-
In Other Words
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 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
From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful nonfiction debut—an “honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story—of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her.
Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for “a trial by fire, a sort of baptism” into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to write—initially in her journal—solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice.
Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.
Read by the Author, in both English and the original Italian
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Roman Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri, Todd Portnowitz - translator
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Carlotta Brentan, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories.
-
-
Loved it!
- By linda on 11-21-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri, and others
-
Translating Myself and Others
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.
-
-
Not just for translators
- By Mariano Desmaras on 07-06-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Lowland
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes.
-
-
My least favorite of all her work.
- By SAK on 10-09-13
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Namesake
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
-
-
My favorite book - in print and audio
- By Diana - Audible on 04-16-12
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Unaccustomed Earth
- Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury, Ajay Naidu
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself.
-
-
Simply Beautiful
- By Eileen on 11-21-08
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Clothing of Books
- An Essay
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".
-
-
Where's the Italian version?
- By Blind Boy on 04-10-18
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Roman Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri, Todd Portnowitz - translator
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Carlotta Brentan, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories.
-
-
Loved it!
- By linda on 11-21-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri, and others
-
Translating Myself and Others
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.
-
-
Not just for translators
- By Mariano Desmaras on 07-06-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Lowland
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes.
-
-
My least favorite of all her work.
- By SAK on 10-09-13
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Namesake
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
-
-
My favorite book - in print and audio
- By Diana - Audible on 04-16-12
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Unaccustomed Earth
- Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury, Ajay Naidu
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself.
-
-
Simply Beautiful
- By Eileen on 11-21-08
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Clothing of Books
- An Essay
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".
-
-
Where's the Italian version?
- By Blind Boy on 04-10-18
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Interpreter of Maladies
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Matilda Novak
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. The nine stories in this stunning debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
-
-
skip it
- By Sheri on 06-30-09
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
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
-
Short Stories in Russian for Beginners
- By: Olly Richards, Alex Rawlings
- Narrated by: Alexander Mercury
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Short Stories in Russian for Beginners has been written especially for students from beginner to intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, a feeling of progress and most importantly - enjoyment! Mapped to A2-B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference, these eight captivating stories are designed to give you a sense of achievement and a feeling of progress when listening. From science fiction to fantasy, to crime and thrillers, Short Stories in Russian for Beginners will make learning Russian easy and enjoyable.
-
-
Great stories for this level
- By Jeffrey L. Smith, PE on 12-06-18
By: Olly Richards, and others
-
Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
-
-
Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
-
Necessary Trouble
- Growing Up at Midcentury
- By: Drew Gilpin Faust
- Narrated by: Drew Gilpin Faust
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival.
-
-
My Life written by Her.
- By Jacqueline L Larner on 09-03-23
-
Lab Girl
- A Memoir
- By: Hope Jahren
- Narrated by: Hope Jahren
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book might have been a revelatory treatise on plant life. Lab Girl is that, but it is also so much more. Because in it, Jahren also shares with us her inspiring life story, in prose that takes your breath away.
-
-
A paradigm-shifting perspective on plant life
- By Elizabeth on 05-20-16
By: Hope Jahren
-
Four Seasons in Rome
- On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Anthony Doerr
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anthony Doerr has received many awards. Then came the Rome Prize, one of the most prestigious awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and with it a stipend and a writing studio in Rome for a year. Doerr learned of the award the day he and his wife returned from the hospital with newborn twins. Exquisitely observed, Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr's varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world.
-
-
Oh my , don't miss this one
- By Molly-o on 02-22-16
By: Anthony Doerr
-
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
-
-
What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others
-
Invisible Man
- A Novel
- By: Ralph Ellison
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching—yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.
-
-
How Did This Escape Me?
- By E. Pearson on 11-23-11
By: Ralph Ellison
-
Anna Karenina
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Length: 35 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.
-
-
Need to Disclose and Highlight Name of Translator
- By Charles B on 08-27-18
By: Leo Tolstoy
-
The Adventure of English
- The Biography of a Language
- By: Melvyn Bragg
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the remarkable story of the English language; from its beginnings as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. The Adventure of English is not only an enthralling story of power, religion, and trade, but also the story of people, and how their lives continue to change the extraordinary language that is English.
