19 Best Literary, Literary Criticism Books
Literary, Literary Criticism is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Literary, Literary Criticism audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 19 Literary, Literary Criticism audiobooks below.
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Of Solids and Surds
- By: Samuel R. Delany
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 4 hours 3 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.46(36 ratings)
4.46(36 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0014.95 USDIn the fourth volume in the Why I Write series, the iconic Samuel Delany remembers fifty years of writing and shaping the world of speculative fiction. Science fiction dwells mostly in the realm of possibility, where mysteries proliferateIn the fourth volume in the Why I Write series, the iconic Samuel Delany remembers fifty years of writing and shaping the world of speculative fiction.
Science fiction dwells mostly in the realm of possibility, where mysteries proliferate nevertheless, meaning is never static, and “time and history have convinced us that things are not as they seem.” So too does all language, argues Samuel Delany, in his vigorous justification for the writing life.
Chronicling his struggle with dyslexia, the evolution of his gay and Black identity during the AIDS crisis, and his experiences and relationships through five decades as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, Delany is a longtime observer of language’s inner workings. For Delany, the reasons to write are inextricably linked with the habits of reading. Like the number of galaxies in the multiverse, the possibilities are endless; but in the last analysis, we write to discover our own worlds in the worlds of others–and to promote an illusion of their sharing.
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The Wife of Bath
- By: Marion Turner
- Length: 8 hours 23 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: January 17, 2023
- Language: English
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4.3(9 ratings)
4.3(9 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDFrom the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinaryFrom the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers–from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden
to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer’s
favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she
plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison’s fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women–from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth
husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison’s postmedieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British womenwriters.Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a oneof-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.
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Super-Infinite
- By: Katherine Rundell
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.28(312 ratings)
4.28(312 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0016.95 USDFrom standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishmentFrom standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.
In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP–and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
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The Age of Disenchantments
- By: Aaron Shulman
- Narrator: Timothy Andres Pabon
- Length: 12 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: March 05, 2019
- Language: English
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4.12(164 ratings)
4.12(164 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USDA gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family–a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy–set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond. In this absorbing and atmosphericA gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family–a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy–set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond.
In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time–from Neruda to Salvador Dali, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolano.
Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy.
A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them.
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Updike
- By: Adam Begley
- Narrator: Grover Gardner
- Length: 20 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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4.11(495 ratings)
4.11(495 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDA masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike–a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work In this magisterial biography,A masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike–a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities.”
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at the New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life–including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his firsthand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works–from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy–and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.
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Jack
- By: George Sayer
- Narrator: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 13 hours 25 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2012
- Language: English
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4.09(2513 ratings)
4.09(2513 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDNumerous biographies have been written about this great theologian, literary critic, and novelist, but we have found this to be the best. Sayer describes Lewis’ early years, hinting at childhood evidence of the brilliance and eccentricity thatNumerous biographies have been written about this great theologian, literary critic, and novelist, but we have found this to be the best.
Sayer describes Lewis’ early years, hinting at childhood evidence of the brilliance and eccentricity that would later become Lewis’ hallmarks. He discusses Lewis’ academic career, his life-transforming conversion to Christianity, and the role of religion in his life. With honesty and compassion, he covers Lewis’ controversial relationship with Mrs. Moore and his passionate marriage to Joy Davidman.
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Common Sense
- By: Thomas Paine
- Narrator: Thomas Paine
- Length: 1 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: December 16, 1999
- Language: English
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3.99(24465 ratings)
3.99(24465 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.008.99 USD“When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir,” wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say:“When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir,” wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had.
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Her Husband
- By: Diane Middlebrook
- Narrator: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hours 1 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2005
- Language: English
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3.92(1507 ratings)
3.92(1507 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0020.95 USDTed Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath’s suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literaryTed Hughes married Sylvia Plath in 1956, at the outset of their brilliant careers. Plath’s suicide six and a half years later, for which many held Hughes accountable, changed his life, his closest relationships, his standing in the literary world, and the style and substance of his verse.In this stunning new biography of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook presents a portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband who was haunted–and nourished–his entire life by the aftermath of his first marriage.
Drawing on a trove of papers, Middlebrook presents Hughes as a complicated, conflicted figure: sexually magnetic, fiercely ambitious, immensely caring, and shrewd in business. She argues that Plath’s suicide, though it devastated Hughes and made him vulnerable to the savage attacks of Plath’s growing readership, ultimately gave him his true subject: how marriages fail and how men fail in marriage. Writing with the penetrating insight and lucid sympathy that has informed all of her bestselling biographies, Middlebrook rises to the multiple challenges presented by this highly fraught, deeply controversial subject. Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer’s art and craft.
