Life Stories
Profiles from The New Yorker
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Narrated by:
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Philip Bosco
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Amy Irving
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Alton Fitzgerald White
About this listen
When they were first published, these biographies brought insight, amusement, understanding, and often, joy or sorrow to those who read them. Gathered here, in Life Stories, they provide an album of our era, a rich and diverse appraisal of some of the most prominent members of an entire century's cast.
A Pryor Love (Richard Pryor), by Hilton Als
A Duke in His Domain (Marlon Brando), by Truman Capote
Isadora (Isadora Duncan), by Janet Flanner
Lady with a Pencil (Katharine White), by Nancy Franklin
Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (Heloise), by Ian Frazier
The Coolhunt (Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon), by Michael Gladwell
Wunderkind (Floyd Patterson), by A.J. Liebling
Mr. Hunter's Grave (George H. Hunter), by Joseph Mitchell
Show Dog (Biff Truesdale), by Susan Orlean
How Do You Like it Now, Gentlemen? (Ernest Hemingway), by Lillian Ross
The Man Who Walks on Air (Philippe Petit), by Calvin Tomkins
Covering the Cops (Edna Buchanan), by Calvin Trillin
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Flesh Wounds
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- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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You Might Remember Me
- The Life and Times of Phil Hartman
- By: Mike Thomas
- Narrated by: Corey Snow
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Both joyous tribute and serious biography, Mike Thomas' You Might Remember Me is a celebration of Phil Hartman's multi-faceted career and an exhaustively reported, warts-and-all examination of his often intriguing and sometimes complicated life - a powerful, humor-filled and disquieting portrait of a man who was loved by many, admired by millions and taken from them far too early.
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I Will Remember You Phil Hartman
- By Roxanna on 12-19-14
By: Mike Thomas
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Street Gang
- The Complete History of Sesame Street
- By: Michael Davis
- Narrated by: Caroll Spinney
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Abridged
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When the first episode aired on Nov. 10, 1969, Sesame Street revolutionized the way education was presented to children on television. It has since become the longest-running children's show in history, and today reaches 8 million pre-schoolers on 350 PBS stations and airs in 120 countries. Street Gang is the compelling and often comical story of the creation and history of this media masterpiece and pop culture landmark.
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An important subject, but hardly gripping
- By Scott T. Hards on 09-24-10
By: Michael Davis
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Dropped Names
- Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them
- By: Frank Langella
- Narrated by: Frank Langella
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad encounters with some of the past century's most famous human beings are profoundly affecting, funny, wicked, sometimes shocking, and utterly irresistible. With sharp wit and a perceptive eye, Mr. Langella takes us with him into the private worlds and privileged lives of movie stars, presidents, royalty, literary lions, the social elite, and the greats of the Broadway stage.
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Delightful
- By Kathy on 04-03-12
By: Frank Langella
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Over Time
- My Life as a Sportswriter
- By: Frank Deford
- Narrated by: Frank Deford
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter is as unconventional and wide-ranging as Frank Deford's remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, fresh, and fresh out of Princeton. In 1990, he was Editor-in-Chief of The National Sports Daily, one of the most ambitious and ill-fated projects in the history of American print journalism.
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Memories
- By Amazon Customer on 05-18-18
By: Frank Deford
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What's So Funny?
- My Hilarious Life
- By: Tim Conway, Jane Scovell, Carol Burnett - foreword
- Narrated by: Tim Conway, Carol Burnett, Dick Hill, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Six-time Emmy Award-winning funnyman Tim Conway, best known for his characters on The Carol Burnett Show, offers a straight-shooting and hilarious memoir about his life on stage and off as an actor and comedian. In television history, few entertainers have captured as many hearts and made as many people laugh as Tim Conway. There's nothing in the world that Tim Conway would rather do than entertain - and in his first-ever memoir, What's So Funny?, that's exactly what he does.
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Not narrated by Tim
- By Bob Murdock on 05-05-14
By: Tim Conway, and others
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John Lennon
- The Life
- By: Philip Norman
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Abridged
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Philip Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the definitive portrait of John Lennon. This biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint.
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Really Bad Abridgement Job (slash job)
- By Let's Be Reasonable on 12-04-08
By: Philip Norman
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Everybody Thought We Were Crazy
- Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
- By: Mark Rozzo
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple—Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—lived out the emblematic love story of ’60s L.A.
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Wonderful!
- By Rob on 06-07-22
By: Mark Rozzo
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- By: Truman Capote, Hilton Als - foreword
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Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and In Cold Blood. This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capote developing the unique voice and sensibility that would make him one of the twentieth century’s most original writers.
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Wonderful Town
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New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the 75-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of 44 of its best stories from (so to speak) home.
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Great stories and readers, but technically sloppy
- By Alison on 09-08-04
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker
- 1925-2025
- By: New Yorker Magazine Inc, Deborah Treisman - editor
- Length: 23 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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There is simply no A-Z like the alphabet of fiction writers who have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the last hundred years. The book boasts inarguable classics like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” alongside stunners to be rediscovered. Some stories defined a moment or a now-lost world (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria”); others showed us a whole new way fiction could sound and feel (“The Red Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid).