-
-
Many Of Course monments
- By Leigh A on 10-21-05
By: Melvyn Bragg
-
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
- Crossing Press Feminist Series, Book 1
- By: Audre Lorde
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in 20th-century literature. In this charged collection of 15 essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
-
-
One of the most important things I have ever listened to.
- By Jayrod on 11-16-16
By: Audre Lorde
Critic reviews
"“Gorgeous . . . the most unusual of self-portraits. It is fitting that Italy, a nation with no unifying language for centuries, should inspire a writer of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stature to organize her reflections around the concept of exile. Why abandon the English language that made her famous, and move with her family to Rome? Because she was in love . . . Dante’s words [about exile] seem relevant when speaking about In Other Words, a book that is everywhere about displacement and the discoveries it can lead to. Lahiri reached out to Italian when English stopped offering her the solitude she craved as a writer; now that she has left Italy we must wait to see where the arrow of exile points her.” —Joseph Luzzi, The New York Times Book Review
“What separates an artist from a creator is one’s insatiable desire to develop his or her craft, one’s perpetual feelings of dissatisfaction and the willingness to embrace challenges, even if that means reinvention. Lahiri’s new book is an expression of just this.” —Nicholas LaRousse, Everyday eBook
“Bold, elegant, poignant. In Other Words artfully and touchingly paints Lahiri’s journey into a new life. Her joy in working with language emanates from every page; the uncomplicated frankness of her voice allows her to cover a satisfyingly wide range of subjects.... In what felt to her like a dangerous leap of faith, she lets her insights stand naked and alone, garbed in neither character nor plot—and all the more beautiful and true for their lovely guilelessness.. . . A pleasure to read.” —Emily Zhao, The Harvard Crimson
Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
Related to this topic
-
Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
-
-
Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
-
Thunder and Lightning
- Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The challenge we face as writers, Natalie Goldberg says, begins with the process of turning inward and then trying to communicate what we find. From the secret of letting characters and stories "write themselves" to finding mentor sources and responding to criticism to writing's one essential ingredient, which is the mind - here are all-new Zen-based lessons and reflections, refined and proven at Natalie's acclaimed national writers' workshops.
-
-
Inspiring
- By StoryDtechtive on 02-11-17
By: Natalie Goldberg
-
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
-
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
-
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
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 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
-
Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
-
-
Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
-
Thunder and Lightning
- Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The challenge we face as writers, Natalie Goldberg says, begins with the process of turning inward and then trying to communicate what we find. From the secret of letting characters and stories "write themselves" to finding mentor sources and responding to criticism to writing's one essential ingredient, which is the mind - here are all-new Zen-based lessons and reflections, refined and proven at Natalie's acclaimed national writers' workshops.
-
-
Inspiring
- By StoryDtechtive on 02-11-17
By: Natalie Goldberg
-
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
-
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
-
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
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 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
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
-
-
An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
-
Writing Down the Bones
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is a new collector's edition of this modern classic as you have never heard it before, read by Natalie Goldberg herself and then infused with her most personal reflections about this "magic manual" for all writers. Try these ingenious, Zen-based exercises to expand your writing skills - or just for fun.
-
-
The Substance
- By Krissy D. on 07-09-10
By: Natalie Goldberg
-
The Grammar of God
- A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
- By: Aviya Kushner
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this eye-opening chronicle, Kushner tells the story of her vibrant relationship to the Bible and along the way illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture's most important written work.
-
-
a sobering read
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-17
By: Aviya Kushner
-
How Proust Can Change Your Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
-
-
A nice petite primer on Proust
- By Darwin8u on 02-20-13
By: Alain de Botton
-
How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
-
-
Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
-
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
-
Process
- The Writing Lives of Great Authors
- By: Sarah Stodola
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace, and more. In Process, acclaimed journalist Sarah Stodola examines the creative methods of literature's most transformative figures. Each chapter contains a mini biography of one of the world's most lauded authors, focused solely on his or her writing process.
