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.
Susie Dent
Summary
Susie Dent is most often seen in the Dictionary Corner of Channel 4’s Countdown, where she has been amazing the public with her extensive knowledge of the dictionary since 1992. She is also the author of several books, and her latest, Dent’s Modern Tribes: the Secret Languages of Britain, is available on Audible now.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
Dermot O'Leary
Summary
Audible Studios invite renowned presenter and author Dermot O'Leary to discuss the release of his new audiobook, Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape. Having been born blind, Toto has learnt to navigate the wild streets of London by developing senses worthy only of a ninja cat. Upon hearing that a poisonous king cobra has been set loose in the big city, Toto and her brother, Silver, embark upon the thrilling and fantastical adventure of a lifetime. In this session, Dermot talks about his endearingly mischievous characters, his creative process and what the future has to hold for himself and, of course, for the magnificent Toto.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Summary
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is the exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts. Drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, it is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.
©1979 Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV, and Thom Steinbeck (P)2012 Penguin
Rula Lenska
Summary
Rula Lenska, who is portraying Princess Dragomiroff in Audible's new audio drama of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to discuss this adaptation. Rula tells Robin about the character of The Princess and why Murder on the Orient Express has such enduring appeal today. They also discuss Rula’s 40 year career as an actress, being a success on both stage and screen.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
Dallas Campbell
Summary
Dallas Campbell joins us in the Audible Studios to chat about his new book, Ad Astra: An Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet. Having travelled the earth widely presenting shows such as Bang Goes the Theory and The Gadget Show, Dallas chats to us about an even bigger adventure - space. He tells us a few of the fascinating stories in his book, chats about why he'd be no good as an astronaut and explains why early space flight was like caravanning.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
Istanbul
Summary
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy - or hüzün - that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters - both Turkish and foreign - who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
©2013 Orhan Pamuk (P)2013 Random House Audio
Philippe Sands
Summary
Audible exclusive. Philippe Sands drops by to discuss East West Street, a historical memoir crossing decades.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
Matt Lucas
Summary
We're joined in the Audible Studios by the award-winning comedian, actor and writer Matt Lucas, to discuss his first autobiography, Little Me: My Life from A-Z. Lucas started his comedy career in the early '90s, working with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer on The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Shooting Stars, where he played giant baby George Dawes. He went on to gain major success with costar David Walliams in Little Britain and Come Fly with Me, for which they won three BAFTAs, three NTAs and two International Emmy Awards. Matt speaks to us about his career successes and tells us all about the new book.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
Robert Harris
Summary
Author of 11 best-selling novels including the Cicero trilogy, Fatherland and An Officer and a Spy, former journalist and master of thrillers Robert Harris visits the Audible Studios to discuss his latest novel, Munich, set against the backdrop of the fateful Munich conference in 1938 that changed history. Harris' journey into publishing began with nonfiction titles such as A Higher Form of Killing and The Making of Neil Kinnock, but after winning a contract in 1991 to write a biography of Le Carre's life, things took a dramatic turn. Le Carre would not allow the biography to be published until after his death, so Harris went about preparing the first of his fiction titles, Fatherland, which consequently changed his life and thrust Harris into the limelight. Robert's unique ability to weave fiction through historical events makes him one of the UK's most successful thriller writers, and he's here to discuss the inspiration behind Munich, the intricate research behind his books and the underlying current throughout all of his novels.
©2017 Audible Ltd (P)2017 Audible Ltd
Matt Lucas - October 2018
Summary
Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about not one but two recent audio projects is actor and comedian Matt Lucas. Matt is well known for Little Britain and Come Fly with Me but has many more strings to his bow - adding the narration of Charles’ Dickens epic Great Expectations to his achievements, along with performing Fagin in the audio drama Dodge and Twist. At a finished time of 20 hours and 39 minutes long, narrating Great Expectations was no mean feat. It has, though, been met with rave reviews - so time well spent! In this interview Matt discusses his audio performances so far, which characters he’d love to voice in the future and which one in a bag of Revels no one wants.
©2018 Audible Ltd (P)2018 Audible Ltd
The Proud Highway
Summary
Here is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists - Hunter S.Thompson. In letters to a who's who of luminaries, from Norman Mailer toCharles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez - not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors - Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through hisown razor-sharp perspective.
Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedentedand penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter.
©1997 Hunter S. Thompson (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Sauve-toi, la vie t'appelle
Summary
"Lors de ma première naissance, je n'étais pas là. Mon corps est venu au monde le 26 juillet 1937 à Bordeaux. On me l'a dit. Je suis bien obligé d'y croire puisque je n'en ai aucun souvenir. Ma seconde naissance, elle, est en pleine mémoire. Une nuit, j'ai été arrêté par des hommes armés qui entouraient mon lit. Ils venaient me chercher pour me mettre à mort. Mon histoire est née cette nuit-là." C'est cette histoire bouleversante que Boris Cyrulnik nous raconte pour la première fois en détail dans ce livre audio où l'émotion du survivant se conjugue au talent de l'écrivain, où le récit tragique se mêle à la construction de la mémoire, où l'évocation intime d'une enfance fracassée par la guerre exalte la volonté de surmonter le malheur et de répondre à l'appel de la vie. Une histoire poignante, hors du commun, qui retentit profondément en chacun d'entre nous.
©2012 Odile Jacob (P)2018 Audiolib
Johnny Marr
Summary
Legendary musician Johnny Marr joins David Darlington in the Audible Studios to discuss his autobiography, Set the Boy Free.