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Summer Crossing
- A Novel
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
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In late 2004, a trove of Truman Capote's abandoned papers went up for auction at Sotheby's. Included in the lot was the handwritten manuscript of Summer Crossing, a novel Capote began writing in 1943, and continued to tinker with on and off for a decade. Since the time of his death in 1984, Capote scholars and biographers had long believed this manuscript lost, never to be recovered. They were wrong.
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Summer doldrums
- By Marjorie on 02-11-06
By: Truman Capote
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Answered Prayers
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 3 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.
By: Truman Capote
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The Early Stories of Truman Capote
- By: Truman Capote, Hilton Als - foreword
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Nancy Linari, Sarah Scott
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Stories From A Young Capote
- By Sara on 04-29-16
By: Truman Capote, and others
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Wonderful Town
- New York Stories from The New Yorker
- By: Woody Allen, John Cheever, E. B. White, and others
- Narrated by: Tyne Daly, Timothy Jerome, Joe Morton, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the 75-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of 44 of its best stories from (so to speak) home.
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Great stories and readers, but technically sloppy
- By Alison on 09-08-04
By: Woody Allen, and others
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker
- 1925-2025
- By: New Yorker Magazine Inc, Deborah Treisman - editor
- Length: 23 hrs
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There is simply no A-Z like the alphabet of fiction writers who have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the last hundred years. The book boasts inarguable classics like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” alongside stunners to be rediscovered. Some stories defined a moment or a now-lost world (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria”); others showed us a whole new way fiction could sound and feel (“The Red Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid).
By: New Yorker Magazine Inc, and others
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Summer Crossing
- A Novel
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In late 2004, a trove of Truman Capote's abandoned papers went up for auction at Sotheby's. Included in the lot was the handwritten manuscript of Summer Crossing, a novel Capote began writing in 1943, and continued to tinker with on and off for a decade. Since the time of his death in 1984, Capote scholars and biographers had long believed this manuscript lost, never to be recovered. They were wrong.
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-
Summer doldrums
- By Marjorie on 02-11-06
By: Truman Capote
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Answered Prayers
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 3 hrs
- Unabridged
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Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.
By: Truman Capote
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Secret Ingredients
- The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
- By: David Remnick
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Mark Deakens, Susan Denaker, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker: literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink.
By: David Remnick
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Michael C. Hall
- Length: 2 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.
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"Better to look at the sky than live there"
- By W Perry Hall on 02-12-14
By: Truman Capote
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Cast of Characters
- Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker
- By: Thomas Vinciguerra
- Narrated by: Tony Pasqualini
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country's most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine's cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, and brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine.
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But...Where's Dorothy Parker
- By Constant Reader on 06-05-18
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The Grass Harp
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, The Grass Harp tells the story of three endearing misfits - an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies - who one day take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, “that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”
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Fake southern accent all wrong
- By small biz owner on 02-08-19
By: Truman Capote
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Fierce Pajamas
- Selected Humor Writing from The New Yorker
- By: David Remnick, Henry Finder, editors
- Narrated by: Byron Jennings, Julie Halston
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Abridged
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When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.
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great, but niche
- By Sue on 02-21-06
By: David Remnick, and others
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In Cold Blood
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
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Still the Best
- By Lisa on 01-10-06
By: Truman Capote
What listeners say about Life Stories
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Stella Macy
- 02-16-05
Life Stories
This audiobook is pure gold - a broad myriad of profiles, colorfully written and perfectly read by performers, such as Amy Irving, whose voices enhance rather than invade the writing. I had read some of these excellent profiles in the New Yorker, but this format gave them new life. This is a highly entertaining and intelligent series. I'm only sad that I've not yet found second installment of Life Stories in audiobook, though I'm still searching.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Donald Frankenfeld
- 05-24-06
Abridged after all
These profiles are so extraordinary that I searched the Internet for others, and discovered the table of contents for this book. Having ordered from Audible an "unabridged" book, I was astonished to find that the Audible version omits about half the content of the print edition. Even at half its advertised length, the Audible version is a gem and well worth it.
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14 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Jody R. Nathan
- 08-25-04
Exceptional writing makes this a fascinating read
I have to admit that the Truman Capote story on Marlon Brando was a bit disappointing. But the rest, oh my! What a wonderful book of stories; it starts with Lillian Ross on Earnest Hemingway; then goes to Katherine White, one of the founding editors of the New Yorker; then goes on to profile boxers, "cool finders", a tightrope walker; Heloise (from Hints from Heloise); Edna Buchanan (Miami crime beat reporter); Isadora Duncan, and even a champion show dog. My two favorites were Mr. Hunter's Grave by Joseph Mitchell and A Pryor Love (about Richard Pryor) by Hilton Als. Mr. Hunter's Grave was not really about a person so much as about a small town on Staten Island; I know, I don't make it sound like much, but really, I hated to have it end. The story on Richard Pryor was insightful -- it showed the flaws in the man with such compassion and with enough understanding of Mr. Pryor's past to show how it all worked together first to make him into a celebrity, and then brought him down again.
The narration on all the stories is good, but it is the writing that really makes this book stand out. It is the sort of writing that transports you from where ever you are into the world being profiled. You come away wanting to know more about the people discussed, and feeling like you may have met some new friends. 10 hours is not enough for this book; I hope they will put out the unabridged edition. I will go back and listen to these stories again.
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28 people found this helpful