-
-
Excellent!
- By Davina Rush on 04-10-15
By: Sarah Stodola
-
Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
-
-
Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
-
Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
-
-
A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
-
Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
-
-
#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
-
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
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Unaccustomed Earth
- Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury, Ajay Naidu
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself.
-
-
Simply Beautiful
- By Eileen on 11-21-08
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Whereabouts
- A Novel
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Susan Vinciotti Bonito
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
-
-
Gorgeous melancholy reflections
- By BenYL on 06-15-21
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Roman Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri, Todd Portnowitz - translator
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Carlotta Brentan, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories.
-
-
Loved it!
- By linda on 11-21-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri, and others
-
Interpreter of Maladies
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Matilda Novak
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. The nine stories in this stunning debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
-
-
skip it
- By Sheri on 06-30-09
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Translating Myself and Others
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.
-
-
Not just for translators
- By Mariano Desmaras on 07-06-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Lowland
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes.
-
-
My least favorite of all her work.
- By SAK on 10-09-13
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Unaccustomed Earth
- Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury, Ajay Naidu
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand. In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he's harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he's keeping all to himself.
-
-
Simply Beautiful
- By Eileen on 11-21-08
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Whereabouts
- A Novel
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Susan Vinciotti Bonito
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone.
-
-
Gorgeous melancholy reflections
- By BenYL on 06-15-21
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Roman Stories
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri, Todd Portnowitz - translator
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Carlotta Brentan, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories.
-
-
Loved it!
- By linda on 11-21-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri, and others
-
Interpreter of Maladies
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Matilda Novak
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. The nine stories in this stunning debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.
-
-
skip it
- By Sheri on 06-30-09
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Translating Myself and Others
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.
-
-
Not just for translators
- By Mariano Desmaras on 07-06-23
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Lowland
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes.
-
-
My least favorite of all her work.
- By SAK on 10-09-13
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
The Namesake
- By: Jhumpa Lahiri
- Narrated by: Sarita Choudhury
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
-
-
My favorite book - in print and audio
- By Diana - Audible on 04-16-12
By: Jhumpa Lahiri
-
Lab Girl
- A Memoir
- By: Hope Jahren
- Narrated by: Hope Jahren
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book might have been a revelatory treatise on plant life. Lab Girl is that, but it is also so much more. Because in it, Jahren also shares with us her inspiring life story, in prose that takes your breath away.
-
-
A paradigm-shifting perspective on plant life
- By Elizabeth on 05-20-16
By: Hope Jahren
-
101 Conversations in Simple Italian (Italian Edition)
- Short Natural Dialogues to Boost Your Confidence & Improve Your Spoken Italian
- By: Olly Richards
- Narrated by: David McNeill, Marco Soldà
- Length: 2 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Real Italian people don’t speak like your textbook…so it’s no wonder you feel unprepared when it’s your turn to speak! Try the StoryLearning method, and dive into a real-world, gripping drama between six characters that helps you learn authentic spoken Italian in the process.
-
-
Wonderful
- By Fredrick Arnstein on 02-07-21
By: Olly Richards
-
The Forest of Enchantments
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Ramayana, one of the world's greatest epics, is also a tragic love story. In this brilliant retelling, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni places Sita at the center of the novel: This is Sita's version. The Forest of Enchantments is also a very human story of some of the other women in the epic, often misunderstood and relegated to the margins: Kaikeyi, Surpanakha, Mandodari.
-
-
10 Stars for Greatness
- By Dani M. on 04-21-21
-
The Betrothed
- A Novel
- By: Alessandro Manzoni, Michael F. Moore - translator, Jhumpa Lahiri - afterword
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos, Susan Vinciotti Bonito
- Length: 22 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Betrothed is a cornerstone of Italian culture, language, and literature. Published in its final form in 1842, The Betrothed has inspired generations of Italian readers and writers. Giuseppe Verdi composed his majestic Requiem Mass in honor of Manzoni. Italo Calvino called the novel “a classic that has never ceased shaping reality in Italy” while Umberto Eco praised its author as a “most subtle critic and analyst of languages.”