©2016 Audible Ltd (P)2016 Audible Ltd
Leonardo and the Last Supper
Summary
Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art - The Last Supper. After a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise. His latest failure was a giant bronze horse to honor Sforza's father: His 75 tons of bronze had been expropriated to be turned into cannons to help repel a French invasion of Italy. The commission to paint The Last Supper in the refectory of a Dominican convent was a small compensation, and his odds of completing it were not promising: Not only had he never worked on a painting of such a large size - 15' high x 30' wide - but he had no experience in the extremely difficult medium of fresco. In his compelling new book, Ross King explores how - amid war and the political and religious turmoil around him, and beset by his own insecurities and frustrations - Leonardo created the masterpiece that would forever define him. King unveils dozens of stories that are embedded in the painting. Examining who served as the models for the Apostles, he makes a unique claim: that Leonardo modeled two of them on himself. Reviewing Leonardo's religious beliefs, King paints a much more complex picture than the received wisdom that he was a heretic. The food that Leonardo, a famous vegetarian, placed on the table reveals as much as do the numerous hand gestures of those at Christ's banquet. As King explains, many of the myths that have grown up around The Last Supper are wrong, but its true story is ever more interesting. Bringing to life a fascinating period in European history, Ross King presents an original portrait of one of the world's greatest geniuses through the lens of his most famous work.
©2012 Ross King (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Everybody Behaves Badly
Summary
The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. But the full story of Hemingway's legendary rise has remained untold until now. Lesley Blume resurrects the explosive, restless landscape of 1920s Paris and Spain and reveals how Hemingway helped create his own legend. He made himself into a death-courting, bull-fighting aficionado; a hard-drinking, short-fused literary genius; and an expatriate bon vivant. Blume's vivid account reveals the inner circle of the Lost Generation as we have never seen it before and shows how it still influences what we read and how we think about youth, sex, love, and excess.
©2016 Lesley M. M. Blume (P)2016 Recorded Books
The World Broke in Two
Summary
A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism. The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers - Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence - make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future despite success in the past. The literary ground is shifting, as Ulysses is published in February and Proust's In Search of Lost Time begins to be published in England in the autumn. Yet, dismal as their prospects seemed in January, by the end of the year Woolf has started Mrs. Dalloway, Forster has, for the first time in nearly a decade, returned to work on the novel that will become A Passage to India, Lawrence has written Kangaroo, his unjustly neglected and most autobiographical novel, and Eliot has finished - and published to acclaim - "The Waste Land". As Willa Cather put it, "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts", and what these writers were struggling with that year was in fact the invention of modernism. Based on original research, Bill Goldstein's The World Broke in Two captures both the literary breakthroughs and the intense personal dramas of these beloved writers as they strive for greatness.
©2017 Bill Goldstein (P)2017 Macmillan Audio
Sophie Kinsella
Summary
Best-selling author Sophie Kinsella joins Sophie Plateau in the Audible Studios to discuss her new novel, My Not So Perfect Life. It follows the character of Katie Brenner: a woman who leads the perfect life on Instagram but not in the real world.
©2017 Audible Studios (P)2017 Audible Studios
The Boy Kings of Texas
Summary
Lyrical and gritty, this New York Times best-selling coming-of-age story about a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas, insightfully illuminates a little-understood corner of America. Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author’s boyhood spent in his sister’s hand-me-down clothes, this book delves into the enduring, complex bond between Martinez and his deeply flawed but fiercely protective older brother, Daniel. It features a cast of memorable characters, including his gun-hoarding former farmhand, Gramma, and “the Mimis”- two of his older sisters who for a short, glorious time manage to transform themselves from poor Latina adolescents into upper-class white girls. Martinez provides a glimpse into a society where children are traded like commerce, physical altercations routinely solve problems, drugs are rampant, sex is often crude, and people depend on the family witch doctor for advice. Charming, painful, and enlightening, this book examines the traumas and pleasures of growing up in South Texas and the often terrible consequences when different cultures collide on the banks of a dying river.
©2012 Domingo Martinez (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Lust & Wonder
Summary
"Burroughs has lived this story, so his delivery perfectly matches the tone and pacing needed. Focusing on a series of failed relationships, Burroughs lets his voice rise in both tension and tenor as he analyzes the reasons, with help from analysis, that some relationships work and others are doomed by the personal quirks of both people." - AudioFile Magazine The instant New York Times best-seller from renowned author Augusten Burroughs. Lust: 1. intense sexual desire or appetite 2.a passionate or overmastering desire or craving 3.ardent enthusiasm; zest; relish. Wonder: 1. something strange and surprising; a cause of surprise, astonishment, or admiration 2. the emotion excited by what is strange and surprising; a feeling of surprised or puzzled interest, sometimes tinged with admiration 3. a miraculous deed or event; remarkable phenomenon From the beloved #1 New York Times best-selling author comes an intimate look at the driving forces in one man's life. With Augusten's unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust and Wonder is a hilariously frank audiobook memoir that his legions of fans have been waiting for. His story began in Running with Scissors, endured through Dry, and continues with this memoir, the capstone to the life of Augusten Burroughs. Funny, sweet, alarming, and ultimately, moving and tender, Lust & Wonder is an experience of an audiobook that will resonate with anyone who has loved and lost and loved again.
©2016 Augusten Inc. (P)2016 Macmillan Audio
My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You
Summary
An intimate portrait of immigration, family, and the heartbreaking (and sometimes hilarious) things that happen along the way from the author Colum McCann calls "the greatest writer of our generation." In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration from Bosnia to Canada - of the lives that were upended in the Siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, Hemon portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping), and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country, from the rule of Otto von Bismarck to the massacres that shocked the world. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course - his parents, sister, uncles, cousins - and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav communist revolutionary partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, and a few befuddled Canadians. That would be enough to astound listeners, and yet Hemon also shares an untampered series of beautifully distilled memories and observations titled This Does Not Belong to You, the perfect complement to a major work from a major writer who is about to become unignorable.
©2019 Aleksandar Hemon (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada