Coventry
Essays
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 $13.22
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Antonia Beamish
-
By:
-
Rachel Cusk
About this listen
From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art
Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the listener. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions.
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
©2019 Rachel Cusk (P)2019 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Arlington Park
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set over the course of one rainy day in an ordinary English suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; Solly, about to give birth to her fourth child; Maisie, struggling to accept provincial life; and Christine, the optimist and host of a dinner party where the neighbors come together.
-
-
Rachel cusk
- By David on 04-16-22
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Bradshaw Variations
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
-
-
Brilliant but tedious
- By Fred Ovrom on 12-14-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nicole Kidman
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life.
-
-
A book that will challenge you to think.
- By Kelly on 04-23-17
By: Virginia Woolf
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Arlington Park
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set over the course of one rainy day in an ordinary English suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; Solly, about to give birth to her fourth child; Maisie, struggling to accept provincial life; and Christine, the optimist and host of a dinner party where the neighbors come together.
-
-
Rachel cusk
- By David on 04-16-22
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Bradshaw Variations
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
-
-
Brilliant but tedious
- By Fred Ovrom on 12-14-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nicole Kidman
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life.
-
-
A book that will challenge you to think.
- By Kelly on 04-23-17
By: Virginia Woolf
-
Brideshead Revisited
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated work is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the story mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh.
-
-
Extraordinary
- By Vieux Carré Blonde on 12-12-12
By: Evelyn Waugh
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
Birnam Wood
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Catton
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
-
-
Outstanding thriller w/ exceptional character development
- By Bradley T. Collins on 04-21-23
By: Eleanor Catton
-
The Science of Storytelling
- By: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
-
-
A great portal into human psychology
- By Stephanie Romer on 02-13-21
By: Will Storr
-
The Second Mountain
- How People Move from the Prison of Self to the Joy of Commitment
- By: David Brooks
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.
-
-
Pursue meaning, reject hyper-individualism
- By Adam Shields on 05-07-19
By: David Brooks
-
Authority and Freedom
- A Defense of the Arts
- By: Jed Perl
- Narrated by: Daniel Oreskes
- Length: 3 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. “Art’s relevance,” he writes, “has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance.” Authority and Freedom will find listeners from college classrooms to foundation board meetings - wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture.
-
-
Excellent book and excellent narration.
- By jeremy long on 03-18-23
By: Jed Perl
-
The Snakehead
- An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe's sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream.
-
-
But Is It a Crime?
- By Roy on 08-23-09
-
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
- A Memoir
- By: Maggie Smith
- Narrated by: Maggie Smith
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.
-
-
Beautiful, relatable, profound
- By Betty Blue on 04-16-23
By: Maggie Smith
-
Kokoro
- By: Natsume Soseki
- Narrated by: Matt Shea
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The subject of Kokoro, which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling,' is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties of a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight.
-
-
The Heart Of Things, Relationships & Feelings
- By Sara on 04-27-15
By: Natsume Soseki
-
Cassandra Speaks
- When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes
- By: Elizabeth Lesser
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories - stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down....
-
-
Wow
- By jamie gass on 11-12-20
By: Elizabeth Lesser
-
Motherhood
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with candor, originality, and humor. In her late 30s, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent audiobook considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forebearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice.
-
-
Way beyond what I expected
- By S. Anderson on 01-03-19
By: Sheila Heti
-
Monsters
- A Fan's Dilemma
- By: Claire Dederer
- Narrated by: Claire Dederer
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
-
-
I needed this book.
- By Jennifer E. Glapion on 05-16-23
By: Claire Dederer
Related to this topic
-
Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
-
-
Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
-
Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Beautiful memoir
- By Gabriel Smith on 07-25-22
By: Jan Morris
-
Isak Dinesen
- The Life of a Storyteller
- By: Judith Thurman
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 21 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.
-
-
over-written
- By Jacqui Good on 10-19-18
By: Judith Thurman
-
The Three Marriages
- Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
- By: David Whyte
- Narrated by: David Whyte
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
According to Whyte, we humans are involved not just with one marriage with a significant other. We also have made secret vows to our work and unspoken vows to an inner, constantly developing self. Whyte's thesis is that to separate these marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself; that in each of these marriages, will, effort, and hard work are overused, overrated, and in many ways self-defeating.