-
-
How to ruin a masterpiece
- By McMurrab on 10-31-22
By: Alessandro Manzoni, and others
-
Learn Italian While Sleeping
- 20+ Hours: Learn Conversational Italian in Your Car or While You Sleep. Includes Common Phrases, Dialogues for Beginners and Conversations with Vocabulary!
- By: The Language Lab
- Narrated by: Intensive Learning Studio
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italy is a captivating country that has gifted the world with its rich history, the grandeur of the Roman Empire, the heart of the Christian faith, breathtaking cities, and enchanting coastlines. And let's not forget the countless varieties of pasta! To truly immerse yourself in this amazing nation, speaking the language is essential. Introducing "Learn Italian While Sleeping" by The Language Lab, the revolutionary audiobook that will transform your language learning experience effortlessly.
-
-
Fluent Mind, Fluent Tongue
- By Kim Vicki on 08-23-23
By: The Language Lab
-
Next Steps in Italian with Paul Noble for Intermediate Learners – Complete Course
- Italian Made Easy with Your Personal Language Coach
- By: Paul Noble
- Narrated by: Paul Noble
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Improve your Italian the easy way at home, now is the time to take your Italian to the next level! No books. No long lists of vocabulary. No chance of failure. Simply download, plug in and listen. Paul Noble’s tried and tested language learning method has been used independently by more than a million people to speak fluently and confidently.
-
-
Straight to the meat and potatoes
- By Naa on 10-28-19
By: Paul Noble
-
Il cuore delle parole
- Etimologie curiose e altre meraviglie della lingua italiana in 370 quiz
- By: Giorgio Moretti
- Narrated by: Giorgio Moretti
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Siamo proprio sicuri di sapere cosa sia un avocado? Dobbiamo offenderci quando in una discussione tra amici ci danno dei filistei? E cosa c’entra il pittore Vittore Carpaccio con il gustosissimo piatto a base di fettine di vitello crudo? Nel libro che hai tra le mani troverai la risposta a queste e alle altre – tantissime – domande che sorgono spontanee ogni volta che hai avuto l’impressione di perdere la bussola nel bosco incantato della lingua italiana.
By: Giorgio Moretti
-
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
-
Cloud Atlas
- A Novel
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite.... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter....
-
-
thoroughly enjoyed
- By Elizabeth on 01-05-08
By: David Mitchell
-
The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
- By: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Coleman Barks - translator, John Moyne - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of listeners, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi more popular than ever.
-
-
Disappointed
- By G. Vidal on 04-09-20
By: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, and others
-
Just Kids
- By: Patti Smith
- Narrated by: Patti Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
-
-
Darkly Self Centered & Narrow View
- By Sara on 10-05-15
By: Patti Smith
What listeners say about In Other Words
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Blind Boy
- 02-20-16
Confessioni d'amore a una lingua
Caspita! La mia scrittrice Americana prediletta diventò un’ autrice tutta Italiana! Non ne sapevo un bel nulla di questo suo lato segreto, la mia sorpresa è così ancora più grande. Eppoi questo testo è inpeccabile, tutto lei.
Per me questa narrativa sa del Secondo Dopoguerra, Morante, Ginzburg, Silone, magari Pavese o Primo Levi. Antiquata in un senso positivissimo, una prosa profondamente radicata nelle tradizioni letterarie novecentesche. Be’, mai dei predecessori migliori!
Tale cambiamento linguistico è ben raro nella letteratura. Mi viene in mente “L’analfabeta” di Ágota Kristóf, ma il suo è un resoconto assai scarno rispetto a questo saggio serio. Ognuno che riflette sulla lingua, su qualsiasi lingua, deve leggere „In altre parole”. Spero non ci vuole sottolineare tale obbligo di pensare spesso alle lingue, all’identità.
Certamente, questa mi è subito diventata un’opera arciimportante, stracolma di idee e contenuto molto compatti. Quanto alla versione sonora, per me è decisamente il libro audio dell’anno 2016.
