Benjamin Taylor has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is The Hue and Cry at Our House.
Naples Declared
Summary
It is a city of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, simultaneously glorious and ghastly. And it is Ben Taylor’s remarkable ability to meld these contradictions into a whole that makes this the exciting and original book it is. He takes his stroll around the bay with the acute sensitivity of a lover, the good humor of a friend, and the wisdom of a seeker who has immersed himself in all aspects of this contrapuntal culture. His curiosity leads him to many byways, both real and metaphoric, and his passion for this ancient city and its people becomes, in his graceful prose and amusing anecdotes, irresistibly contagious.
©2012 Benjamin Taylor (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Debriefing
Summary
Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art - made more urgent by the passage of years - await a new generation of listeners. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the 20th century at the height of her power.
©2017 David Rieff (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Here We Are
Summary
A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
©2020 Benjamin Taylor (P)2020 Penguin Audio
The Hue and Cry at Our House
Summary
A memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed. After John F. Kennedy's speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor's teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president's assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next 12 months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn't, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of 12 months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, "[A]ny 12 months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough...Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at 11 and 12."
©2017 Benjamin Taylor (P)2017 Penguin Audio