyone.
Truly illuminating. Having admitted his illustrations since the late 90's I finally visited the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod and immediately needed to learn all I could about the man. This book was wonderful in its ::ahem:: illustration of the man so unique and yet so human. I enjoyed this work immensely!
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- Amary
- 06-10-19
Fresh modern worthy
I completely enjoyed this book. Narrators performance had just the right crispness and irreverence. What a wonderful experience that we can enjoy Gorey and contextualize him in LGBTQ atheistics and culture and at the same time allow him his fabulous mysteries of identity. Highly recommend both the book and the actor ,
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2 people found this helpful
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- Linn
- 04-09-21
Tiring to listen to.
I loved Edward Gorey's art and his life was very interesting, but I found listening to Adam Sims rather exhausting. A little too intense and overworked.
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2 people found this helpful
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- SherryH
- 09-12-22
Appreciated the Biography
Admittedly a difficult person on whom to collect information, Mark Dery has done an excellent job of seeking it out. I also bought the book, which I will pass on, so I could see some of the drawing he was writing about. It's a long book and I'm glad to have done that - the font in the book is so tiny I would have given up! I came away with a greater picture of the man (as much as anyone might be able) behind the Art.
I was a little bored with the narrator. I felt his tone was a bit newscaster-ish. That being said, I'm also not exactly sure how this biography should be read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- niteowl
- 07-18-19
Goreyaphile
I guess I don’t really care what sexual orientation an author or artist is. I have always appreciated his creative output regardless of his sexuality. The reason I gave the story a four star rating instead of five stars is that some areas of the book seemed to obsessively reiterate Edward Gorey’s s.o.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Michael J. Robert
- 07-01-19
lovely book about the reader mispronounced a lot
this was a lovely book but the reader mispronounced many words. for example the word m o r e s and the word t a o. I'm surprised that the producer did not catch this.
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6 people found this helpful
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- J. Nelson
- 05-27-20
Spoiler: he liked cats.
If you’ve gotten this far in reading reviews, just go ahead and buy it already. Dery does a great job summing up an elusive and complex man and somehow manages to do it without reducing Gorey to a Gorey-esque caricature. I wish the book had been twice as long.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Flavia
- 07-26-19
Gorey is amazing but...
But he really didn't need the longest wikipedia in history about him, obsessively repetitive about his sexuality to a creepy degree.
It was a very enjoyable read at first... well written, interesting facts and interviews. Then it drags forever and repeats constantly, as if the author wanted to dig some secret trauma from Gorey's sexuality privacy.
Tedious read to the very end.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 02-02-23
Hang your head, Audible
Arghh! So many mispronunciations! Where was the producer/director? Where was the narrator during literature, philosophy, and/or film class discussions? I do give the narrator props for including footnotes seamlessly.
The book, itself, comes off as an over-long, overwrought essay hyper-focused on Gorey's sexuality. Despite chapters ordered chronologically, it feels disorganized. Some cruel-to-be-kind editor needed to tell the author that every single bit of his research did not need to be included in the narrative.
If it weren't for the quirky and fascinating topic of this book, it would have been a DNF for me.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-07-20
If it was half as long, it would be twice as good.
A long list of names and unnecessary display of complicated words, otherwise fine.
It very mush seems like the author wants to show off his vocabulary and knowledge of people. I rather think that a cluster of sentences with pretty words that repeat the same thing in a more, or EVEN more complicated way, doesn't prove that you as a writer have understood something. It just shows that you are pretentious. Furthermore, it most likely does not help the average reader come to terms with it.
The text is absolutely packed with names. I assume it's an attempt to anchor Gorey's character and work; who influenced him and vice versa. However, if you as a reader are not familiar with the work of the name dropped people, it just serves to make the text longer, almost unbearably so.
Then there are the Freudian analysis of Gorey's sex-life... It seems more than a bit obnoxious to try and dig so deep into a subject that according to the person in question, did not matter to him.
I really wanted to like this book, but it was hard. I really love the work of Edward Gorey, and I did learn more about him, but the book could do with a rather harsh editing.
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4 people found this helpful