The Art of Cruelty
A Reckoning
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Narrated by:
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Tavia Gilbert
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By:
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Maggie Nelson
About this listen
Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.
In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
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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.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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Men Explain Things to Me
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Luci Christian Bell
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling.
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Great read - horrible performance
- By Denise Johnson on 03-26-15
By: Rebecca Solnit
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Wasteland
- The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror
- By: W. Scott Poole
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.
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An interesting take
- By CN on 07-30-19
By: W. Scott Poole
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Angels and Ages
- A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.
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Connecting Darwin and Lincoln
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Adam Gopnik
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Nothing Ever Dies
- Vietnam and the Memory of War
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.
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Good, probably should be read and not listened to via audible for the best experience.
- By Tanya on 10-24-16
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Stay
- A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
- By: Jennifer Michael Hecht
- Narrated by: Jennifer Michael Hecht
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness.
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Informative but oddly dispassionate
- By Scott on 01-07-14
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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All Things Shining
- Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular World
- By: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.
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Excellent Book that refreshes the classics
- By Tod on 06-14-11
By: Hubert Dreyfus, and others
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The Devil Finds Work
- An Essay
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.
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A Critical Masterpiece.
- By Ramon McGee on 05-10-18
By: James Baldwin
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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What listeners say about The Art of Cruelty
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-20-17
Great book!
I really enjoyed the book, as I do all of Maggie Nelson's writing, but given the density of the content, the narrator spoke wayyy too fast. Had to listen at 75% speed.
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5 people found this helpful
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- joseph berry
- 08-15-17
Hugely powerful
Maggie Nelson is extraordinary Russia. The range of references is very broad and also very deep. The only negative I had was the new races voice I found it
too staccato and mannered. Nonetheless, the material was compelling enough that I listened to the end I have now ordered the book so that I can read it in hardcopy. It warrants that kind of attention.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kris
- 07-28-22
Paradigm enhancing
This is my 2nd Maggie Nelson audio book (1st was “On Freedom”). Again, I feel as tho Nelson guided me thru thoughts, questions, and emotions that terrify me. I’m very thankful for her perspective. On to another one of her works.
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- Catherine
- 01-17-23
Fire Tavia Gilbert!!!
Tavia Gilbert reads too fast for her own comprehension and gets a lot of words wrong. I appreciate her on-point french accent but she often mispronounce english words or gets them entirely wrong which is kind of a basic no-no for an audiobook performance.
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- cyberdaniel4
- 10-25-24
Is Artaud so glad and at peace?
This is an articulation of things that I’ve dealt with for a long time, and for that I am grateful
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- Melina
- 11-14-17
Wonderful book, mediocre narration
The narrator mispronounces so many terms, artists, and theorists to the point of being distracting.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Fredfred Burger
- 11-16-21
Fantastic, but I do not recommend this book first.
This is the third book in her Cruelty series (she states this in her interview with Judith Butler found on YB). It's fantastically well researched, thorough without being polemic, and witty (at times). Nelson is one of my favorite writers. She's a brilliant poet (Bluets is chef kisses fingers). lol
However, I do not recommend it for people who haven't read Jane, and The Red Parts by Nelson first. Also, if you're not well versed in criticism (this includes me), buckled up and have a tab for Google open. Read Butler, Scarry, Sontag, in addition to this. Basically, I will be coming back to this book after I've gained more contextual insight. Note: it's not that Nelson is hard to understand by any means; she guides you through how she's uses text. It's that I'm pretentious and feel inadequate because I haven't read as much. lol
Happy reading, nerds.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Damian
- 01-30-24
Long Justification Of Not Watching The News
The headline is the summary. Talked about a lot of things that... are not art. Has bad opinions on art. And mostly seems like she's interested in finding a way to feel like not watching the news is radical. Which sure, whatever, don't watch the news, but it's not radical. You're not morally superior for not doing it. Being cognizant of cruelty does not need to make one cruel
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