The Art & Literature category has 653 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 1,594 ratings. The most-rated is Inheritance.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire
Summary
In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell's treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject). Lowell's New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, many hospitalizations, vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems - Jamison gives us the poet's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was - both despite and because of mental illness - a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
©2017 Kay Redfield Jamison (P)2017 Random House Audio
We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It
Summary
In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s.
Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish Midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and backbreaking.
It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland.
We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.
©2019 Tom Phelan (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Jonathan Safran Foer
Summary
Jonathan Safran Foer joins Maddie Hickish in the Audible Studios to discuss his latest novel, Here I Am.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
Richard Lumsden
Summary
Richard Lumsden visited Audible to discuss his debut novel, The Six Loves of Billy Binns. Lumsden has 30 plus years of acting experience as well as a talent for playing musical instruments, composing and scriptwriting. He now turns his experience as a scriptwriter to novels. In The Six Loves of Billy Binns, listeners will follow 117-year-old Billy Binns as he relives his past loves, with the audiobook narrated by Richard Lumsden himself. In this interview Richard talks about giving up music to write, needing to be a bit older to find Billy’s view of love and how he adds emotion to the story.
©2019 Audible Ltd (P)2019 Audible Ltd
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
Summary
If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article "The Hell of Treblinka" became evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. We are only now able to examine Grossman's prose, which has the everlasting quality of great art, as well as his life and legacy, which Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates.
©2019 Alexandra Popoff (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Dermot O'Leary - September 2019
Summary
Joining us at Audible Studios is British-Irish television and radio presenter Dermot O'Leary. Well known for his stints hosting the National Television Awards, ITV's The X Factor and Channel 4's Big Brother's Little Brother, O'Leary has become a familiar and household name. He is well recognised for his charitable acts, including a 24 hour dance, going commando for testicular cancer, hosting Soccer Aid and Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief. He has graced our screens for well over 10 years as well as radio programmes, including Dermot's Saturday Club and Breakfast for BBC Radio 2. More recently, O'Leary has published the third in his children's books series Toto the Ninja Cat and the Superstar Catastrophe as well as beginning a podcast for Audible Originals, called People Just People, in which he interviews guests he admires to find out how they got to where they are in life. We spoke to Dermot O'Leary about narrating his audiobooks (including the character he voiced as Winston Churchill!), how podcast People Just People got its name and how he felt at the end of those in depth interviews.
©2019 Audible Ltd (P)2019 Audible Ltd
Emma Hannigan
Summary
Emma Hannigan describes herself as a 'cancer vixen.' She's beaten the disease a grand total of nine times and turned the boredom of the recovery process into a successful career as an author. Emma visits the Audible studios to talk about her latest novel The Perfect Gift.
©2016 Audible Ltd. (P)2016 Audible Ltd.
A Place to Stand
Summary
Jimmy Santiago Baca has been called an heir to Pablo Neruda and one of the best poets in America today. At the age of 21, however, he was illiterate and facing five to 10 years in a maximum-security penitentiary for selling drugs. Five years later, he emerged from prison with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A Place to Stand is his memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, from beating another inmate with a lead pipe to slicing an attacker's stomach with a butcher's knife. Although these were acts of self-defense, they landed him repeatedly in solitary confinement. His time in isolation was intended to break his spirit, but it proved to be the catalyst for an extraordinary series of memories and revelations that endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. Poetry became an essential element of this newfound sense of self, and the act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings. A Place to Stand is a vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity.
©2001 Jimmy Santiago Baca (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Louise Doughty - August 2019
Summary
Joining us at Audible Studios is Louise Doughty, an English fiction and non-fiction writer, a playwright and a journalist. Doughty studied for an MA in Creative Writing. As her writing for newspapers and radio began to garner more attention, she wrote and released her first novel, and hasn't stopped since then. One of her novels, Apple Tree Yard, was adapted into a BBC series under the same name. Doughty has been on the panel for many literary prizes and festivals, including the Man Booker Prize 2008, and the Costa Book of the Year Award 2015. She has recently released her most recent novel, Platform Seven, which opens with a man on the edge of a train platform, and the narrator who knows he is about to jump. We will be speaking to Louise Doughty about her new, thrilling book, her wide ranging topics that are addressed in her books, and how she has created such riveting fiction over so many years, in novels and radio plays.
