The Essays category has 117 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 702 ratings. The most-rated is What the Dog Saw.
Modern Love, Revised and Updated (Media Tie-In)
Summary
The most popular, provocative, and unforgettable essays from the past 15 years of the New York Times "Modern Love" column - including stories from the upcoming anthology series starring Tina Fey, Andy Garcia, Anne Hathaway, Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, and John Slattery A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man’s promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her 70s looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships. These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love, Revised and Updated, featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in The New York Times "Modern Love" column since its debut in 2004. Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love. But all of the stories are, above everything else, honest. Together, they tell the larger story of how relationships begin, often fail, and - when we’re lucky - endure. Edited by longtime "Modern Love" editor Daniel Jones and featuring a diverse selection of contributors - including Mindy Hung, Trey Ellis, Ann Hood, Deborah Copaken, Terri Cheney, and more - this is the perfect audiobook for anyone who’s loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: In other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.
©2019 Daniel Jones, Andrew Rannells, Ayelet Waldman, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Veronica Chambers (P)2019 Random House Audio
Art Matters
Summary
A stunning and timely creative call-to-arms combining four extraordinary written pieces by Neil Gaiman. “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” (Neil Gaiman) Drawn from Gaiman’s trove of published speeches, poems, and creative manifestos, Art Matters is an embodiment of this remarkable multimedia artist’s vision - an exploration of how reading, imagining, and creating can transform the world and our lives. Art Matters bring together four of Gaiman’s most beloved writings on creativity and artistry: “Credo”, his remarkably concise and relevant manifesto on free expression, first delivered in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings “Make Good Art”, his famous 2012 commencement address delivered at the Philadelphia University of the Arts “Making a Chair”, a poem about the joys of creating something, even when words won’t come “On Libraries”, an impassioned argument for libraries that illuminates their importance to our future and celebrates how they foster readers and daydreamers. Art Matters is a stirring testament to the freedom of ideas that inspires us to make art in the face of adversity and dares us to choose to be bold.
©2018 Neil Gaiman (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
The Opposite of Loneliness
Summary
Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness", went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.
©2014 Tracy and Kevin Keegan (P)2014 Tantor
Vesper Flights
Summary
Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
©2020 Helen Macdonald (P)2020 Recorded Books
Autumn
Summary
From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons. August 28. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you. I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: Showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice - the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This book is a personal encyclopedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable, and wondrous the world is.
©2015 Karl Ove Knausgaard and Forlaget Oktober; 2017 Ihgvild Burkey (translation) (P)2017 Recorded Books
Fates Worse Than Death
Summary
Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order. Vonnegut was never a real optimist, and with just cause: he had an incredibly difficult life (he had been a prisoner of war, from which he drew the title for his book Slaughterhouse-Five) and suffered from failing health, which only showed him his own mortality even more than he already knew it. Still, most readers find that in the body of Vonnegut's work there is a glimmer of desperate hope. Vonnegut's continued search for meaning surely counts for a great deal as he balances hope and despair. Scholars and fans can read about Vonnegut's experiences during World War II and the after effect he felt it had on him. His religious (or antireligious) ramblings and notations are interesting and, by turns, funny and perceptive. The humor may be dark, but that does not make it any the less funny.
©1991 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Armageddon in Retrospect
Summary
The first and only collection of unpublished works by Kurt Vonnegut since his death - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution to the discussion of war, peace, and humanity's tendency toward violence.
©2009 Penguin (P)2008 Kurt Vonnegut
Mythologies
Summary
What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these "mythologies" appear to be what they are: the ideology of mass culture. When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory - yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant "Astrology", never published in English before. Mythologies is a lesson in clairvoyance. In a new century, in which the virtual dominates social interactions and advertisement defines popular culture, it is more relevant than ever.
©1957 Éditions du Seuil (P)2012 Tantor
The Western Canon
Summary
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Listen to a conversation with Harold Bloom.
©1994 by Harold Bloom (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Uncommon Carriers
Summary
From Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee, author of The Founding Fish, comes the fascinating story of an often overlooked, yet vitally important part of America. This first-hand account of the transportation sector features evocative portraits of the men and women who deliver our consumer and industrial goods. McPhee begins his adventure riding with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of an 18-wheeler hauling nearly 30 tons of highly toxic chemicals from North Carolina to Washington. He continues his journey on a towboat pushing over 1,000 feet of barge up the narrow channel of the Illinois River. He rounds out his account crawling through Nebraska, Kansas, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming in massive coal trains. Along the way, he tells the stories of the people he meets and the places he visits. McPhee's sense of humor, incisive observations, and historical asides make for a highly entertaining journey across America.
©2006 John McPhee (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC
Up in the Old Hotel, and Other Stories
Summary
Saloon keepers, street preachers, gypsies, steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady, and a 93-year-old "seafoodetarian" who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for the New Yorker and in four books - McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret - that are still renowned for their respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens - as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
©2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Braindead Megaphone
Summary
From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. The breakout book from "the funniest writer in America" - not to mention an official "Genius" - his first nonfiction collection ever. George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigates the works of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Esther Forbes, and leads the listener across the rocky political landscape of modern America. Emblazoned with his trademark wit and singular vision, Saunders's endeavor into the art of the essay is testament to his exceptional range and ability as a writer and thinker.
