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Under the Red White and Blue
- Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
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Publisher's summary
A deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive
Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.
Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins's 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann's critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version - the fourth, so far.
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“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and best-selling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space
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Magical
- By Mary A. Ardoin on 05-11-21
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan
- A Portrait
- By: Daniel Mark Epstein
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid, full-bodied portrait of one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century - a man widely regarded as the most important lyricist America has ever produced. Acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein frames Dylan against the backdrop of four seminal concerts - all of which he attended. Beautifully written, The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a unique, eye-opening portrait of an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.
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Excellent book, excellent narration
- By L chandler on 12-22-11
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 23 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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Learned so much!
- By Paula on 02-18-08
By: Alex Ross
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The Secret Life of the American Musical
- How Broadway Shows Are Built
- By: Jack Viertel
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in actors and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?
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Great review lacked music
- By joseph f mcgovern on 10-14-18
By: Jack Viertel
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Reading Like a Writer
- By: Francine Prose
- Narrated by: Nanette Savard
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Practical, literate, generous
- By Gare on 04-13-08
By: Francine Prose
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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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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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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The Philosophy of Modern Song
- By: Bob Dylan
- Narrated by: Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. And while ostensibly about music, they are really meditations on the human condition.
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Needs chapter headings
- By kaon on 12-22-22
By: Bob Dylan
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Positively 4th Street is a mesmerizing account of how four young people (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina) gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.
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Lousy reader ruins otherwise interesting history
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The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs
- By: Greil Marcus
- Narrated by: Henry Rollins
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 and then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out - a new language, something new under the sun.
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Don't just read the title!
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So We Read On
- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
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- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
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Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Overall
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Performance
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Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 and then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out - a new language, something new under the sun.
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