Edoardo Ballerini has narrated 234 audiobooks on Listento.it by 205 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 6,682 ratings. The most-rated is Pandemic.
Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
Summary
The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry. This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death - completed weeks before Harold Bloom died - shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called a universe of death. Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life's troubles, taking listeners on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. High literature, he writes, is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death. In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself edged by nothingness, uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear-eyed, this is among Harold Bloom's most ambitious and most moving books.
©2020 Harold Bloom (P)2020 Recorded Books
Benjamin's Crossing
Summary
The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days - adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini. It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now, Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America. Beloved biographical novelist Jay Parini's thrilling tale of escape is beautifully interwoven with vignettes of Benjamin's complex, cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years with the German Youth Movement, his university days, his close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, and many other well-known artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's intimate circle between the two World Wars. Part tragedy, part dark comedy, this sharply realized historical novel tells one of the great and most moving peripheral stories of the Holocaust.
©1996 Jay Parini (P)2021 Random House Audio
In the Valley
Summary
Named a Garden & Gun and Atlanta Journal Constitution best book of the year Winner of the 2020 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature "Mesmerizing.... He's one of the best living American writers." (Janet Maslin, New York Times Book Review) From best-selling and award-winning writer Ron Rash - "One of the great American authors at work today." (The New York Times) - comes a collection of 10 searing stories and the return of the villainess who propelled Serena to national acclaim, in a long-awaited novella. Ron Rash has long been a revered presence in the landscape of American letters. A virtuosic novelist, poet, and story writer, he evokes the beauty and brutality of the land, the relentless tension between past and present, and the unquenchable human desire to be a little bit better than circumstances would seem to allow (to paraphrase Faulkner). In these 10 stories, Rash spins a haunting allegory of the times we live in - rampant capitalism, the severing of ties to the natural world in the relentless hunt for profit, the destruction of body and soul with pills meant to mute our pain - and yet within this world he illuminates acts of extraordinary decency and heroism. Two of the stories have already been singled out for accolades: "Baptism" was chosen by Roxane Gay for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2018, and "Neighbors" was selected by Jonathan Lethem for The Best American Mystery Stories 2019. And in revisiting Serena Pemberton, Rash updates his best-selling parable of greed run amok as his deliciously vindictive heroine returns to the North Carolina wilderness she left scarred and desecrated to make one final effort to kill the child that threatens all she has accomplished. "A gorgeous, brutal writer" (Richard Price) working at the height of his powers, Ron Rash has created another mesmerizing look at the imperfect world around us.
©2020 Ron Rash (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Cheffe
Summary
From the celebrated French writer Marie NDiaye - Prix Goncourt-winning author of Three Strong Women - comes the story of the Cheffe: a woman who lives in the single-minded pursuit of creating incomparable culinary delights. Born into poverty in Southwestern France, as a teenager the Cheffe takes a job working for a wealthy couple in a neighboring town. It is not long before it becomes clear that she has an unusual, remarkable talent for cooking, and soon her sheer talent and ambition put her in charge of the couple’s kitchen. Though she revels in the culinary spotlight, the Cheffe remains secretive about the rest of her life. She shares nothing of her feelings or emotions. She becomes pregnant but will not reveal her daughter’s father. And when the demands of her work become too great, she leaves her baby in the care of her family and sets out to open her own restaurant, to rave reviews. As time goes on, the Cheffe’s relationship with her daughter remains fraught, and eventually it threatens to destroy everything the Cheffe has spent her life perfecting. Told from the perspective of the Cheffe’s former assistant and unrequited lover, this stunning novel by Marie NDiaye is a gustatory tour de force.
©2019 Marie NDiaye (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Penguin Book of Hell
Summary
Three thousand years of visions of hell, from the ancient Near East to modern America From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to 21st-century visions of Hell on Earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through 3000 years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a 12th-century Irish monk - a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno, in which gluttons, liars, heretics, murderers, and hypocrites are made to endure crime-appropriate torture; and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles, and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.
©2018 Scott G. Bruce (P)2018 Recorded Books
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets
Summary
From the acclaimed Argentine writer, one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists: a bold, ambitious new novel about how art became politics and politics became crime during the cataclysm of the Second World War. Pinerolo, Italy, April 1945. At a conference in support of fascism, a writer disappears and is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Thirty years later, a young man - a political activist or a terrorist, depending on your perspective - interviews survivors from the conference to try to uncover the truth about what happened and its consequences. Who was the writer? What did he believe in? Why, shortly before his death, did he save a man who could have killed him? Where is his lost work? And what does any of this have to do with a teenager in contemporary Milan involved in a violent confrontation with the police? Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is a razor-sharp, completely original exploration of our most timeless concerns - guilt, betrayal, the legacy of earlier generations - and probes the question of what literature is: how it explains our times and irrevocably changes our lives.
©2020 Patricio Pron (P)2020 Random House Audio
Sustainability
Summary
The word is nearly ubiquitous: at the grocery store we shop for "sustainable foods" that were produced from "sustainable agriculture"; groups ranging from small advocacy organizations to city and state governments to the United Nations tout "sustainable development" as a strategy for local and global stability; and woe betide the city-dweller who doesn't aim for a "sustainable lifestyle". Seeming to have come out of nowhere to dominate the discussion - from permaculture to renewable energy to the local food movement - the ideas that underlie and define sustainability can be traced back several centuries. In this illuminating and fascinating primer, Jeremy L. Caradonna does just that, approaching sustainability from a historical perspective and revealing the conditions that gave it shape. Locating the underpinnings of the movement as far back as the 1660s, Caradonna considers the origins of sustainability across many fields throughout Europe and North America. Taking us from the emergence of thoughts guiding sustainable yield forestry in the late 17th and 18th centuries, through the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the environmental movement, and the emergence of a concrete effort to promote a balanced approach to development in the latter half of the 20th century, he shows that while sustainability draws upon ideas of social justice, ecological economics, and environmental conservation, it is more than the sum of its parts and blends these ideas together into a dynamic philosophy. Caradonna's unique and concise history broadens our understanding of what "sustainability" means, revealing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that shapes everything from individual lifestyles, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy. For anyone seeking understand the history of those striving to make the world a better place to live, here's a place to start.
©2014 Jeremy L. Caradonna (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Mayor of Polk Street
Summary
As America finds its footing in the post-World War II years, violence has decimated the Mafia’s leadership in the US and in Italy. Renegade gangsters are dispatching their own form of justice. Chaos rules the streets of New York. When the mob war spills over into Narrows Gate, a gritty New Jersey waterfront town, the young grocer Sal Benno must fight to hold his Polk Street community together. His lifelong friend Leo Bell - one foot in Narrows Gate, the other stepping toward a brighter future - finds his burgeoning career at CBS in jeopardy as the Red Scare threatens the powerful network. And neither can escape the gravitational pull of the mob. Sal and Leo will be drawn into a web of intrigue that stretches from Las Vegas and Hollywood to Sicily and Greece, from Havana and Buenos Aires to New York’s back alleys and halls of power. Inevitably, though, the fate of Sal and Leo - and the women they love - will be written in the streets of their home town as they struggle to maintain their friendship amid the madness that drives them to a desperate edge.
©2019 Jim Fusilli (P)2019 Audible Originals, LLC.
The Story of Land and Sea
Summary
Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family - fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amid a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love. Drawn to the ocean, 10-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her. Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her 10th birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship. Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father's wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery. In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the lonely paths we travel in the name of renewal.
©2014 Katy Simpson Smith (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers
In the Hands of the People
Summary
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham offers a collection of inspiring words about how to be a good citizen, from Thomas Jefferson and others, and reminds us why our country’s founding principles are still so important today. Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a government and its citizens, in both the government’s responsibilities to its people and also the people’s responsibility to the republic. In this illuminating book, a project of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the number one New York Times best-selling author Jon Meacham presents selections from Jefferson’s writing on the subject, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed and comments on Jefferson’s ideas from others, including Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Frederick Douglass, Carl Sagan, and American presidents. This curated collection revitalizes how to see an individual’s role in the world, as it explores such Jeffersonian concepts as religious freedom, the importance of a free press, public education, participation in government, and others. Meacham writes, “In an hour of 21st-century division and partisanship, of declining trust in institutions and of widespread skepticism about the long-term viability of the American experiment, it is instructive to return to first principles. Not, to be sure, as an exercise in nostalgia or as a flight from the reality of our own time, but as an honest effort to see, as Jefferson wrote, what history may be able to tell us about the present and the future.” Read by Fred Sanders and Edoardo Ballerini, with Paul Boehmer, Mark Bramhall, Amanda Carlin, Janina Edwards, Robert Fass, Jim Frangione, Dion Graham, Johnny Heller, JD Jackson, Arthur Morey, George Newbern, and Christine Rendel.
©2020 Jon Meacham (P)2020 Random House Audio
Game of Masks
Summary
Amy O’Sullivan finds an invitation to a masquerade dinner party in her refrigerator, balanced atop a bottle of pinot grigio. If she accepts the invitation, Amy will be picked up by a limousine. She and four competing strangers must wear masks to the party. The winner will receive a choice of either 50,000 dollars cash or a free murder of anyone the winner designates. Amy could certainly use the money. She also has a person she’d love to see dead. Life is full of choices, and Amy has one to make. As complications set in, Jack McCall is brought in by Amy’s uncle, Max Logan, a staff detective in McCall Investigations. To find the solution to what it’s all about, Jack will travel halfway around the world. Come along!
©2019 David Bishop (P)2019 David Bishop
The Florios of Sicily
Summary
Based on the true history of the uncrowned kings of Sicily: The story of a family, restless and ambitious, shrewd and determined to be richer and more powerful than anybody else. In this grand, sweeping epic inspired by the real lives of history-making titans, international best-selling author Stefania Auci brings to life the dark secrets, the loves, and betrayals, and the cruel acts of revenge that marked the Florio family’s century of influence. The Florios arrive in Sicily, with nothing but the clothes on their back after an earthquake destroys their hometown. Against all odds, the family begins anew despite the looming Napoleonic wars and devastating plagues. But when Vincenzo is spurned by his aristocratic lover, he vows to avenge his honor by becoming the wealthiest man in Italy. Sacrificing love and family, he strives to buy what cannot be his by birth. Not to be outdone by the men, the Florio women unapologetically demand their place outside the restraints of caring mothers, alluring lovers, or wounded wives. Giulia, though only a mistress, is fiercely intelligent and runs the empire from the shadows. Angelina, born a bastard, charts her own future against the wishes of her father. In this epic yet intimate tale of power, passion, and revenge, the rise and fall of a family taps into the universal desire to become more than who we are born as. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Stefania Auci (P)2020 HarperAudio
The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943
Summary
The White Rose tells the story of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, who in 1942 led a small underground organization of German students and professors to oppose the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. They named their group the White Rose, and they distributed leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime. Sophie, Hans, and a third student were caught and executed. Written by Inge Scholl (Han's and Sophie's sister), The White Rose features letters, diary excerpts, photographs of Hans and Sophie, transcriptions of the leaflets, and accounts of the trial and execution. This is a gripping account of courage and morality. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2012 Inge Aicher-Scholl (P)2020 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
Istanbul
Summary
The first single-volume history of Istanbul in decades: a biography of the city at the center of civilizations past and present. For more than two millennia, Istanbul has stood at the crossroads of the world, perched at the very tip of Europe, gazing across the shores of Asia. The history of this city - known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now Istanbul - is at once glorious, outsized, and astounding. Founded by the Greeks, its location blessed it as a center for trade but also made it a target of every empire in history, from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Empire, to the Romans and later the Ottomans. At its most spectacular, Emperor Constantine I re-founded the city as New Rome, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, and dramatically expanded the city, filling it with artistic treasures, and adorning the streets with opulent palaces. Around it all, Constantine built new walls, truly impregnable, that preserved power, wealth, and withstood any aggressor - walls that still stand for tourists to visit. From its ancient past to the present, we meet the city through its ordinary citizens - the Jews, Muslims, Italians, Greeks, and Russians who used the famous baths and walked the bazaars - and the rulers who built it up and then destroyed it, including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who christened the city "Istanbul" in 1930. Thomas Madden's entertaining narrative brings to life the city we see today, including the rich splendor of the churches and monasteries that spread throughout the city. Istanbul draws on a lifetime of study and the latest scholarship, transporting listeners to a city of unparalleled importance and majesty that holds the key to understanding modern civilization. In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, "If the Earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital."
©2016 Thomas F. Madden (P)2016 Recorded Books
Together in a Sudden Strangeness
Summary
In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives. Featuring 107 poets, from A to Z - Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder - with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Jeffrey Yang As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. Here, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits.
©2020 Alice Quinn (P)2020 Random House Audio
Murderous Mysteries Audio Collection, Volume 2
Summary
Unlock your inner Sherlock! Discover intrigue and bloodcurdling suspense in tales that appeared in the pages of the most popular pulp fiction magazines. Featuring award-winning Hollywood actors and unprecedented cinematic sound. Each audiobook provides the listener with a true "theater of the mind" experience. The Murderous Mysteries Audio Collection, Volume 2 includes nine stories: "False Cargo", "Mouthpiece", "The Phantom Patrol", "Inky Odds", "Brass Keys to Murder", "Grounded", "Flame City", "Calling Squad Cars!", and "The Grease Spot".
©2012, 2012 Galaxy Press (P)2012, 2012 Galaxy Press
The Mercy of Snakes
Summary
A series of suspicious deaths in a retirement home draws Nameless into the confidence of a terrified former resident - and into the dark heart of a shocking conspiracy. In part five of the Nameless series, it’s time to hunt. Oakshore Park is Michigan’s most exclusive assisted-living community. Presided over by two killer angels of mercy, it’s also THE go-to facility in assisted dying. For a cut, they make impatient heirs happy. Nameless must concoct a scheme just as cunning. But righteous retribution stirs disquiet in the avenger as light starts to shine on the black hole of his past. Should he welcome it or keep running? From number one New York Times best-selling author Dean Koontz comes The Mercy of Snakes, part of Nameless, a riveting collection of short stories about a vigilante nomad, stripped of his memories and commissioned to kill. Follow him in each story, which can be listened to in a single sitting.
©2019 The Koontz Living Trust (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Summary
In the coming-of-age story, we follow a young Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, on many adventures, including his experiences at the Battle of Waterloo, and romantic intrigues.
©1997 Margaret Mauldon (P)2013 Recorded Books
Mouthpiece
Summary
Imagine that your father is one of New York City’s top gangsters, and that you want nothing to do with him or his criminal empire. Now imagine he’s been murdered...and the only person who gives a damn is you. Meet Mat Lawrence, a stand-up guy who’s got one thing on his mind: revenge. The last place Mat wants to go is back to New York, but that’s where the killers are, and he won’t stop until they’re dead...or he is. And there’s only one man who can help him track them down: his father’s criminal attorney - the Mouthpiece. But there’s more than a desire for revenge at play in this deadly game. When Mat’s old man went down, a million dollars went missing. Put it all together - a cold-blooded murder and a cool million gone - and it’s a pretty good bet that the one thing Mat is sure to find is some serious heat. Also includes the tales of mystery, “Flame City”, the story of one man’s harrowing attempt to save his father and the city from a serial arsonist; “Calling Squad Cars!”, in which a police dispatcher goes to extraordinary lengths to bring down a gang of bank robbers after he is accused of working with them; and “Grease Spot”, the story of a former race car driver, now the owner of a wrecking company, who plays fast and loose with the police...and may have to pay for it. If you’re a fan of a good mystery, it would be a crime to miss the audio version of Mouthpiece...it’s killer entertainment! * A Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award Winner
©2012 Galaxy Press (P)2012 Galaxy Press
Climb the Wind
Summary
The Civil War is finally over, and a weakened America is struggling to rebuild. The white man is sweeping across the continent, driving native peoples on the prairies and plains from their lands. But time is about to stand still, the map of history rewritten.... Something is wrong out West. The Buffalo Soldiers sent to subdue the Cheyenne are deserting and joining their former enemy. The Sioux are leaving their reservations in hordes. And armed bands of Apaches have been sighted riding east of the Mississippi! Lemuel Rowland, formerly Poyeshao, a son of the Seneca, has spent his life learning the white man's ways. A Washington bureaucrat, he must now choose between his successful career and his ancient heritage, for the dreams of his native people are about to come true. An obscure Lakota chief, inspired by visions of a female soothsayer and armed by a foreign spy, is uniting the Indian nations into an awesome fighting force that will thunder eastward and try to reclaim all of America for its peoples. As a loyal employee of the United States government, it is Rowland's job to stop these renegade warriors - but he wants them to win! And what will it mean for America - and her future history- if they do?
©1998 Pamela Sargent (P)2012 Audible, Inc.