©2007 George Saunders (P)2020 Random House Audio
Sri Aurobindo & India's Rebirth
Summary
Revolutionary, philosopher, litterateur, and seer, Sri Aurobindo remains one of the brightest minds India has ever had. This book captures the evolution of his thought through excerpts from his political articles and speeches, essays, talks with and letters to disciples and public messages - presented chronologically. It includes his views on Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose; his doubts about Gandhi’s method to attain freedom and insistence on Ahimsa; and his very distinctive contribution to the nascent Nationalist Movement. Both prophetic of the challenges to come India’s way post-Independence and persuaded of her potential to overcome them, Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a new India melds the spiritual with the political. More than 60 years after his passing, Sri Aurobindo’s penetrating insights on issues such as building on India’s cultural and spiritual foundations, a national agenda for education, Hindu-Muslim coexistence and the need to distinguish reason from a blind imitation of the West continue to resonate.
©2018 Michel Danino (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
Magic Hours
Summary
Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as The Believer, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, these essays represent 10 years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation - be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices - and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter. What are sitcoms for exactly? Can art be both bad and genius? Why do some books survive and others vanish? Bissell’s exploration of these questions make for a gripping, unforgettable listen.
©2018 Tom Bissell (P)2018 Random House Audio
Black Is the Body
Summary
“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably.... Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.” In these 12 deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up Black in the South with a family name inherited from a White man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a White man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily White New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." (Elizabeth Gilbert) Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Kirkus Reviews One of Maureen Corrigan's 10 Unputdownable Reads of the Year
©2019 Emily Bernard (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Sopranos Sessions
Summary
On January 10, 1999, a mobster walked into a psychiatrist's office and changed TV history. By shattering preconceptions about the kinds of stories the medium should tell, The Sopranos launched our current age of prestige television, paving the way for such giants as Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. As TV critics for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, New Jersey's Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz were among the first to write about the series before it became a cultural phenomenon. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show's debut, Sepinwall and Seitz have reunited to produce The Sopranos Sessions, a collection of recaps, conversations, and critical essays covering every episode. Featuring a series of new long-form interviews with series creator David Chase, as well as selections from the authors' archival writing on the series, The Sopranos Sessions explores the show's artistry, themes, and legacy, examining its portrayal of Italian Americans, its graphic depictions of violence, and its deep connections to other cinematic and television classics. Contains mature themes.
©2019 Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall (P)2020 Tantor
Cunning Plans
Summary
Cunning Plans collects several of NYT best-selling author Warren Ellis' lectures on the nature of the haunted future and the secrets of deep history, given in recent years at events in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.
©2015 Warren Ellis (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Mon initiation chez les chamanes
Summary
Dans son Journal d'une apprentie chamane, Corine Sombrun racontait l'incroyable aventure qui l'avait conduite, sur les traces d'un chamane péruvien, au fin fond de la forêt amazonienne. Elle a poursuivi sa quête spirituelle en Mongolie auprès des chamanes Tsaatanes, qui vont lui révéler qu'elle est elle-même chamane et doit suivre leur enseignement. Commence alors pour elle une initiation qui comporte outre l'apprentissage des différents rituels, la vie commune sous le tipi, la garde des rennes, le dressage des chevaux, la transhumance et la maîtrise du froid. C'est autant une vision décapante du monde de la steppe que le récit singulier d'une expérience intérieure au ton absolument inédit.
©2004 Albin Michel (P)2020 Audible Studios
The Common Reader Volume 1
Summary
This is Virginia Woolf’s first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader’ - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father’s library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English literature’. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in. She investigates medieval England (The Paston Letters and Chaucer), tsarist Russia (The Russian Point of View), Elizabethan Playwrights, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Modern Fiction and the Modern Essay. When she published this book Woolf’s fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses ‘the common reader’ in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamps of her genius.
©1925 Virginia Woolf Estate (P)2020 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Sister Mother Husband Dog
Summary
In Sister Mother Husband Dog, Delia Ephron brings her trademark wit and effervescent prose to a series of autobiographical essays about life, love, writing, movies, and family. In "Sister," she deftly captures the rivalry, mutual respect, and intimacy that made up her relationship with her older sister and frequent writing companion, Nora. "Blame It on the Movies" is Ephron's wry and romantic essay about becoming a writer and finding a storybook ending to her twenties, though it was just the beginning of a lifetime of taking notes. "Bakeries" is both a lighthearted tour through her favorite downtown patisseries and a thoughtful, deeply felt reflection on the dilemma of "having it all." From keen observations on modern living, the joy of girlfriends, and best-friendship, to a consideration of the magical madness and miracle of dogs, to haunting recollections of life with her famed screenwriter mother and growing up the child of alcoholics, Ephron's eloquent style and voice illuminate every moment of this superb and singular work.
Recorded by arrangement with Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Stories previously published in the New York Times: "Name-Jacked" (originally titled "Hey, You Stole My Name!"), "The Banks Taketh" (originally titled "The Banks Taketh, But Don't Giveth"), "Hit & Run," "If My Dad Could Tweet," "Your Order Has Been Shipped" (originally titled "The Hell of Online Shopping"). Previously published in the Wall Street Journal: "Upgrade Hell."
©2013 Delia Ephron (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.