-
-
RARE SELF-HELP BOOK THAT ACTUALLY HELPS
- By Elizabeth on 03-05-09
By: David Whyte
-
Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
-
-
Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
-
Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Beautiful memoir
- By Gabriel Smith on 07-25-22
By: Jan Morris
-
Isak Dinesen
- The Life of a Storyteller
- By: Judith Thurman
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 21 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.
-
-
over-written
- By Jacqui Good on 10-19-18
By: Judith Thurman
-
The Three Marriages
- Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
- By: David Whyte
- Narrated by: David Whyte
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
According to Whyte, we humans are involved not just with one marriage with a significant other. We also have made secret vows to our work and unspoken vows to an inner, constantly developing self. Whyte's thesis is that to separate these marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself; that in each of these marriages, will, effort, and hard work are overused, overrated, and in many ways self-defeating.
-
-
RARE SELF-HELP BOOK THAT ACTUALLY HELPS
- By Elizabeth on 03-05-09
By: David Whyte
-
Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
-
-
An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
-
The Second Mountain
- How People Move from the Prison of Self to the Joy of Commitment
- By: David Brooks
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.
-
-
Pursue meaning, reject hyper-individualism
- By Adam Shields on 05-07-19
By: David Brooks
-
The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
-
-
Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
-
The Consolations of Philosophy
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.
-
-
Cheering, empathic, helpful
- By Austin on 11-11-09
By: Alain de Botton
-
Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
-
-
Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
-
The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Yet another Gornick masterpiece
- By Lo on 01-14-23
By: Vivian Gornick
-
The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
-
-
Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
I Love the Bones of You
- By: Christopher Eccleston
- Narrated by: Christopher Eccleston
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Be it as Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends In The North, Maurice in The A Word, or his reinvention of Doctor Who, one man, in life and death, has accompanied Christopher Eccleston every step of the way – his father Ronnie. In I Love The Bones Of You, Eccleston unveils a vivid portrait of a relationship that has shaped his entire career trajectory, mirroring and defining his own highs and lows, from stage and screen triumph to breakdown, anorexia, self-doubt, and a deep belief in the basic principles of access and equality denied to generations.
-
-
A kinder view of a loved one
- By Robin Casey on 11-03-19
-
Passing
- By: Nella Larsen
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1929, Passing is a remarkable exploration of the shifting racial and sexual boundaries in America. Larsen, a premier writer of the Harlem Renaissance, captures the rewards and dangers faced by two Negro women who pass for White in a deeply segregated world.
-
-
If not for the Ending
- By William M Storm on 04-23-12
By: Nella Larsen
-
For Your Own Good
- Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
- By: Alice Miller
- Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term effects of abusive child-rearing.
-
-
Should be required reading for everyone
- By Timothy on 05-15-18
By: Alice Miller
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Aftermath
- On Marriage and Separation
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk’s marriage of 10 years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms, but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement, and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a “normal” life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all.
-
-
Good book great author
- By S. spronsen on 08-28-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Saving Agnes
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Alexandra Fuller
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a young British woman's first affair and entry into adulthood.
-
-
most boring book I've ever read.
- By Lee C. Bendig on 05-28-15
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Second Place
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Fleetwood
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma - and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives.
-
-
Description of child sex abuse
- By Karin Dicker on 06-01-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Aftermath
- On Marriage and Separation
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk’s marriage of 10 years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms, but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement, and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a “normal” life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all.
-
-
Good book great author
- By S. spronsen on 08-28-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Saving Agnes
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Alexandra Fuller
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a young British woman's first affair and entry into adulthood.
-
-
most boring book I've ever read.
- By Lee C. Bendig on 05-28-15
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Second Place
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Fleetwood
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma - and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives.
-
-
Description of child sex abuse
- By Karin Dicker on 06-01-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Recollections of My Nonexistence
- A Memoir
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was 19, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer.
-
-
Observant, organized, and real...
- By Jesse Rolfer on 03-25-20
By: Rebecca Solnit
-
The Bradshaw Variations
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
-
-
Brilliant but tedious
- By Fred Ovrom on 12-14-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
-
-
terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
-
Homesick for Another World
- Stories
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan, Richard Poe
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities.
-
-
Funny, Dynamic Writing
- By Sofia Macht on 06-13-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
-
Eileen
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.
-
-
Strange, unsettling, but engrossing
- By S. Yates on 01-09-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
What listeners say about Coventry
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Paul
- 05-16-21
This review is biased
by how much I loved the Outline Trilogy.
So don’t listen to me. She can do no wrong
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful