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The Lonely City
- Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
An expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir, and biography on the subject of loneliness told through the lives of six iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass.
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we're not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?
Olivia Laing explores these questions by traveling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists, among them Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and Klaus Nomi. Part memoir, part biography, part dazzling work of cultural criticism, The Lonely City is not just a map, but a celebration of the state of loneliness. It's a voyage out to a strange and sometimes lovely island, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but visited by many - millions, say - of souls.
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- Narrated by: Mark Bachman
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out”, what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
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Forget the Status Quo South Beach B.S.
- By Susie on 03-14-13
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Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
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A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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Girl in Need of a Tourniquet
- Memoir of a Borderline Personality
- By: Merri Lisa Johnson
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
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An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson’s account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of "bleeding out" unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed "psycho girlfriend," she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point.
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Chaotic, disturbing, meaningless
- By BRB on 04-02-14
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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
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Story
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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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Speak
- A Novel
- By: Louisa Hall
- Narrated by: Suzan Crowley, Christopher Ashman, Adrienne Rusk, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human and what it means to be less than fully alive.
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Like nothing else
- By Anonymous User on 06-22-17
By: Louisa Hall
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What listeners say about The Lonely City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kentuckian
- 02-12-19
Biography of NY Artists
Lonely City is a well-written, poetic account of loneliness and it's affect on the artists Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, Dave Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol. More biography than memoir.
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- Yvonne@Windlullaby
- 07-25-17
Unexpected and somewhat graphic
The Lonely City was an unexpected and not totally welcomed expose of the lives of several famous artists and writers who predominately lived in New York City from the 1960s-1980s. The stories are told by the author who
researches the darker sides of these people in her attempt to understand her own loneliness. The narrative is extremely intimate and graphic at times. An interesting side story that weaves around these lives is a look at the ways technology impacts humans. Unfortunately, this is somewhat depressing as well, but a brutal look at the secondary impacts that result from the variety of devices that are touted as great aides to humans. The various themes of social isolation, prejudices, depression, and of course loneliness make this book difficult to finish. However, it is worth the task for those who are willing to suffer a bit and learn more about the things that are not discussed by most people.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Tamara
- 04-15-20
Disappointed
Started out as an interesting story with good information about different artists.AIDS facts drags on and on . This is basically a documentary.
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- Lis
- 01-31-17
Thorough interesting research, average story
I enjoyed the accounts of the artists in this book, and I found myself looking them and their art up throughout the book out of curiosity. Which that's what this book did - perked my curiosity. I liked the art history lesson, which you can tell Olivia Laing has done some very thorough research and I thought her own personal story and how it intertwined with the artists was cool. But at times the narration got old and dry, and I wasn't dying to listen to it everyday. Written beautifully, but not always profound.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Swannee
- 11-13-23
Thank you
I immediately re listened I wanted to absorb as much as I could while still open
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- Anonymous User
- 05-07-24
Famous people lonely
The author waxes poetic about her own loneliness and of celebrities. The parts that hit for me are about Andy Warhol as I only know his art and had no idea about his personal life.
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- JSTAR
- 10-10-18
Read This Book
Olivia Laing is simply a brilliant thinker. Listening to The Lonely City, I felt like I was walking around NYC having a captivating, in-depth, magical conversation with my smartest friend about Artists and culture and the sad (sometimes wondrous) baggage that comes with humanity. So good.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Christina
- 03-10-17
Beautifully Written, Engaging, Informative
What made the experience of listening to The Lonely City the most enjoyable?
Olivia Laing's writing was on point. This is a great book to read/listen to if you are or have ever been lonely, if you are or have ever been an artist, if you are interested in art or art history or New York City, or if you are interested in the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. I downloaded the book in a fit of acute loneliness, and it was comforting. I did not expect it to be so satisfying personally, politically, intellectually, and artistically. It's one of my top five audiobooks ever.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes! But it's too dense to absorb all at once. I immediately started it from the beginning after I finished it, and wrote out several quotes so that I could go back to reference them later.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Vly Summit
- 09-22-21
Remarkable and fascinating
An account of the author saving herself by learning, learning and expressing all she could about the city in which she lived temporarily and some remarkable artists had lived, worked, and died. New York and art, and the redemptive quality of the painful emotion of loneliness--these are some of the subjects of this wonderful book. Beautifully performed!
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- Chris
- 01-31-17
Highly relatable, unexpectedly personal.
I read the description not quite knowing what to expect. This novel forced me to look inward, forcing me, not reluctantly, to empathize with many of the individuals that were discussed.
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