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Gossip
- The Untrivial Pursuit
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
A dishy, incisive exploration of gossip - from celebrity rumors to literary romans à clef, personal sniping to political slander - by one our “great essayists” (David Brooks).
To his successful examinations of some of the most powerful forces in modern life - envy, ambition, snobbery, friendship - the keen observer and critic Joseph Epstein now adds Gossip. No trivial matter, despite its reputation, gossip, he argues, is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed from its old-fashioned best - clever, mocking, a great private pleasure - to a corrosive new-school version, thanks to the reach of the mass media and the Internet. Gossip has invaded and changed for the worse politics and journalism, causing unsubstantiated information to be presented as fact. Contemporary gossip claims to reveal truth, but as Epstein shows, it’s our belief in truth that gossip today threatens to undermine and destroy.
Written in his trademark erudite and witty style, Gossip captures the complexity of this immensely entertaining subject.
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- 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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Emily Post
- Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
- By: Laura Claridge
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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From the excesses of the late 19th-century Gilded Age, through the horrors of World War I, to the transformations of the Roaring 20s that gave birth to her magisterial Etiquette, Emily Post unfailingly took the measure of her era. A Baltimore blue blood with a populist heart, she helped the masses live the American dream with her hugely popular book, which has been continuously in print for over 85 years.
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Typical for Emily Post
- By Stephanie on 01-07-19
By: Laura Claridge
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It Ended Badly
- Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved - from his old tutor to most of his friends - put to death. Oscar Wilde's lover, whom he went to jail for, abandoned him when faced with being cut off financially from his wealthy family.
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Shallow, poorly researched, forced humor
- By S. Yates on 05-11-17
By: Jennifer Wright
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Ida M. Tarbell
- The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - and Won!
- By: Emily Arnold McCully
- Narrated by: Emily Arnold McCully
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
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Philip Roth
- The Biography
- By: Blake Bailey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 31 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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"I don't want you to rehabilitate me," Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. "Just make me interesting." Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost 10 years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth's own breathtakingly candid confessions. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.
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moved
- By Michael on 08-18-21
By: Blake Bailey
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Georgette Heyer
- Biography of a Bestseller
- By: Jennifer Kloester
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
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The Golden Age of Murder
- By: Martin Edwards
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- 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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Salinger
- By: David Shields, Shane Salerno
- Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
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Ingenious novel or biography? Hard to tell....
- By Melinda on 09-05-13
By: David Shields, and others
What listeners say about Gossip
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carolyn
- 02-14-12
Good Try
From cold to hot this was a warm. Included gossip is geared to the older adult. I was looking for the reasons for gossip and they were there. Not a poorly written book but do not start thinking you will hear anything new or 21st Century exciting.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Timothy
- 11-05-19
Epstein's writing is moreish.
I wish that Audible would consider getting this reader to taking more of Epstein's lines out for a walk.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-17-15
Insightful and Amusing
I wanted to hear what a long essay sounded like. I enjoyed it. There are countless examples of all variety of gossip and the categories alone are interesting.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Shielding C
- 09-21-23
Misogynist whines that he got called misogynist
There isn't much here in the way of a history of gossip or anything very intellectually stimulating. It's just a collection of the author's favorite rumors about celebrities of various sorts, annotated with the author's opinions about the relative truthfulness and morality of some anecdotes. Unfortunately this commentary frequently amounts to whining about feminism and nostalgia for the good 'ol days when people had too much dignity to disclose their traumas or call other people out on their casual prejudices. He felt the need to comment on three different rumors about domestic abuse that he was sure the rumors were true because the victim was a hard-to-live-with woman and the abuser was a stressed out man or one with a lot of physical energy. He concocted the juicy rumor to share with us that an ex writer whose writing career is usually said to have ended because of depression probably stopped writing because his wife was "crazy," which turns out to mean Epstein found her annoyingly talkative when he met her. Toward the end of the book Epstein switches from praising gossip to criticizing the way society today publicizes all its grievances, and it seems to me this shift occurred specifically so that could whine about a former student of his who told him to his face that she thought it was misogynist of him to keep calling on male students to speak while ignoring female students. It is totally unfair, he tells us, that in today's world a young woman can ruin a good professor's reputation because of being a feminist and also mentally disturbed. Fascinatingly, he does not deny her accusation that he tended to invite male students to dominate discussion in his classroom, but tells us that keeping track of gender imbalances was the real hamper to her education. He also says that he would have called on anyone who he thought had something intelligent to say, which doesn't at all refute her point that misogyny played a role in who he thought worth listening to. I listened to the whole book so I can say I gave it a chance, it just never amounted to anything more than misogynist whining and vapid anecdote.
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