Penso alle mie lotte diurne con l’Inglese e non vorrei aggiungere molto alla pronuncia della signora Lahiri. Dimenticavo per interi minuti che ella non è italofona, e questo non è poco. Una cosa però deve comprendere: senza l’uso corretto (e frequente) del raddoppiamento consonantico il flusso del discorso non sarà mai completamente autentico. Penso una seconda lettura avrebbe anche portata dei risultati migliori. Comunque sia, l’autrice ci offre un’esperienza del tutto gradevole.
Raccomando i lettori bilingui ascoltino ambedue le registrazioni. La traduzione Inglese del testo originale dà effetti sorprendenti, ci mette qualcosa di più, qualcosa di diverso. Tutto sommato lo considero un capolavoro e lo riascolterò varie volte di sicuro.
Penso a Giumpa con calore. Penso in un certoqualmodo sia arrivata a casa. Benvenuta in Italia, benvenuta nell’Italiano!
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
- A. Potter
- 02-12-16
Beautiful meditation on language and art
As a journalist who has studied a foreign language, lived abroad, and spent considerable time in Italy, I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's exploration of the themes of exile and finding a new voice in her writing through another language (in her case, a third). This slim volume, translated from her new-found Italian to English, her language of core competency, reflects the often staccato style of a foreign speaker, which felt repetitive at first. That's forgivable, because Lahiri makes you co-pilot on her journey to navigate her way through this new, more romantic language, one that makes her feel more at home and creative, but one in which, to her own admission, she still struggles. What I missed from this book was more of her story (she moves her family to a new country and rarely discusses those struggles or sacrifices). I also craved more details of her new surroundings, the gorgeous city of Rome, which she leaves mostly to the reader's imagination. This book, which seems to be part journal, is almost more of a lengthy essay fit for a literary magazine than a book-length memoir. I was shocked when, three hours into my listening, the book ended. For the remaining three and a half hours, she reads the same book in Italian (a beautiful Italian, but still Italian)!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
8 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Iris Pereyra
- 02-16-16
Language As A Lover
When I first heard that Jhumpa Lahiri had chosen to put her writing career on hold in order to pursue her long-term passion for the Italian language, my initial reaction was similar to the one many sports fans had when Michael Jordan decided to come out of retirement to follow his dream of becoming a professional baseball player, namely admiration, perplexity and a little bit of curiosity.
Why would a wildly successful author, Pulitzer Prize/Pen Award winner, awarded with the 2014 National Humanities Medal, take such a leap of faith?
The answers to this question are complex and profound and after reading this short but very poignant memoir, my sense is that Lahiri herself doesn't necessarily have definite answers.
Written in Italian, "In Other Words" include a few fictional stories, which Lahiri acknowledges were based on her own experiences during the two years she and her family lived in Italy on what she calls her "linguistic pilgrimage".
I am not sure that the author would be able to replicate her success in her new adopted language, so far it seems to me that is a work in progress.
Self-doubt, the search of identity and a foreboding sense of understanding many cultures but not completely fitting or belonging to any of them, is at the center of this short memoir.
On a personal level, I felt a deep sense of connection and empathy with the author and how aptly she describes the sense of wonder one can experience when learning a new language, a process that can be rewarding and enlightening, but also intellectually exhausting.
I felt that Lahiri so accurately described my own experience while reading in a second language - in my case English - when she asserts:
"I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading".
Lahiri's account of her quest to master the Italian language struck me at times as a little bit self-serving and redundant, but as a whole I truly enjoyed this introspective, thoughtful meditation on the central role language plays in our lives and most importantly in the lives of writers.
At this point in her life, she sounds to me like a writer in transition, a woman looking for answers who can't stand still because she is trying to figure out the next chapter in her writing career.
