Homo Irrealis
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 $14.99
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
André Aciman
-
Edoardo Ballerini
-
By:
-
André Aciman
About this listen
2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
This program includes an introduction read by the author.
The New York Times best-selling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works.
Irrealis moods are the set of verbal moods that indicate that something is not actually the case or a certain situation or action is not known to have happened....
André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was - but could in theory still happen.
From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination’s power to shape our memories under time’s seemingly intractable hold.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
©2021 André Aciman (P)2021 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
-
-
Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
By: André Aciman
-
Alibis
- Essays on Elsewhere
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
-
-
Absolutely a favorite
- By Kalindi Bellach on 01-20-23
By: André Aciman
-
Enigma Variations
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want to offer only what we crave from them.
By: André Aciman
-
Out of Egypt
- A Memoir
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life—Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
-
-
Perfect match
- By Bob on 06-24-23
By: André Aciman
-
The Passenger
- A Novel
- By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, André Aciman
- Narrated by: Philip Boehm, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.
-
-
Top-notch novel
- By R. Klein on 05-31-21
By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, and others
-
Lie with Me
- A Novel
- By: Philippe Besson, Molly Ringwald - translator
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.
-
-
Memoir or fiction, either way it's enthralling.
- By Keith G on 05-08-19
By: Philippe Besson, and others
-
Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
-
-
Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
By: André Aciman
-
Alibis
- Essays on Elsewhere
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
-
-
Absolutely a favorite
- By Kalindi Bellach on 01-20-23
By: André Aciman
-
Enigma Variations
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Enigma Variations, Aciman maps the most inscrutable corners of passion, proving to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want to offer only what we crave from them.
By: André Aciman
-
Out of Egypt
- A Memoir
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life—Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
-
-
Perfect match
- By Bob on 06-24-23
By: André Aciman
-
The Passenger
- A Novel
- By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, André Aciman
- Narrated by: Philip Boehm, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.
-
-
Top-notch novel
- By R. Klein on 05-31-21
By: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, and others
-
Lie with Me
- A Novel
- By: Philippe Besson, Molly Ringwald - translator
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.
-
-
Memoir or fiction, either way it's enthralling.
- By Keith G on 05-08-19
By: Philippe Besson, and others
-
Alec
- A Novel
- By: William di Canzio
- Narrated by: John Sackville
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec—a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.
-
-
Wonderful continuation of Maurice
- By michaelforrest on 07-25-21
-
No Name in the Street
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
-
-
A strange and terrible vehicle
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-20
By: James Baldwin
-
Killing Commendatore
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 28 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.
-
-
A Masterpiece and A Good Novel To Start
- By Elif Kaya on 10-18-18
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
-
Maurice
- By: E. M. Forster
- Narrated by: Peter Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
'Ah for darkness...not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!' Maurice Hall knows he must choose between living life in the shadows or denying himself a chance at love and fulfilment. Aware of his attraction to the same sex, in a time where it was considered unlawful and immoral to have homosexual desires, Maurice must decide whether to battle or submit to a prejudiced 20th-century English society.
-
-
Finally!!! It's past time!
- By Christopher P. on 11-18-10
By: E. M. Forster
-
The Age of Insight
- The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
- By: Eric R. Kandel
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.
-
-
Worth the listen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-19
By: Eric R. Kandel
-
Swimming in the Dark
- A Novel
- By: Tomasz Jedrowski
- Narrated by: Will Watt
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide - a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.
-
-
One of the Best Contemporary Novels Ever
- By Jeffrey veals on 05-11-20
By: Tomasz Jedrowski
-
Playing the Palace
- By: Paul Rudnick
- Narrated by: Michael Urie
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After having his heart trampled on by his cheating ex, Carter Ogden is afraid love just isn’t in the cards for him. He still holds out hope in a tiny corner of his heart, but even in his wildest dreams he never thought he’d meet the Crown Prince of England, much less do a lot more with him. Yes, growing up he’d fantasized about the handsome, openly gay Prince Edgar, but who hadn’t? When they meet by chance at an event Carter’s boss is organizing, Carter’s sure he imagined all that sizzling chemistry. Or was it mutual?
-
-
LOL Rom com!
- By Bookworm16 on 05-31-21
By: Paul Rudnick
-
The Kingdom of Sand
- A Novel
- By: Andrew Holleran
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Kingdom of Sand features a nameless narrator who has survived the death of his friends to AIDS and the loss of his parents to old age and tragedy. Now he must witness the slow demise of a friend just a shade older than he is. Semi-anonymous sexual encounters, gallows humor, and classic films are his tools for staving off the dying of the light. In prose that’s in turn mordantly funny and hauntingly elegiac, Andrew Holleran takes the listener from a video porn shop off Route 301 to the memory of parties in Washington, DC.
