Two-Way Mirror
The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $16.99
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Fiona Sampson
-
By:
-
Fiona Sampson
About this listen
A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year
New York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction Title
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention.
Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art—and the art of biography itself.
©2021 Fiona Sampson (P)2022 W. F. Howes LtdListeners also enjoyed...
-
William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
-
-
Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
-
Truly, Madly
- Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century
- By: Stephen Galloway
- Narrated by: Molly Parker Myers
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1934, a friend brought fledgling actress Vivien Leigh to see Theatre Royal, where she would first lay eyes on Laurence Olivier in his brilliant performance as Anthony Cavendish. That night, she confided to a friend, he was the man she was going to marry. There was just one problem: She was already married - and so was he. Truly, Madly is the biography of a marriage, a love affair that still captivates millions, even decades after both actors' deaths.
-
-
Annoying, gossipy - ruined by horrid narrator.
- By Louisiana Gal on 03-26-22
By: Stephen Galloway
-
Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
-
-
A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
-
Sister Novelists
- The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
- By: Devoney Looser
- Narrated by: Larissa Thompson
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration.
-
-
Rollicking good
- By Kriss McL on 11-04-22
By: Devoney Looser
-
The Hyacinth Girl
- T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
- By: Lyndall Gordon
- Narrated by: Buffy Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T. S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters.
-
-
Great Book, Not So Great Narration
- By k clay on 12-21-22
By: Lyndall Gordon
-
The Turning Point
- 1851, a Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
- By: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Narrated by: Philip Stevens
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart.
-
William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
-
-
Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
-
Truly, Madly
- Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century
- By: Stephen Galloway
- Narrated by: Molly Parker Myers
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1934, a friend brought fledgling actress Vivien Leigh to see Theatre Royal, where she would first lay eyes on Laurence Olivier in his brilliant performance as Anthony Cavendish. That night, she confided to a friend, he was the man she was going to marry. There was just one problem: She was already married - and so was he. Truly, Madly is the biography of a marriage, a love affair that still captivates millions, even decades after both actors' deaths.
-
-
Annoying, gossipy - ruined by horrid narrator.
- By Louisiana Gal on 03-26-22
By: Stephen Galloway
-
Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
-
-
A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
-
Sister Novelists
- The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
- By: Devoney Looser
- Narrated by: Larissa Thompson
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen’s heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. But history hasn’t been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters’ works as his inspiration.
-
-
Rollicking good
- By Kriss McL on 11-04-22
By: Devoney Looser
-
The Hyacinth Girl
- T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
- By: Lyndall Gordon
- Narrated by: Buffy Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T. S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters.
-
-
Great Book, Not So Great Narration
- By k clay on 12-21-22
By: Lyndall Gordon
-
The Turning Point
- 1851, a Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
- By: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Narrated by: Philip Stevens
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart.
-
Véra
- By: Stacy Schiff
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hailed by critics as "monumental" ( Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" ( New York magazine), Véra, the story of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory, wrote his books first for himself and secondly for his wife.
-
-
Author & narrator combine talents
- By Krystyna Hanser on 03-18-13
By: Stacy Schiff
-
Rembrandt Is in the Wind
- Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith
- By: Russ Ramsey, Makoto Fujimura
- Narrated by: Zach Hoffman, John Behrens
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Striving for beauty, art also reveals what is broken. It presents us with the tremendous struggles and longings common to the human experience. And it says a lot about our Creator too. Great works of art can speak to the soul in a unique way. Rembrandt Is in the Wind is an invitation to discover some of the world's most celebrated artists and works and how each of them illuminates something about God, people, and the purpose of life. Part art history, part biblical study, part philosophy, and part analysis of the human experience, this book is nonetheless all story.
-
-
Creating Beauty as Our Lifework
- By Anonymous User on 07-02-22
By: Russ Ramsey, and others
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
How to Live
- Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, perhaps the first recognizably modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and winegrower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them essays, meaning “attempts” or “tries.” He put whatever was in his head into them: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the religious wars....
-
-
Interesting and in parts Inspired.
- By Darwin8u on 05-21-12
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
Under the Sign of Saturn
- Essays
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
-
-
Great essays and a great reading performance
- By Jaded Buddha on 03-29-18
By: Susan Sontag
-
Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
-
-
Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
-
Powers of Two
- Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs
- By: Joshua Wolf Shenk
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A revelatory synthesis of cultural history and social psychology that shows how one-to-one collaboration drives creative success. Weaving the lives of scores of creative duos - from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie, to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - Joshua Wolf Shenk identifies the core qualities of that dizzying experience we call "chemistry". Revealing the six essential stages through which creative intimacy unfolds, Shenk draws on new scientific research and builds an argument for the social foundations of creativity - and the pair as its primary embodiment.
-
-
Love the book, hated the language.
- By Nate on 07-15-15
-
Contested Will
- Who Wrote Shakespeare?
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language?
-
-
Somewhat Surprised and very pleased
- By Geoff in NY on 04-10-10
By: James Shapiro
-
Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
-
-
I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
-
On Photography
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
-
-
I'm Glad I Bought, Despite Some Negative Reviews
- By DEF on 10-18-13
By: Susan Sontag
-
The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
-
-
If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
-
The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
-
-
Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
Critic reviews
"Beautifully told. It is high time Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names." (Mail on Sunday)
Related to this topic
-
The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
-
-
Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
-
-
I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
-
How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
-
Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
-
-
Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
-
The Vanishing Velázquez
- A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece
- By: Laura Cumming
- Narrated by: Siobhan Redmond
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young - too young to be king - and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible - but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.
-
-
A fascinating study of art history
- By Ron on 07-02-16
By: Laura Cumming
-
The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
-
-
Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
-
At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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!"
-
-
Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
-
Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
-
-
I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
-
How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
-
Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
-
-
Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
-
The Vanishing Velázquez
- A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece
- By: Laura Cumming
- Narrated by: Siobhan Redmond
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young - too young to be king - and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible - but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.
-
-
A fascinating study of art history
- By Ron on 07-02-16
By: Laura Cumming
-
So Much Longing in So Little Space
- The Art of Edvard Munch
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done.
-
-
not just for Munch fans
- By Alexander on 08-19-24
-
Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
-
-
Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
-
The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
-
-
Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
-
To Show and to Tell
- The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
- By: Phillip Lopate
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.
-
-
Not a guide on writing personal essays
- By A. Yoshida on 08-07-13
By: Phillip Lopate
-
Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
-
-
A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
-
Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
-
-
Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
-
Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
-
-
Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
-
Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
-
-
A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
-
The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
-
-
If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
-
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
- By: Umberto Eco
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.
-
-
big ideas presented simply
- By Ashton on 01-31-14
By: Umberto Eco
-
Reading Like a Writer
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire listeners to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
-
-
Practical, literate, generous
- By Gare on 04-13-08
By: Francine Prose
-
Kierkegaard
- A Single Life
- By: Stephen Backhouse
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An accessible, expert introduction to one of the greatest minds of 19th century. Whether you're completely new to him, or if you're already familiar with his work, Kierkegaard: A Single Life presents a fresh understanding of his life and thought. Kierkegaard was a brilliant and enigmatic loner whose ideas permeated culture, shaped modern Christianity, and influenced people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Martin Luther King Jr. Though few people today have read his work, that lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is changing with this biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse.
-
-
Great!
- By Will on 07-11-17