-
Happily
- A Personal History—with Fairy Tales
- Narrated by: Gilli Messer
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
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 $15.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily”
“One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
FINALIST FOR THE SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE
The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls “this strange American weather.”
Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in “Sorry, Peter Pan, We’re Over You,” when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In “The Evil Stepmother,” Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in “Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand,” the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister’s cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by.
Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark’s voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
White Cat, Black Dog
- Stories
- By: Kelly Link
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Dan Stevens, Dominic Hoffman, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose. Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.
-
-
Weird stories that seem to have no point
- By Erinne Brown on 12-09-23
By: Kelly Link
-
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
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
-
Land of Milk and Honey
- A Novel
- By: C Pam Zhang
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
-
-
Started strong
- By Harry on 09-29-23
By: C Pam Zhang
-
The Woman Warrior
- Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
- By: Maxine Hong Kingston
- Narrated by: Ming-Na
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior broke new ground when it was first published 35 years ago, weaving autobiography, history, folklore, and fantasy in to a candid and revelatory story about the daughter of Chinese immigrants in mid-20th century California.
-
-
Hilariously Vicious; Touchingly Empathetic
- By Horace on 08-28-11
-
The Vaster Wilds
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
-
-
Slow torture written too hastily
- By Jennifer on 09-23-23
By: Lauren Groff
-
White Cat, Black Dog
- Stories
- By: Kelly Link
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Dan Stevens, Dominic Hoffman, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose. Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.
-
-
Weird stories that seem to have no point
- By Erinne Brown on 12-09-23
By: Kelly Link
-
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
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
-
Land of Milk and Honey
- A Novel
- By: C Pam Zhang
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
-
-
Started strong
- By Harry on 09-29-23
By: C Pam Zhang
-
The Woman Warrior
- Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
- By: Maxine Hong Kingston
- Narrated by: Ming-Na
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior broke new ground when it was first published 35 years ago, weaving autobiography, history, folklore, and fantasy in to a candid and revelatory story about the daughter of Chinese immigrants in mid-20th century California.
-
-
Hilariously Vicious; Touchingly Empathetic
- By Horace on 08-28-11
-
The Vaster Wilds
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
-
-
Slow torture written too hastily
- By Jennifer on 09-23-23
By: Lauren Groff
-
King: A Life
- By: Jonathan Eig
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.
-
-
My Time
- By Susan on 06-18-23
By: Jonathan Eig
-
Normal Rules Don't Apply
- Stories
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Paterson Joseph
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that listeners love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.
-
-
Playful jigsaw puzzle of stories
- By ReallyNelie on 02-24-24
By: Kate Atkinson
-
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
-
-
An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
-
Festival Days
- By: Jo Ann Beard
- Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When “The Fourth State of Matter”, her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work.
-
-
Moments of brilliance
- By P. Bergh on 08-23-21
By: Jo Ann Beard
-
Pure Colour
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her.
-
-
Nothing else like it
- By Teri Kline on 03-20-22
By: Sheila Heti
-
Also a Poet
- A Memoir
- By: Ada Calhoun
- Narrated by: Ada Calhoun, Lili Taylor, Josephine Brill
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.
-
-
Pretty Interesting
- By Michele A. Cacano-Green on 08-02-22
By: Ada Calhoun
-
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
-
The Neil Gaiman Reader
- Fiction
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman, George Guidall, Lenny Henry, and others
- Length: 27 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning Gaiman’s career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a captivating collection from one of the world’s most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted fans. A brilliant representation of Gaiman's groundbreaking, entrancing, endlessly imaginative fiction, this captivating volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults—Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and nearly fifty of his short stories.
-
-
52 Bits of Awesome
- By Southard on 08-11-21
By: Neil Gaiman
-
In the Wake
- On Blackness and Being
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
-
-
Necessary reading
- By Joe Wilson on 08-10-24
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Trigger Warning
- Short Fictions and Disturbances
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this new anthology, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath. Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013--as well as "Black Dog", a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.
-
-
It Triggered Me to Stay Up Late and Listen
- By Jan on 02-10-15
By: Neil Gaiman
-
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
-
-
Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
On Our Best Behavior
- The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
- By: Elise Loehnen
- Narrated by: Elise Loehnen
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses—often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts—are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.
-
-
Autobiography in Disguise
- By Lindsey on 06-11-23
By: Elise Loehnen
Critic reviews
“With milk teeth, bread crumbs, pebbles, and tears, Sabrina Orah Mark illumines the outermost expanses of motherhood’s chaos, cruelty, and love. She confidently wields the weird logic of the fairy tale; bewitched, I didn’t even try to distinguish the real from the unreal. I just wanted to follow this thrillingly distinctive book wherever it went.” —Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People
“Who is this stunning sorceress of love and lightness and language wrapped around the heavy? We are so lucky to have her to consider the world with us. This book is going onto my fairy-tale class syllabus pronto but beyond the tales it’s also such a powerful investigation of motherhood, of personhood, chock-full of truly amazing associations. A keeper.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Butterfly Lampshade
“Sabrina Orah Mark’s lapidary sentences hitched together can make us understand fairy tales better but not by any means so obvious as explaining them. These are fairy tales that are essays on fairy tales but also incantations, confessions, news analysis, personal history, and reminders that fairy tales are dainty things capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting of the contents of our imaginations and the aches of our hearts. Which is my long-winded way of saying: Amazing! Gorgeous! Read this!” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Waking Beauty and Men Explain Things to Me
Related to this topic
-
Beasts and Beauty
- Dangerous Tales
- By: Soman Chainani
- Narrated by: Polly Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twelve tales, 12 dangerous tales of mystery, magic, and rebellious hearts. Each twists like a spindle to reveal truths full of warning and triumph, truths that free hearts long kept tame, truths that explore life...and death.
-
-
The Book & the Narrator
- By Johnny Morris on 08-19-22
By: Soman Chainani
-
Tales from the Hinterland
- The Hazel Wood
- By: Melissa Albert
- Narrated by: Rebecca Soler
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.
-
-
Does not disappoint
- By Harley Easton on 02-22-21
By: Melissa Albert
-
The Charmed Wife
- By: Olga Grushin
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, 13 and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong, and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.
-
-
Warning
- By Ijw on 01-26-21
By: Olga Grushin
-
Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
-
-
well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
-
Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
-
-
I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
-
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These 4 stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "The Black Wedding."
-
-
Incredible narration
- By Frances on 01-10-19
-
Beasts and Beauty
- Dangerous Tales
- By: Soman Chainani
- Narrated by: Polly Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twelve tales, 12 dangerous tales of mystery, magic, and rebellious hearts. Each twists like a spindle to reveal truths full of warning and triumph, truths that free hearts long kept tame, truths that explore life...and death.
-
-
The Book & the Narrator
- By Johnny Morris on 08-19-22
By: Soman Chainani
-
Tales from the Hinterland
- The Hazel Wood
- By: Melissa Albert
- Narrated by: Rebecca Soler
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.
-
-
Does not disappoint
- By Harley Easton on 02-22-21
By: Melissa Albert
-
The Charmed Wife
- By: Olga Grushin
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, 13 and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong, and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.
-
-
Warning
- By Ijw on 01-26-21
By: Olga Grushin
-
Owls Do Cry
- By: Janet Frame
- Narrated by: Heather Bolton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'
-
-
well told but a wee bit depressing.
- By Muzza on 11-03-19
By: Janet Frame
-
Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
-
-
I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
-
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These 4 stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "The Black Wedding."
-
-
Incredible narration
- By Frances on 01-10-19
-
Trigger Warning
- Short Fictions and Disturbances
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this new anthology, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath. Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013--as well as "Black Dog", a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.
-
-
It Triggered Me to Stay Up Late and Listen
- By Jan on 02-10-15
By: Neil Gaiman
-
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
- By: Andrew Sean Greer
- Narrated by: Brian Keeler
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Max Tivoli is uniquely cursed. His mind ages normally, but he is born with the withered body of a 70-year-old man, and his body ages in reverse. Despite this torment, Max manages three times to cross paths with Alice, the woman who captures his heart. Because he appears to be a different person each time they meet, Max has three chances for true love.
-
-
odd premise, but it works!
- By Sean Dunnahoo on 03-03-04
-
Caramelo
- By: Sandra Cisneros
- Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
-
-
Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
-
Everything Is Illuminated
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
-
-
Astounding reading
- By bookworm123abc on 02-10-23
-
Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
-
-
Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
-
She Walks in Beauty
- A Woman's Journey Through Poems
- By: Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, Jane Alexander, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.
-
-
Still struggling with poetry
- By Beatrice on 01-30-12
By: Adrienne Rich, and others
-
On Division
- A Novel
- By: Goldie Goldbloom
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just a block or two up from the East River on Division Avenue, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her 10 children range in age from 13 to 39. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie was 16, they have a happy marriage and a full life, and, at the ages of 57 and 62, they are looking forward to some quiet time together.
-
-
A great book
- By Sab on 04-24-20
By: Goldie Goldbloom
-
The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
-
-
Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
-
A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
-
-
His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
-
The Magician of Lublin
- By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Narrated by: Larry Keith
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Magician can dazzle the crowds with his sleight of hand, climb to any height, open any lock. Fearlessly, he does death-defying tricks in theaters all over Poland. At home, his sweet Jewish wife waits for him to return from the city. In the city, his adoring mistresses wait for him to return from home. He holds the key to all hearts, but his own is beset with confusion.
-
-
Complex Masterpiece
- By Evan on 09-11-08
-
All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
-
-
Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
-
Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
-
-
Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
What listeners say about Happily
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Tara Bardeen
- 03-22-23
Weaves a magical spell
Lyrical, perceptive, intimate and universal, this lovely listen is filled with beautiful insights and imagery. I came under the spell of this book completely and have already started listening to it again!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Pamela
- 05-30-24
A bit grim
The writer seemed intent on finding the darkness in every fairy tale. Her mother was awful. I’d expected more of a memoir. But I’m sure she will have a devoted audience.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!