Careless People
Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
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Narrated by:
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Kate Reading
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By:
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Sarah Churchwell
About this listen
Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922 - the parties, the drunken weekends at Great Neck, Long Island, the drives back into the city to the jazz clubs and speakeasies, the casual intersection of high society and organized crime, and the growth of celebrity culture of which the Fitzgeralds themselves were the epitome. And for the first time it returns to the story of Gatsby: the high-profile murder that provided a crucial inspiration for Fitzgerald's tale.
With wit and insight, Sarah Churchwell traces the genesis of a masterpiece, discovering where fiction comes from and how it takes shape in the mind of a genius. Blending biography and history with lost and forgotten newspaper accounts, letters, and newly discovered archival material, Careless People is the biography of a book, telling the extraordinary tale of how F. Scott Fitzgerald created a classic and in the process discovered modern America.
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- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.
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Doesn't work as an audiobook
- By Pat on 08-02-15
By: Martin Edwards
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The Curse of Beauty
- The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel
- By: James Bone
- Narrated by: Marianne Fraulo
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist's model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon - her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. Her name is Audrey Munson.
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Fascinating
- By Аmazon Customer on 04-06-17
By: James Bone
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Melville in Love
- The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his legacy, we know very little about Melville, and even less about what he called his "wicked book". Scholars still puzzle over what drove Melville to invent Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of the great white whale.
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intriguing
- By Jean on 06-18-16
By: Michael Shelden
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The Ambulance Drivers
- Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War
- By: James McGrath Morris
- Narrated by: Dean Temple
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense 20-year friendship and write some of America's greatest novels, giving voice to a "lost generation" shaken by war. Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps.
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Morris always delivers interesting biographies...
- By NMwritergal on 04-08-17
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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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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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The Real Lolita
- The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
- By: Sarah Weinman
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
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Meandering and tedious while never delivering the promised story.
- By Timothy McCarthy on 09-15-18
By: Sarah Weinman
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Tinseltown
- Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood
- By: William J. Mann
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence; yet Hollywood's glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies - including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.
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Everybody's a dreamer...
- By Steven on 01-08-15
By: William J. Mann
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
What listeners say about Careless People
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Linda
- 12-06-14
You'll need the book "The Great Gatsby"
I had never read the book or seen a "Gatsby" movie. I was pretty confused because she kept reading excerpts of the Gatsby book. I bought the audio version of "the Great Gatsby".
After listening to it this book made more sense.
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- LaurieLW
- 03-11-15
wanted to like it more
How did the narrator detract from the book?
I found her reading style to be affected, and flat. As someone who is extremely interested in the topic, I found I was unable to get interested or really care about the story and it was solely on the performance. sorry
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- Lyn Relph
- 06-28-23
Excellent
Fascinating, articulate, incisive, well-narrated look into The Great Gatsby and that era and how it all reflects on our evolving perception of America.
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- Ellenaeddy
- 10-16-14
Square on look at the twenties.
More than anything this is a solid look at the elite of the 20s. As my mother grew up in this it was very illuminating and very well done. Mind you, they are not nice people. But it's a very interesting look in the jazz world, and prohibition. Very interesting history.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Sand
- 06-11-14
Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
A sensational true crime story, historical anecdotes, weird facts and celebrity scoops--all from the year 1922--what more could an American history nerd want?
Add to that an insightful re-examination of The Great Gatsby in the context of these things, and you have a fascinating account of the height of the Jazz Age, and why F. Scott Fitzgerald captured its zeitgeist so perfectly that most contemporary critics dismissed the novel as being too "of the moment" to have any lasting resonance.
I'm not an American Lit scholar and it had been years since I'd re-read The Great Gatsby, so I can only judge this book from a lay reader's perspective, but I found it to be a true pleasure from start to finish.
While it's true that the overlying theme of this book--namely the exploration of the connection between the much-publicized Hall-Mills double-murder and how it informed the plot of Gatsby--becomes a little heavy-handed at times, at the very least it functions as a tidy framework for Churchwell to organize her narrative, allowing her to deftly zoom in and out between the Fitzgerald’s insular world and the bigger world around them.
The murder case, along with other news stories and commentaries Churchwell culls from that year, reinforces how truly modern Fitzgerald’s novels were. Vehicular homicides, “publicity hounds”, public intoxication, trial by the press, “spicy” poplular novels romanticizing infidelity--not to mention the unprecedented liberation of women on every front--were all still alarming new trends, the symptoms of a world turned upside-down and inside-out by rapid technical change and the Great War. The reckless behavior of both the Gatsby characters and the-real life Fitzgeralds reflected a national identity crisis that, arguably, we’re still trying to resolve.
It was fun to revisit the novel and be reminded of why no movie adaptation has been able--and probably never will be--to capture it's underlying brilliance.
Last but not least, Kate Reading's silky-smooth narration is a true delight--her reading of Zelda's voice is particularly mesmerizing--and the production is flawless. I will definitely be actively be seeking more of Reading's performances!
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10 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-24-15
Great story
I really enjoyed this book. Unfortunately it went on for too long and the narrator could have been better. Poor Fitzgerald. He shouldn't have had to end up like he did. Definitely a cautionary tale for all.
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- Serkan
- 06-17-15
Good, not my favorite
Churchwell did a good job in her story telling. However the comparison to the New Jersey murders and Fitzgerald's books was a little overdone, or maybe just wasn't done well enough? It was a little dull. There were also conflicting stories than that I've heard before from the lives of Scott and Zelda that maybe should have at least been addressed. Still worth the read, even if it didn't keep my attention as much as I would have liked.
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- Luccia
- 06-22-23
A review of the lives of Fitzgerald and Zelda
And the country’s dive into big money crime and glamor before the inevitable crash. It seemed like it would last forever, it always does. Also includes a strange true crime case, still unsolved, emblematic of the time. So sad that they both had genetic conditions that undermined health and sanity, still they did a lot and lived it up to the hilt. Insightful on The Great Gatsby and much about the literary world of the 20s, steeped in money alcohol glamor and driving every one involved fast off the edge.
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- The Louligan
- 10-25-14
UNDERWHELMING
While this is a well-researched book about the Jazz Age and F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic "The Great Gatsby", there wasn't much more insight into Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda than one can find on Wikipedia.com. The narrator was boring and misprounced several words. Plus her idea of reading French words and phrases is to speak as if she's squeezing her buttocks tight and SPITTING the words out like the cartoon character Pepe Le Pew! You might like this book but I found it to be a colossal waste of time.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Datoms
- 12-03-14
For serious Gatsby fans
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
half as long
Has Careless People turned you off from other books in this genre?
no
Did Kate Reading do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
yes
Any additional comments?
There was so much detail, I couldn't finish it. I'd read Gatsby immediately before this. I liked it, but didn't adore it (too much hype over all these years? expectations too high?). I appreciated the value of such an in depth analysis, but for more casual reading/listening, that I find Audible books so nice for, it was just too much. I'd love to know who did it, but not enough to listen to every possible piece of background for so many parts of the book.
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2 people found this helpful