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Italian Folktales
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 28 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists. Introduction by the author. Translated by George Martin. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.
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These 4 stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "The Black Wedding."
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Incredible narration
- By Frances on 01-10-19
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The King of Ireland's Son
- By: Padraic Colum
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated Irish author Padraic Colum dazzled audiences with his retellings of old Gaelic myths. In The King of Ireland's Son, he imbues seven favorite tales from the Emerald Isle with sly humor, whimsy, and imagination.
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👍🏾❣❤️💛💚💙💜💓💞💝💕💘💖💗💟
- By GRamsey-Ray on 08-10-16
By: Padraic Colum
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Andersen's Fairy Tales (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Hans Christian Andersen
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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Uniting universal themes with a wonderfully personal vision of the world, Hans Christian Andersen found magic in the landscape of childhood. His talking animals and living toys shine a sparkling light on the strange wisdom of innocence and the deceptive nature of adulthood. These stories have now been adapted into countless classic films (including The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, and Frozen - which was based on “The Snow Queen”) and have become part of our everyday speech, such as when we talk about “ugly ducklings” and “the emperor’s new clothes.”
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relaxing bed time book
- By Ryan on 09-27-21
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Catherine, Called Birdy
- By: Karen Cushman
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1290, her 14th year, Catherine begins a diary that quickly fills with the irrepressible joys and frustrations of her days. Always looking for ways to avoid drudging hours of embroidery, Birdy fills her time with pranks, celebrations of feast days, and local gossip. Wriggling out of her father's plans to find a prosperous husband for her proves to be Birdy's greatest challenge.
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Corpus bones! What a great heroine.
- By Hilary on 08-30-12
By: Karen Cushman
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The Ickabog
- By: J.K. Rowling
- Narrated by: Stephen Fry
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The kingdom of Cornucopia was once the happiest in the world. It had plenty of gold, a king with the finest moustache you could possibly imagine, and butchers, bakers, and cheesemongers whose exquisite foods made a person dance with delight when they ate them. Everything was perfect - except for the misty Marshlands to the north, which, according to legend, were home to the monstrous Ickabog. Anyone sensible knew that the Ickabog was just a myth to scare children into behaving. But the funny thing about myths is that sometimes they take on a life of their own.
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Oh, dear...
- By ili pika on 11-11-20
By: J.K. Rowling
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Andersen's Fairy Tales, Volume 1
- By: Hans Christian Andersen
- Narrated by: Emma Fenney, Phil Gigante, Erin Yuen
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness. Readily accessible by children, they present lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity that appeal to mature listeners as well. This collection of 18 tales includes "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Princess and the Pea", and "The Snow Queen".
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Tales from the Hinterland
- The Hazel Wood
- By: Melissa Albert
- Narrated by: Rebecca Soler
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.
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Does not disappoint
- By Harley Easton on 02-22-21
By: Melissa Albert
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A Vision of Light
- A Margaret of Ashbury Novel, Book 1
- By: Judith Merkle Riley
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Margaret of Ashbury wants to write her life story. However, like most women in 14th-century England, she is illiterate. Three clerics contemptuously decline to be Margaret’s scribe, and only the threat of starvation persuades Brother Gregory, a Carthusian friar with a mysterious past, to take on the task. As she narrates her life, we discover a woman of startling resourcefulness.
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Old fashioned heroine
- By Margaret on 06-22-13
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
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Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
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Mr. Palomar
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Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
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This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
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Numbers in the Dark
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Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
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Marcovaldo
- or The Seasons in the City (Translated by William Weaver)
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- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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- Unabridged
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Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
- By Drew on 12-17-17
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Invisible Cities
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- Narrated by: Richard Higgins
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- Unabridged
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In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
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Such a wonderful book ruined by terrible narration
- By anonymous on 08-18-23
By: Italo Calvino
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Under the Jaguar Sun
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- Unabridged
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.
By: Italo Calvino
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Into the War
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- Unabridged
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These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.
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The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe
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Magic and myth inhabit these chapters in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. These stories, set in Norway's majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate. All are rendered in the deceptively simple narrative style perfected by Asbjørnsen and Moe.
