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The Finishing School
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 3 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
Nobody writing has a keener instinct than Muriel Spark for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and moral ambiguity, or a more deliciously satirical eye. The Finishing School is certain to be another Spark landmark.
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Critic reviews
"[Spark has] the most sharply original fictional imagination of our time...Starting her career as a poet, [she] in many ways remains one, not least in her deftness at finding images in unexpected places." (Sunday Times)
"Wittily recalls Spark's best-known work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie....Sparks so brilliantly captures extreme states of mind (paranoia, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis) because she organizes her chaotic and centrifugal subject matter through tightly structured plots and luminously precise language." (Times Literary Supplement)
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New York Times best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith, winner of the first-ever Saga Award for Wit, has entertained millions with his beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mysteries. Now this phenomenally popular author introduces a fresh series, brimming with the charm and humor his stable of dedicated fans can't get enough of.
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Advice For Prospective Listeners
- By DCinMI on 02-18-13
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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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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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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High Rising
- A Virago Modern Classic
- By: Angela Thirkell, Alexander McCall Smith - introduction
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son, Tony, set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy friend and neighbor, George Knox, has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village.
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Beginning of a journey
- By Jerri C on 11-04-16
By: Angela Thirkell, and others
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
What listeners say about The Finishing School
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lyndae
- 02-06-19
Superb
If I could give this combination of writer and narrator ten stars I would. This is the best of the best.
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4 people found this helpful
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- hamster
- 12-12-20
What Did I Miss?
I am confused as to how this received such rave reviews. I feel like there is an error on my end.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Blythe
- 08-13-07
Short but Sweet
Murial Spark is a pro and she doesn't disappoint. An excellent study of interactions and dynamics and very well done. I enjoyed it.
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5 people found this helpful
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- escoocoo
- 02-05-22
Mediocre
This book was okay. Somewhat boring at the start but at some point became more engaging and interesting enough through to the end. Narrator was good. Nice speaking voice with very pleasant British accent. Some interesting themes, observations, and commentaries on human nature and modern day life.
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- Charlotte Henley Babb
- 06-13-21
Characters in search of a plot
I listened to this because it was included on my membership. It confirms my suspicion that the adjective "literary" as applied to fiction means "little commercial appeal." While there lots of events, there was no suspense. I did not relate to any of the characters despite being a writer and a former English teacher. Ah well, just not my cup of tea. At least I got some craft work done.
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4 people found this helpful