Metamorphoses
Penguin Classics
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Narrated by:
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Martin Jarvis
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John Sackville
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Maya Saroya
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David Raeburn
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by award-winning voice actor Martin Jarvis OBE, as well as John Sackville, Maya Saroya and the translator of this edition, David Raeburn. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Denis Feeney.
Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic yet playful, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.
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The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed".
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A breath of fresh air!
- By Michael on 02-19-14
By: Denis Dutton
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Confronting the Classics
- Traditions, Adventures and Innovations
- By: Mary Beard
- Narrated by: Lynne Jenson
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the world's leading historians provides a revolutionary tour of the Ancient World, dusting off the classics for the twenty-first century. Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people - the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women.
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Annoying narrator
- By Chris E on 02-27-15
By: Mary Beard
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
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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.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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The Art of Language Invention
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- Narrated by: David J. Peterson
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From master language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers. Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien's creations and Klingon to today's thriving global community of conlangers.
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Great resource, but not conducive to audiobook
- By Ashley T. on 04-18-16
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The Pun Also Rises
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
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By: John Pollack
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The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali
- A Biography
- By: David Gordon White
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
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Consisting of fewer than 200 verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status.
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Academic Hubris
- By John on 10-31-14
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The Art of Fiction
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Ayn Rand discusses how a writer combines abstract ideas with concrete action and description to achieve a unity of theme, plot, characterization, and style, the four essential elements of fiction. Here, too, are Rand's illuminating analyses of passages from famous writers, rewrites of scenes from her own works, and fascinating rules for building dramatic plots and characters with depth.
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Get Stein on Writing
- By Lois on 12-04-09
By: Ayn Rand
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis
- Exploring the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life
- By: Alister McGrath
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
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Have you ever wondered…whether God exists? whether life has meaning? Whether pain and suffering have a purpose? This audiobook is my invitation to sit down with C. S. Lewis and me to think about some of the persistent questions and dilemmas every person faces in life. We’ll explore Lewis’s thoughts on everything from friendships to heaven, from the reasons for faith to the power of stories.
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A great overview
- By Kevin on 12-31-14
By: Alister McGrath
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Good but the chapters aren't IN ORDER
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Humphries has rendered (Ovid's) love poetry with conspicuous success into English which is neither obtrusively colloquial nor awkwardly antique.
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The translation is suspect. Painful modernisms.
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A classic of American literature from a Nobel Prize winning author, The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the twentieth century. William Faulkner expertly illustrates the epic and tragic story of the Compson family, three generations of Southern aristocrats on the brink of ruin. Unprecedented for its time, Faulkner weaves a tale spanning nearly two decades, told from multiple points of view in a style all its own.
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Sophocles was born at Colonus, near Athens in about 496 BC and is considered to be one of the premier playwrights of Greek tragedy. His stories may have been filled with strife, but Sophocles himself was prosperous and came from a good family. It is said that he was handsome, wealthy, and a highly respected citizen of Athens. During his life, he wrote over 120 plays and was instrumental in how plays would eventually be performed, including the addition of stage props.
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Bad Dialogue
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What listeners say about Metamorphoses
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-04-22
Storytelling at its Best
Great storytelling and narration. A few minor errors in the reading and typos but easily overlooked.
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- Robert S. Becker
- 01-10-21
Next I’ll read the book
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is hours of wonderful storytelling. I was delighted by Maya Saroya’s performance. The men in the cast are wooden by comparison.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Michael Cain
- 05-24-20
A revelation
I knew Ovid was the source for a lot of what we know about classical mythology, but I had no idea how much fun he was to actually read.
This is basically a collection of hundreds of interconnected short stories. Some are lyrical and romantic, some are heroic sagas, and some (actually, a lot) are grindhouse-style torture porn. The gods and goddesses have a lot of cruel and unique ways to punish us mortals.
I enjoyed this translation; it flowed better than others I have looked at. The rotating narrators were also very good.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous
- 08-17-20
don't buy the paperback
great narration of a great translation. the best ovid on audible.
my only recommendation is to get the kindle version of this translation if you want to read along or look at the text. the paperback version is one of the worst formatted books in the penguin classics library. absolute failure. impossible to read. there are so many simple ways where they could format the book so that each line is a single line (without reducing the font size). they published the book years ago and no one ever fixed it. if it's one line of verse, then it should be one line. if there's an exception, it's an exception. but it shouldn't be the rule that most lines of verse are two lines. it's not even poetry anymore. just a formatting mess.
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12 people found this helpful
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- pandajama
- 04-28-22
These performances are not really that good
Despite the glowing reviews here, these performances are not so good. A different reader is given for each tale, which could work, but it is jarring with each change, and more so when you learn to your dismay it's the reader you like the least. But none are that good. Often it seemed as if their performance was the first time they had encountered the words they were reading. I think this work is a particular challenge for readers because it deals with classic epic subjects, but does not require the epic register that, say, The Iliad or Paradise Lost warrant. I feel the Metamorphoses is often closer to comedy or romance than to epic, and when read entirely in the epic register much is lost. Worse, it gets tiresome. Charlton Griffin's Metamorphoses isn't bad, but it suffers from a monotonous and overbearing high, thundering mode. These readers don't all do that, but when they don't it seems to be because they haven't figured out which mode or voice or register to employ. I haven't found a suitable performance of this great work on audible yet, which is a disappointment, but I can see the challenge is great. Maybe this is a book to be read, not listened to.
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2 people found this helpful