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Doris Lessing
- By: Carole Klein
- Narrator: Anna Fields
- Length: 10 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
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3.86(42 ratings)
3.86(42 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0020.95 USDBoth in her personal life and in her literature, Doris Lessing broke the rules. Born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia by a hypercritical mother and a father who was shell-shocked during the First World War, she was forever in search of her essentialBoth in her personal life and in her literature, Doris Lessing broke the rules. Born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia by a hypercritical mother and a father who was shell-shocked during the First World War, she was forever in search of her essential identity. Twice married and divorced before the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with one of her children and little more than an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase. Ardently embracing communism, then feminism, she would discard them both long before their attractions faded for others. As a writer, she consistently charted new territory, most famously with the series of science fiction novels she submitted under a pseudonym. Based on numerous interviews and sources, this is a fascinating portrait of a celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work.
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The World Broke in Two
- By: Bill Goldstein
- Narrator: Bill Goldstein
- Length: 12 hours 6 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: August 15, 2017
- Language: English
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3.78(415 ratings)
3.78(415 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USDThis program is read by the author. 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 theThis program is read by the author.
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.
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Dylan Thomas
- By: Andrew Lycett
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 18 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2005
- Language: English
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3.78(112 ratings)
3.78(112 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.95 USDIn this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas—author of Under Milkwood, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog,In this authoritative, fresh, and compelling account of the extraordinary life and enduring work of Dylan Thomas—author of Under Milkwood, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, and numerous poems and stories—Andrew Lycett peels back the layers of story that have accumulated around this extraordinarily talented writer, one of the most celebrated and contradictory literary figures of the twentieth century.
Lycett uses as his overwhelming motif the deeply ambivalent forces in Thomas’ life—“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me” said Thomas—that allowed him to be a wild boy in public and a poet of deep sensitivity in private, and helped him to bridge the gap between modernism and pop, the written and the spoken word, individual art and performance art.
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E. E. Cummings
- By: Susan Cheever
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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3.75(440 ratings)
3.75(440 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDFrom the acclaimed author of My Name Is Bill and Home before Dark comes a major reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s preeminent twentieth-century poets. E. E. Cummings’ radical experimentation with form, punctuation,From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Bill and Home before Dark comes a major reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s preeminent twentieth-century poets.
E. E. Cummings’ radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it “hideous,” while Malcolm Cowley called him “unsurpassed in his field”), at the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-seven, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States.
Now, in this new biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings’ seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein) where the radical verse of Ezra Pound lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem and towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917 and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, including Marianne Moore and Hart Crane.
Rich and illuminating, E. E. Cummings: A Life is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrator: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
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3.72(2115 ratings)
3.72(2115 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDOLIVIA LAING’S WIDELY ACCLAIMED ACCOUNT OF WHY SOME OF THE BEST LITERATURE HAS BEEN CREATED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work andOLIVIA LAING’S WIDELY ACCLAIMED ACCOUNT OF WHY SOME OF THE BEST LITERATURE HAS BEEN CREATED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America’s finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.
Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever’s New York to Williams’ New Orleans, and from Hemingway’s Key West to Carver’s Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
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James Joyce in 90 Minutes
- By: Paul Strathern
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 1 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
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3.66(112 ratings)
3.66(112 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.009.95 USDFrom a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious, original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny. He would indeed go on to transform the nature of modern literature, employing a unique stream-of-consciousness technique rich inFrom a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious, original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny. He would indeed go on to transform the nature of modern literature, employing a unique stream-of-consciousness technique rich in symbolism and wordplay. Through his art, the Dublin native sought to reveal the radiance and meaning that lurks in the everyday world, “the soul of the commonest object,” evoking a heightened sense of consciousness within the grit of common life.
James Joyce in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Joyce’s life and ideas, and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Joyce’s chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.
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Making Darkness Light
- By: Joe Moshenska
- Narrator: Joe Eyre
- Length: 15 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: December 07, 2021
- Language: English
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3.6(44 ratings)
3.6(44 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0031.99 USDAn innovative and elegant new biography of John Milton from an acclaimed Oxford professorJohn Milton was once essential reading for visionaries and revolutionaries, from William Blake to Ben Franklin. Now, however, he has become a literaryAn innovative and elegant new biography of John Milton from an acclaimed Oxford professor
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John Milton was once essential reading for visionaries and revolutionaries, from William Blake to Ben Franklin. Now, however, he has become a literary institution–intimidating rather than inspiring.
In Making Darkness Light, Oxford professor Joe Moshenska rediscovers a poet whose rich contradictions confound his monumental image. Immersing ourselves in the rhythms and textures of Milton’s world, we move from the music of his childhood home to his encounter with Galileo in Florence into his idiosyncratic belief system and his strange, electrifying imagination.
