Richmond Hoxie has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 8 authors, with an average listener rating of 3.4★ across 116 ratings. The most-rated is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Summary
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals - while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
©1984; 1984 Milan Kundera; English translation © Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Summary
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
©1978 Milan Kundera; translation copyright 1996, Aaron Asher (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishers
Immortality
Summary
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
©1990 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Laughable Loves
Summary
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories, while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
©1999 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Joke
Summary
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present audio edition provides English-language listeners an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.
©1967 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Henry, Himself
Summary
A member of the greatest generation looks back on the loves and losses of his past and comes to treasure the present anew in this poignant and thoughtful new novel from a modern master. Stewart O'Nan is renowned for illuminating the unexpected grace of everyday life and the resilience of ordinary people with humor, intelligence, and compassion. In this prequel to the beloved Emily, Alone, he offers an unsentimental, moving life story of a 20th-century everyman. Soldier, son, lover, husband, breadwinner, churchgoer, Henry Maxwell has spent his whole life trying to live with honor. A native Pittsburgher and engineer, he's always believed in logic, sacrifice, and hard work. Now, 75 and retired, he feels the world has passed him by. It's 1998, the American century is ending, and nothing is simple anymore. His children are distant, their unhappiness a mystery. Only his wife, Emily, and dog, Rufus, stand by him. Once so confident, as Henry's strength and memory desert him, he weighs his dreams against his regrets and is left with questions he can't answer: Is he a good man? Has he done right by the people he loves? And with time running out, what, realistically, can he hope for? Like Emily, Alone, Henry, Himself is a wry, warmhearted portrait of an American original who believes he's reached a dead end only to discover life is full of surprises.
©2019 Stewart O'Nan (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Slowness
Summary
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
©1995 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperColilns Publishers
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
The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend
Summary
This magical story begins on an island far away, where an imaginary friend is born. He patiently waits his turn to be chosen by a real child, but when he is overlooked time and again, he sets off on an incredible journey to the bustling city, where he finally meets his perfect match and - at long last - is given his special name: Beekle. New York Times best-selling and award-winning author and illustrator Dan Santat combines classic storytelling with breathtaking art, creating an unforgettable tale about friendship, imagination, and the courage to find one's place in the world.
©2014 Dan Santat (P)2015 Hachette Audio