Although Lahiri's narration felt a bit flat and I thought it lacked intensity on her delivery, I've come to appreciate memoirs read by the authors because ultimately they are better at expressing their own words.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- GothamReader
- 10-05-16
Excellent writing but terrible narration
Every part of me wants to give this at least 4 stars for the writing. Sigh. The narration was so monotonous and inspirited. I hope they consider a rerecord.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jean
- 02-18-16
A Lexical love affair
Jhumpa Lahiri won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for “Interpreter of Maladies”. She has won many literary awards over the years. This is her first non-fiction book. I was interested in reading this because the advertising blub said it was about her struggle to learn a new language. I have been struggling to learn Spanish so I thought I might learn something about learning another language from Lahiri. This book will interest those readers who are interested in learning another language and are interested in the writing process.
Lahiri’s essay goes into her relationship with language and of her identity of always feeling like an outsider or foreigner. She was born in England of Bengali immigrants. She moved to the United States as a small child and was raised speaking primarily English; the family spoke Bengali at home. She tells of learning Latin in school and then as an adult learning Italian. She said she fell in love with Italian and felt it much more of an expressive language than English. She moved to Italy to totally immerse herself in the language.
Lahiri goes into great detail about the work of writing and language. I learned about what the author goes through trying to find just the right word to express the exact meaning intended. I also learned some techniques to help me in my attempt to learn Spanish. I thought it was interesting that speaking Bengali helped Lahiri with the pronunciation of Italian words; apparently she speaks almost accent free which would not be the case if she went from English only to Italian. The author revealed much about herself and love of lexicology and the inner drive to write.
The book is beautifully written; I read the audiobook version from Audible and think this is the best way to read the book because of all the Italian words. The book is divided in half: the first part in English the second half is the original Italian version of the book. Lahiri had a translator Ann Goldstein translate the book from Italian to English as she was afraid she might try to rewrite the book in English. Jhumpa Lahiri narrated the book herself.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Suzanne
- 02-24-16
I wish I spoke Italian
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Granted, I didn't read the whole description of the audiobook before purchase, but I was expecting a 7 hour book that I could fully understand. If I am ever lucky enough to learn Italian I will be able to return to the second part of this production. Jhumpa Lahiri's efforts to take the leap and write in a 2nd (3rd?) language are admirable.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- RdRydngHd
- 02-28-16
For me, 1 problem with the book, and 1 1/2 problems with the audio version
I love Rome, the Italian language, and accounts of personal journeys, and I am happy for Ms. Lahiri's great success. But while I found her very personal reasons for this undertaking--her initial great success in English, her primary language--interesting, I thought that expecting this book to be of wider interest was a lot to ask. (Also, I found her ongoing gripes about people's surprise at what language she was speaking and how well she was speaking it to be tedious and self-absorbed, but maybe that's just me… ) And having her Italian translated back into English by someone else was just weird.
Her section on Daphne and Apollo and metamorphosis was brilliant, though. Stunning really.
Regarding the audio version, while the narrator's Italian was excellent, I found her reading voice to be a bit difficult to listen to, a little monotonous and strained. But my biggest quibble is with the audio book's form, though there was probably no other solution: having the first half of the book be in English, and the second half of the book be in Italian. In the print copy, I believe, the Italian and English versions are on facing pages, separated paragraph by paragraph so the reader can compare them. That is not possible with the audio version.
Still, I am glad the audio version exists, and I wish the gifted writer continued great success. But I found this particular book to o be something of a disappointment.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
7 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jarl B. Johnsson
- 06-05-16
She shouldn't have written this book
I could not finish it as one can perceive that it is written in a language foreign to the writer. Short sentences for beginners. I love her books in English, well interpreted with the Indian accent. But this book has no story and it is written as I would write a book in French or German.
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
-
Performance
-
Story
- MICHELLE P
- 11-23-20
Not at all interesting, just drones on
I don’t know, maybe it’s the delivery or the story itself - it seems whiney. And just drones on in a “woe is me and my inability to connect with a language or a culture that I’m not a part of but so longingly cling to.” I’m a huge fan of Ms. Lahiri’s works, so it makes me sad that this one is just awful.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Murlidhar Jutti
- 05-26-23
In other words review
More than 50% of the book is narrated in Italian; so for English readers like me it was a big disappointment. Even though I am a great fan of her writing, this book seriously disappointed me big time. I am not interested in what people think of me as an italian writer being a south asian.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!