Making Darkness Light will change the way we think about Milton, the place of his writings in his life, and his life in history. It is also a book about Milton’s place in our times: about our relationship with the Western canon, about why and how we read, and about what happens when we let someone else’s ideas inflect our own. -
Juliet’s Answer
- By: Glenn Dixon
- Narrator: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 7 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.54(829 ratings)
3.54(829 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDWhen Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet–letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet’sWhen Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet–letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet’s hometown, people who long to understand the mysteries of the human heart.
Glenn’s journey takes him deep into the charming community of Verona, where he becomes involved in unraveling the truth behind Romeo and Juliet. Did these star-crossed lovers actually exist? Why have they remained at the forefront of hearts and minds for centuries? And what can they teach us about love?
When Glenn returns home to Canada and resumes his duties as an English teacher, he undertakes a lively reading of Romeo and Juliet with his students, engaging them in passions past and present. But in an intriguing reversal of fate and fortune, his students–along with an old friend–instruct the teacher on the true meaning of love, loss, and moving on.
An enthralling tale of modern-day love steeped in the romantic traditions of eras past, this is a memoir that will warm your heart.
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In A Dark Wood
- By: Joseph Luzzi
- Narrator: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: Harper Wave
- Publish date: June 02, 2015
- Language: English
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3.49(255 ratings)
3.49(255 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0021.99 USDIn the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante’s Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning–a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power ofIn the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante’s Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning–a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power of literature to inspire and heal the most devastating loss.
Where do we turn when we lose everything? Joseph Luzzi found the answer in the opening of The Divine Comedy: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”
When Luzzi’s pregnant wife was in a car accident–and died forty-five minutes after giving birth to their daughter, Isabel–he finds himself a widower and first-time father at the same moment. While he grieves and cares for his infant daughter, miraculously delivered by caesarean before his wife passed, he turns to Dante’s Divine Comedy for solace.
In a Dark Wood tells the story of how Dante helps the author rebuild his life. He follows the structure of The Divine Comedy, recounting the Inferno of his grief, the Purgatory of healing and raising Isabel on his own, and then Paradise of the rediscovery of love.
A Dante scholar, Luzzi has devoted his life to teaching and writing about the poet. But until he turned to the epic poem to learn how to resurrect his life, he didn’t realize how much the poet has given back to him. A meditation on the influence of great art and its power to give us strength in our darkest moments, In a Dark Wood opens the door into the mysteries of Dante’s epic poem. Beautifully written and flawlessly balanced, Luzzi’s book is a hybrid of heart-rending memoir and critical insight into one of the greatest pieces of literature in all of history. In a Dark Wood draws us into man’s descent into hell and back: it is Dante’s journey, Joseph Luzzi’s, and our very own.
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Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes
- By: Paul Strathern
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 2 hours 7 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2005
- Language: English
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3.36(241 ratings)
3.36(241 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.006.95 USDBuilding on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world’s great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life inBuilding on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world’s great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.
After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky never took things lightly. His great novels burst upon the European literary scene like a succession of thunderbolts. His understanding of the darker and more extreme recesses of the human mind cast a forceful light into these areas of experience. The raw psychology and passionate involvement of his books galvanized writers and thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche and Kafka.
In Dostoevsky in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Dostoevsky’s life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes selections from Dostoevsky’s writings and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.
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D. H. Lawrence in 90 Minutes
- By: Paul Strathern
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 1 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
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3.35(59 ratings)
3.35(59 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.009.95 USDBy the end of his life, Lawrence had despaired of Western civilization, which he felt had corrupted and weakened the human spirit. He believed that we had somehow lost touch with our instinctual being and no longer responded to the ‘trueBy the end of his life, Lawrence had despaired of Western civilization, which he felt had corrupted and weakened the human spirit. He believed that we had somehow lost touch with our instinctual being and no longer responded to the ‘true voice’ of our blood. We still possessed such truth deep within us, but it was smothered by a dead culture.
His works were an attempt to revive a life we have lost, and in them it is possible to glimpse something vivid, something now damaged, that we nonetheless recognize in ourselves. At his best, Lawrence reminds us of what we are, what it is we have lost. But it is a very tenuous argument, for all the vividness with which it is evoked. In Lawrence, deep sense often coexists with empty nonsense. The ranter coexisted with the prophet, just as his often dubious message coexisted with some of the finest writing in the English language. Lawrence had a genius for evocation, both of a past that may never in fact have existed and of a luminous present that exists as never before in his words. This is his undeniable legacy.
Building on his enormously successful Philosophers in 90 Minutes series, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world’s great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.
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Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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