©2019 Audible Ltd (P)2019 Audible Ltd
Matt Haig - July 2017
Summary
Matt Haig, the award-winning best-selling author for children and adults, joins Robin Morgan for his second time in the Audible Studios to discuss his new book How to Stop Time. It follows the character of Tom Hazard, a man that looks 41 but, owing to a rare condition, has actually been alive for centuries. Matt Haig tells Robin about how he came up with the idea for the book as well as its new film adaptation, produced and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Matt also discusses his best-selling children's novel, A Boy Called Christmas, which is also being made into a film. He also talks about the October 2017 release of his new festive children's book, Father Christmas and Me.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
Geography of the Heart
Summary
From the author of the award-winning novels Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock comes a powerful book about the transformative power of love. Fenton Johnson recounts the history of "how I feel in love how I came to be with someone else, how he came to death and how I helped." Johnson interweaves two stories: his own upbringing as the youngest of a Kentucky whiskey maker's nine children, and that of his lover Larry Rose, the only child of German Jews. survivors of the Holocaust.
©1996 Fenton Johnson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Jonathan Pryce
Summary
Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about his narration of the classic Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist is Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce. Dickens' second published novel, Oliver Twist, has been adapted numerous times. Following orphan Oliver from the workhouse to the streets of London, he meets a pickpocket known as the Artful Dodger, who offers him shelter. There we meet Fagin, Nancy and Bill Sikes. Oliver’s innocence is tested as he witnesses the darker side of London. With a commanding stage presence, Jonathan Pryce has had a hugely successful stage career - which includes his appearance in productions such as Oliver! and Miss Saigon, for which he won a Tony Award - and screen career, playing the High Sparrow in Game of Thrones, Governor Weatherby Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean, and many more. Pryce now narrates the audio version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In this interview, Jonathan Pryce talks to us about the narrating Oliver Twist, why he loves acting onstage and how he has carved quite a niche for himself by playing Argentinian heads of state.
©2019 Audible Ltd (P)2019 Audible Ltd
Nichi Hodgson
Summary
Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about her latest book, The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, is British journalist, broadcaster and author Nichi Hodgson. A regular contributor to The Guardian, Vice and The Telegraph on issues of civil liberties, gender politics and sex, and the law, Nichi Hodgson was one of the first British journalists to court-report via Twitter. Her latest book, The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, looks at the history of dating in all its various forms. Nichi Hodgson talks to us about women’s rights, sexuality in the Victorian period and a parliamentary debate about lesbianism.
©2018 Audible Ltd (P)2018 Audible Ltd
Melanie Brown
Summary
Joining us in the Audible Studios to discuss her tell-all memoir, Brutally Honest, is Spice Girl and TV presenter Melanie brown. Beyond being a Spice Girl, Mel B is now also an advocate for women across the world who suffer from domestic violence. Melanie’s memoir is a compelling, frank and inspirational story of a woman who has lived through many challenges but refuses to be shamed any more. In this interview, Mel spoke to us about revisiting painful memories in writing her memoir, the process of casting the audiobook and the feedback she's got already from her nearest and dearest.
©2018 Audible Ltd (P)2018 Audible Ltd
Sue Nelson
Summary
Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about her book Wally Funk’s Race for Space is science writer and broadcaster Sue Nelson. Wally Funk was one of the 13 members of the 1961 Women in Space Programme. The female aviation pioneer also became the first female air safety investigator for the NTSB and the first civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, with over 19,000 flight hours. Sue Nelson, former BBC science correspondent and Radio 4 presenter, documents Wally’s extraordinary life in her new book, Wally Funk’s Race for Space, published in 2018. Sue Nelson talks to us about the astronaut tests of the '60s, where her own interest in space began and the incredible life of aviation pioneer Wally Funk.
©2018 Audible Ltd (P)2018 Audible Ltd
Jamie Smart
Summary
Self-help expert Jamie Smart joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to discuss the writing and narrating processes for his books.
©2017 Audible Studios (P)2017 Audible Studios
Ian Wright
Summary
Legendary footballer Ian Wright joins Gabriel Fleming in the Audible Studios to discuss his autobiography, A Life in Football.
©2016 Audible, Ltd (P)2016 Audible, Ltd
Oli White
Summary
Listen to an exclusive interview with YouTube sensation and all-round nice guy Oli White as he releases his debut novel, Generation Next..
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
Dan Hardy
Summary
Dan Hardy joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to talk about his autobiography Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me. Dan 'The Outlaw' Hardy is a mixed martial artist, UFC World Title challenger and now television commentator and analyst for the UFC. After turning professional with the UFC in 2004, Dan fought 36 times with 25 wins and 12 knockouts. Until, in 2013, he was diagnosed with a symptomless but very rare heart condition. He's well known for his outspoken views on the use of psychedelic drugs, the spiritual exploration of his mind and his love of clean eating.
©2017 Audible Studios (P)2017 Audible Studios
Louise Doughty
Summary
Louise Doughty is the author of the several novels, most notably Whatever You Love and Apple Tree Yard, the latter of which is soon to be turned into a BBC adaptation staring Emily Watson. Louise joins Robin Morgan to talk about her career and her new novel, Black Water, which takes us from Indonesia to the Netherlands, to California throughout the 20th century.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd