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The Long Embrace
- Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 12 hrs
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Publisher's summary
Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was terrain and inspiration for Chandler's imagination, including the nearly two dozen apartments and houses the Chandlers moved into and out of over the course of two decades. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand not only his female characters - and Marlowe's relation to them - but himself as well.
A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
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"A beautiful and original book....Freeman writes about L.A. with a tender precision and yearning that borders on the religious....Freeman's identification with her subject is so complete we feel we're there with Chandler too." (The Los Angeles Times)
"A compelling picture of present-day Los Angeles and a compelling dual portrait of Chandler and his wife....Ms. Freeman knows the territory as well as Marlowe himself....she feels the language and captures the mood. Like Cissy, when she crooks her finger, it's impossible not to follow." (The New York Times)
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- 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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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 Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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Fire in the Belly
- The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
- By: Cynthia Carr
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 25 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture - and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.
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Why did they let this person read?
- By Wendell Ricketts on 12-11-18
By: Cynthia Carr
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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In the Great Green Room
- The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown
- By: Amy Gary
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The extraordinary life of the woman behind the beloved children's classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny comes alive in this fascinating biography of Margaret Wise Brown. Margaret's books have sold millions of copies all over the world, but few people know that she was at the center of a children's book publishing revolution.
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Excruciatingly boring
- By Melissa S. on 01-31-19
By: Amy Gary
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
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Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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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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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
What listeners say about The Long Embrace
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christiana
- 06-12-22
A must for Raymond Chandler fans...
I truly enjoyed this book and the audio performance was excellent. If you are a Raymond Chandler fan you really need to hear this it gives you so much insight into the man's life. further, I enjoyed hearing subtle phrases and manners of speech that Miss Freeman inherited from Chandler. :) I suspect she put those there intentionally and it was a real treat to hear them when they came around.
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Overall
- Chris
- 11-15-08
A fine portrait of Chandler
This is really a dual portrait--not of Chandler and his wife, Cissy, but of Chandler and Los Angeles. As a Los Angeles resident, Freeman knows the places that Chandler wrote about so well, and her method is to visit all of the astonishing 30-odd places that Chandler and his wife lived while telling the story of their lives. This method can make the book seem a little slow at first, since it's more "visiting Chandler's haunts" than discussing Chandler himself, but the method eventually pays off in a good evocation of Chandler's Los Angeles.
The research about Chandler's early life and his sad decline after Cissy died is interesting, as is the information provided about Cissy. One piece of information that might have been resolved: Freeman discusses Chandler's affairs during his Hollywood years and indicates that the Chandlers came close to divorce, yet Chandler's letters state that he was never unfaithful to her and that she was the love of his life. Both of these contradictory ideas are presented without a resolution, but that, too, might be just part of the method here.
Well worth listening to, and worth the patience that it might take to work through the first few chapters.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Brustar
- 01-01-15
Separates the Wheat from the Chaff ... and Prints the Chaff
Raymond Chandler was a seminal author who lived an eccentric, virtually inexplicable, life. How did he become, at age 53, a significant, almost revolutionary, author of film noir after never writing anything more memorable than a spreadsheet for the oil company where he worked as an accountant for his entire pre-writing career? Why did he marry a woman 18 years older than he? Was he gay and, if so, did that affect his writing? Why did Chandler and his equally eccentric wife, Cissy, live a peripatetic life, moving almost every year of their married lives to a succession of 30 or so mostly semi-seedy, apartments?
These questions are raised, but, mostly unanswered, in “The Long Embrace”, a disjointed, not-exactly-biography that dedicates too many pages (or, if you listen to the audiobook, too many hours) tracking down Chandler and Cissy’s constant, perhaps, obsessive, moves in and around Los Angeles 70-80 years ago. Trust me, that search, loaded with irrelevant detail, is almost completely devoid of interesting information.
If you can persevere through all those pages about all those apartments, there are some interesting questions that do get somewhat addressed: To what extent can we read the enigmatic Chandler and Cissy into his various characters? How did the reclusive Chandler handle Hollywood, where he became a successful screenwriter? What did the snobbish Chandler think of the movies based on his books and how did he regard Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell and the other actors who played Chandler’s creation, the iconic detective Philip Marlowe?
Chandler was such a unique, bizarre, brilliant, flawed character that there are inevitably some worthwhile moments in “The Long Embrace”. But they are overwhelmed by so many trips to so many apartments in so many parts of L.A. that they stand out like "a black widow spider on a piece of angel food cake".
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3 people found this helpful
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- Isabelle F.
- 07-08-16
Not worth it
Often repetitive rambling supposed life story of a early century writer deduced by a narrator touring LA to find nothing remains.
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2 people found this helpful