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I love these stories!
- By Taylor on 12-26-21
By: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, and others
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Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland
- By: Lisa Schneidau
- Narrated by: Joan Walker
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- Unabridged
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The islands of Britain and Ireland hold a rich heritage of plant folklore and wisdom, from the magical yew tree to the bad-tempered dandelion. Here are traditional tales about the trees and plants that shape our landscapes and our lives through the seasons. They explore the complex relationship between people and plants, in lowlands and uplands, fields, bogs, moors, woodlands and towns.
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Wee Folk, Giants and Witches. Oh, My!
- By Amazon Customer on 07-14-21
By: Lisa Schneidau
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The Path to the Spider's Nests
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Italo Calvino was only 23 when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of these characters, seen through the eyes of a child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance but an insightful coming-of-age story.
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How unique to use a child’s viewpoint of war.
- By BBWrighter on 07-17-24
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Household Tales
- By: The Brothers Grimm
- Narrated by: Kelly Lintz
- Length: 26 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of German fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the famous Brothers Grimm. Their most famous tales are instantly recognizeable: "Rumpelstiltskin", "Snow White", "Rapunzel", "Cinderella", "Hansel and Gretel", and "The Frog Prince." The collection is often known today as "Grimms' Fairy Tales".
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Wonderfully read, but most tales not for kids
- By 208 Garner on 08-06-12
What listeners say about Italian Folktales
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Diogenes
- 01-16-22
entertaining and eclectic
If you are interested in a different take on the traditional fairy formula, the unique perspectives of these stories are at once familiar, dealing with magical beings, unlikely heroes, and virtue rewarded, but also contain elements not found in Grimm, such as shotguns. Well-read and satisfyingly long. One of my best loved anthologies.
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3 people found this helpful
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- TR701
- 03-10-22
Tedious after awhile
These folktales were good, some better than others. There were a lot with very similar story lines so listening to them became tedious. It would have been nice to have print copy in order to mark the ones I especially liked. I appreciated hearing what part of Italy each folktale came from
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2 people found this helpful
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- Goldie
- 03-21-22
great for sleep
Inflection and volume are consistent, have not woken up to yelling out loud sounds yet. Stories are authentic so involved some gore as all folk tales do. I love this book, am very picky, and couldn’t be happier.
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6 people found this helpful
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- FranceyO
- 04-14-21
Love LOVE Love!!!!
Such a disarmingly wonderful, quirky, amusing spin on “fairy” tales—delivered by the perfect narrator. Magical!!!
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2 people found this helpful
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- John
- 06-12-20
At Last: Unbridled Delight
“For years I have been hoping someone would record Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. That hasn’t happened yet, but this is just as good. Maybe even better.” -Me, 2017
I was talking about Giambattista Basile's Tale of Tales. And while those stories, told in a vigorous, verbally inventive 17th Century manner that is half charming, half scatological, offer a far more vivid experience than these somewhat restrained retellings I pined, nevertheless, for Calvino's masterpiece as well.
I read these stories out loud while drinking at college, to our kids when they were young, and have been waiting for an audiobook version since there were such things as audiobooks. For while they may lack the linguistic gymnastics of The Tale of Tales, they possess all the charm and odd, take-the-incredible-in-your-stride quality of those stories: the king who lives just across the street, the ogre who lives next door, the old woman by the side of the road who happens to be a fairy, the prince who will turn into a dragon the moment he turns 20, the innkeeper who's in charge of all the animals of earth (with, of course, two brothers who oversee, respectively, all the world’s fish and all the world’s birds).
And as if that wasn’t enough, Edoardo Ballerini reads these stories just like I used to read them to our kids. Only much better.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Maker of Images
- 02-14-24
I loved these stories
What a great collection of stories some of them incredibly inventive. Worth listening to, all 29 hours worth!
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- Brett Dewing
- 03-07-24
I’m so sad it’s over…
Somehow, 200 Italian folktales did not satiate me. It brought forth fascinating questions about the purpose of folktales, the way they cross-pollinate, and the nature of the human imagination. And I always think this narrator fits Calvino like an Italian leather glove.
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