-
-
Bold, hilarious & profound
- By M. Mead on 06-14-23
By: Andrew Holleran
-
Here for It
- Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays
- By: R. Eric Thomas
- Narrated by: R. Eric Thomas
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went - whether it was his rich, mostly White, suburban high school, his conservative Black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city - he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience.
-
-
Love in the Time of Coronavirus, Fabulous edition!
- By MMJetSet on 03-22-20
By: R. Eric Thomas
-
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
-
Pale Fire
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
-
-
An amazing feat for such a unique novel
- By AmazonCustomer on 03-27-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
Critic reviews
PEN Literary Award - Finalist, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2021
Related to this topic
-
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
-
Simple Passion
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
-
-
Pulitzer Prize Winner
- By Kimberly on 10-17-22
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
-
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
-
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
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
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
-
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
-
Simple Passion
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
-
-
Pulitzer Prize Winner
- By Kimberly on 10-17-22
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
-
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
-
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
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
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
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
-
-
Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
-
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
-
Swann's Way
- By: Marcel Proust
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 21 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.
-
-
Not a book one reads but inhabits & floats through
- By Darwin8u on 02-24-13
By: Marcel Proust
-
So Much Longing in So Little Space
- The Art of Edvard Munch
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done.
-
-
not just for Munch fans
- By Alexander on 08-19-24
-
The Book of Disquiet
- By: Fernando Pessoa
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
-
-
The book that saved my life
- By Hutchinson on 03-09-21
By: Fernando Pessoa
-
On Elizabeth Bishop
- By: Colm Tóibín
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this book novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences - the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.
-
-
ELIZABETH BISHOP
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 05-19-16
By: Colm Tóibín
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Eleven Minutes
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox, Derek Jacoby
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chance meeting in Rio takes Maria to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune, yet ends up working the streets as a prostitute. In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness or risking everything to find her own 'inner light'.
-
-
Beautiful Story & A Good Example Of Determination
- By Apollo Butler on 12-14-11
By: Paulo Coelho
-
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
-
The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
-
-
Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
-
Reading Like a Writer
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire listeners to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
-
-
Practical, literate, generous
- By Gare on 04-13-08
By: Francine Prose
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Alibis
- Essays on Elsewhere
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
-
-
Absolutely a favorite
- By Kalindi Bellach on 01-20-23
By: André Aciman
-
Roman Year
- A Memoir
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other.
By: André Aciman
-
The Gentleman from Peru
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been 10 years since a group of college friends made a vow: that the first to get rich would rent a boat and invite the others on a cruise. Now, the friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can’t help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two.
-
-
A beautiful escape . . .
- By Michele on 09-02-20
By: André Aciman
-
Room on the Sea
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Jeff Daniels
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Paul was reading a newspaper. Catherine was reading a novel. So begins Room on the Sea, André Aciman's scorching and elegiac love-story about a middle-aged man and woman who meet in the bullpen of jury selection and spend a sultry summer’s week trespassing ever further into each other's hearts. What begins as a flirtation quickly evolves into something deeper, something Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret - and with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question.
-
-
Captivating!
- By Owen L on 02-01-22
By: André Aciman
-
Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
-
-
Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
By: André Aciman
-
The Novel of Ferrara
- By: Giorgio Bassani, Andre Aciman - foreword, Jamie McKendrick - translated
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 32 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.
-
-
Great books, poorly read
- By Amazon Customer on 10-26-24
By: Giorgio Bassani, and others
-
Alibis
- Essays on Elsewhere
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
-
-
Absolutely a favorite
- By Kalindi Bellach on 01-20-23
By: André Aciman
-
Roman Year
- A Memoir
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other.
By: André Aciman
-
The Gentleman from Peru
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been 10 years since a group of college friends made a vow: that the first to get rich would rent a boat and invite the others on a cruise. Now, the friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can’t help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two.
-
-
A beautiful escape . . .
- By Michele on 09-02-20
By: André Aciman
-
Room on the Sea
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Jeff Daniels
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Paul was reading a newspaper. Catherine was reading a novel. So begins Room on the Sea, André Aciman's scorching and elegiac love-story about a middle-aged man and woman who meet in the bullpen of jury selection and spend a sultry summer’s week trespassing ever further into each other's hearts. What begins as a flirtation quickly evolves into something deeper, something Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret - and with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question.
-
-
Captivating!
- By Owen L on 02-01-22
By: André Aciman
-
Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
-
-
Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
By: André Aciman
-
The Novel of Ferrara
- By: Giorgio Bassani, Andre Aciman - foreword, Jamie McKendrick - translated
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 32 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.
-
-
Great books, poorly read
- By Amazon Customer on 10-26-24
By: Giorgio Bassani, and others
What listeners say about Homo Irrealis
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Cheryl Holtzman
- 04-15-21
True Aciman
Adore this book gets to the heart speaks through the ages of longing for all of us displaced
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
- Gwen
- 04-19-22
Banal
I didn't finish, but started at least each chapter. Self-absorbed, superficial musings. This is not an inspirational, life-affirming journey.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!