
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Liang
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By:
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Solvej Balle
About this listen
Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.
The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”
©2020, 2024 Solvej Balle; Barbara J. Haveland (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Rodrigo Fresán, Will Vanderhyden - translator
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin, and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River. His son, still a child, sits at the foot of the bed, attentively collecting these final hallucinated words. Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time, and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—have as its source this ultimate paternal legacy?
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Outstanding reader
- By Sherrie Brownell on 04-10-25
By: Rodrigo Fresán, and others
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
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Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
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Bite
- An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans
- By: Bill Schutt
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a surprising case: it is teeth that are responsible for the long-term success of vertebrates. The appearance of teeth, roughly half a billion years ago, was an adaptation that allowed animals with backbones, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs and mammals—including us—to chow down in pretty much every conceivable environment.
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excellent
- By Amazon Customer on 02-09-25
By: Bill Schutt
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Sweet, Sweet Revenge Ltd.
- A Novel
- By: Jonas Jonasson
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The beloved author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared returns with an enchanting adventure that skewers the greed and hypocrisy that dominates our time and holds lessons about what’s truly important in life.
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His best book thus far
- By Sarah Zaaimi on 04-30-25
By: Jonas Jonasson
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The Sunday Sessions
- By: Philip Larkin
- Narrated by: Philip Larkin
- Length: 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A collection of Larkin's best-known poems, read by the poet. The Sunday Sessions consists of 26 poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes contain work from Larkin's first major collection, The North Ship as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.
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A perfect thing
- By sfp on 01-01-23
By: Philip Larkin
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Time Shelter
- By: Georgi Gospodinov, Angela Rodel - translator
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.
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Great story about memory & forgetting
- By D. on 05-20-23
By: Georgi Gospodinov, and others
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The Gameshouse
- By: Claire North
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets.... It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost through chess, backgammon - every game under the sun. But those whom fortune favors may be invited to compete in the higher league...a league where the games played are of politics and empires, of economics and kings. It is a league where Capture the Castle involves real castles, where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent.
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PLAYERS, PIECES, PAWNS DON'T MATTER. IT'S THE GAME
- By Lawrence R. Spencer on 06-13-19
By: Claire North
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Terra Nostra
- By: Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Volpi - introduction, Margaret Sayers Peden - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 46 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction, Terra Nostra is concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations. Fuentes skillfully blends a wide range of literary forms, stories within stories, Mexican and Spanish myth, and famous literary characters in this novel that is both a historical epic and an apocalyptic vision of modern times. Terra Nostra is that most ambitious and rare of creations - a total work of art.
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Too much of a good thing
- By Gordon on 06-29-14
By: Carlos Fuentes, and others
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Strange Pictures
- A Novel
- By: Uketsu
- Narrated by: Andrew Grace
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Structured around nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites listeners to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.
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An eerie, logic grid puzzle of a novel
- By Jessica on 03-05-25
By: Uketsu
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On Palestine
- By: Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine.
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Excellent Introduction/101 Level Book
- By Anonymous User on 10-24-23
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Being and Time
- By: Martin Heidegger
- Narrated by: Martyn Swain, Taylor Carman
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Being and Time was published in 1927 during the Weimar period in Germany, a time of political, social and economic turmoil. Heidegger himself did not escape the pressures and his nationalism, and undeniable anti-Semitism in the following decades cast a shadow over the man, but not the work. Being and Time is not coloured by expressions of his later views (unlike other writings) and remains an outstanding document.
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Surprised it works as audio
- By Anonymous on 02-02-20
By: Martin Heidegger
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At Home in the World
- Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe
- By: Tsh Oxenreider
- Narrated by: Tsh Oxenreider
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As Tsh Oxenreider, author of Notes from a Blue Bike, chronicles her family's adventure around the world. Seeing, smelling, and tasting the widely varying cultures along the way, she discovers what it truly means to be at home.
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Having traveled the world as a kid myself.....
- By kmk on 07-31-17
By: Tsh Oxenreider
Must Need All Volumes
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When time stands still
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Engaging story of reliving the day over and over
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The Perfect Book
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My type of weird.
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Painful
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