The Confidence-Man
His Masquerade
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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By:
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Herman Melville
About this listen
In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War.
Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con men, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all "medicines" to those who are raising money for supposed charitable organizations and those who simply ask for money outright. One man sneaks aboard ship to test the so-called confidence of the passengers, and everyone is forced to confront that in which he places his trust before journey's end.
Mixing his trademark satirical style with allegory and metaphysical treatise, Melville's The Confidence-Man is a precursor to the 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.
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Staggering
- By Tad Davis on 02-16-10
By: Thomas Hardy
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The Warden
- By: Anthony Trollope
- Narrated by: Nigel Hawthorne
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the world of the Victorian professional and landed classes, the story centres on Mr Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to it.
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a delight
- By Janet on 12-22-08
By: Anthony Trollope
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Fathers and Sons
- By: Ivan Turgenev
- Narrated by: David Horovitch
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticising the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away the traditional values of contemporary Russian society.
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The greatest novel I'll ever read
- By Dan Harlow on 07-07-13
By: Ivan Turgenev
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Joseph Andrews
- The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams
- By: Henry Fielding
- Narrated by: Rufus Sewell
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Riotous, sexy and groundbreaking, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, published in 1742, was one of the first English novels. Fielding was melding and parodying the two major forces battling for control of the fiction market at the time - the mock heroic, neoclassical tradition as practiced by Pope and Swift and the popular and populist fiction of the new novelists such as Defoe and Richardson.
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A perfect reader for Henry Fielding
- By TiffanyD on 07-27-17
By: Henry Fielding
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North and South
- By: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 18 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire....
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Delightful
- By Sally on 01-04-10
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Waverley
- By: Sir Walter Scott
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Waverley by Sir Walter Scott is an enthralling tale of love, war and divided loyalties. Taking place during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the novel tells the story of proud English officer Edward Waverley. After being posted to Dundee, Edward eventually befriends chieftain of the Highland Clan Mac-Ivor and falls in love with his beautiful sister Flora. He then renounces his former loyalties in order actively to support Scotland in open rebellion against the Union with England. The book depicts stunning, romantic panoramas of the Highlands.
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Loved it
- By Tad Davis on 04-12-18
By: Sir Walter Scott
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Dead Souls
- By: Nikolai Gogol, C. J. Hogarth - translator
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types.
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Captures absurdity of mid 19th century Russia
- By Darwin8u on 10-26-12
By: Nikolai Gogol, and others
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
- By: Robert Louis Stevenson
- Narrated by: Michael Kitchen
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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This dark psychological fantasy is more than a moral tale. It is also a product of its time, drawing on contemporary theories of class, evolution and criminality, and the secret lives behind Victorian propriety, to create a unique form of urban Gothic.
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The Dark Human Heart
- By Jefferson on 01-30-11
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Mary Barton
- A Tale of Manchester Life
- By: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 16 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When her father assassinates Henry Carson, his employer's son and Mary's admirer, suspicion falls on Mary's second admirer, Jem, a fellow worker. Mary has to prove her lover's innocence without incriminating her own father.
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Mrs. Gaskell was so far ahead of her time
- By Pat on 08-20-13
What listeners say about The Confidence-Man
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nelson
- 01-24-22
Trust and the confidence man
This piece of work by Melville is certainly entertaining if you have the patience for it. Like with other works there is slow build up but you will be rewarded for that patience. Have confidence. I think I’ll return to this book in the future because there are so many ideas at play that I’m sure I missed some.
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- Lowball
- 05-01-19
A Benchmark of American Literature
Characterization and human insight paralleling Tolstoy are the benchmarks of this amazing study in the effect of confidence or the lack thereof on the human psyche. The sheer number of different interactions and conversations Melville juggles is amazing. I could not stop reading this tale and kept thinking of Chaucer's earlier works.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-25-17
great themes and concepts, poor story
this review is almost solely based on Melville's narrative in this story. though capable of great works like Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scribner, this is almost like a rough, rough draft of those concepts. the story doesn't really go anywhere. it just repeats the same theme through conversations between various characters on a boat.
the narrator was alright but not great.
I can understand why Harold Bloom calls this story almost unreadable.
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