Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Art & Literature

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903-1981) - author of the 1958 national best seller Only in America - illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s.

It was Benjamin Franklin who came up with the list - temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility. Writer and visual artist Teresa Jordan wondered if Franklin's perhaps antiquated notions of virtue might offer guidance to a nation increasingly divided by angry righteousness. She decided to try to live his list for a year, focusing on each virtue for a week at a time and taking weekends off to attend to the seven deadly sins.

When three colleagues die violently during a single wartime election day in Central America, two female journalists, best friends, are hurled into a torrent of change in their personal and professional lives and in their relationship with each other. The author, bedeviled by stress and feelings of abandonment, hangs on by her fingernails to reporting while her dear friend "just can't take another picture of a dead body" and throws herself into teaching photography to children who live in a garbage dump.

It's 1965, and in Primrose Hill, North London, a beautiful young woman has just gassed herself to death, leaving behind a suicide note, two small children, and an about-to-be-published manuscript: The Captive Wife. Like Sylvia Plath, who died in eerily similar circumstances two years earlier just two streets away, Hannah Gavron was a writer. But no one had ever imagined that she might take her own life.

An intimate portrait of the lives and writings of the Brontë sisters, drawn from the objects they possessed. In this unique and lovingly detailed biography of a literary family that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries, Victorian literature scholar Deborah Lutz illuminates the complex and fascinating lives of the Brontës through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on, and inscribed.

At the center of The Hooligan's Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea's book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny.

In this touching and humorous essay, John Philip Drury recounts coming of age during the Vietnam Era. With a low draft number and an exit from college looming, Drury faces the imminent possibility of fighting in a war that he opposes. In the meantime he tries and abandons a dream to become a songwriter, labors mightily to lose his virginity, and looks to the adult world around him for models of what he most wants to be - an artist.

Call it the flattening effect. The process by which mystery is leached from life and replaced by weary literalism. Age is the primary culprit, abetted by desensitizing technology and the reductive shove of science. At a certain point, thought becomes synapse, talk becomes tweet, and all Netflix movies seem to merit three stars. Gradually the world recedes from your touch until the only things that still feel real are sex and video games.

Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce's progress from her arrival on Capitol Hill through her career as a diplomat, prolific journalist, and magnetic public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era.

"Her technique was simple: aim for the top", an envious colleague wrote of Clare Boothe Luce. No American woman of the twentieth century aimed so accurately or rose so far as this legendary playwright, politician, and social seductress.

February 29th is a date that comes into existence just once every four years. It is also the birthday of Thais - author Anne-Dauphine Julliand's darling daughter - who died of a genetic disease. Thais lived just shy of her fourth birthday. She had a short life but good one. As this special day is about to reappear on her calendar for the first time since her daughter passed away, Anne-Dauphine struggles with how to mark this momentous occasion. She wants to live fully on this special day: Thais would have been eight years old.

It was the U.K.'s worst rail disaster in years. On the morning of October 5, 1999, two rush-hour commuter trains collided just outside London. Hundreds were feared dead. Though he was traveling in the front-most carriage, the novelist Andrew Rosenheim survived the crash. In The Secrets of Carriage H, Rosenheim recalls in heart-pounding detail the events of that day and opens up about the emotional rollercoaster that consumed him for months thereafter.

Recollections of one of the grand masters of science fiction of his storied career as a celebrated author and his relationships with other luminaries in the field. This memoir is filled with all the humor and irreverence Harry Harrison's readers have come to expect from the New York Times best-selling author of the uproarious Stainless Steel Rat series.

Kissing Cousins recalls the author as a teenager: peppy, earnest, and a bit self-important. Hortense Calisher documents her family's surprising history as Southern Jews adrift in New York. Finding her new city and school boorish, the young Calisher takes solace in the enduring friendship she develops with Katie Pyle, a gregarious nurse turned "kissing cousin" 15 years Calisher's senior. Katie, an unmarried woman, possesses her own secret, depicted here with a novelist's touch for the dramatic.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres....

In this poignant book, the writer and investigative journalist Katharine Quarmby describes the 20-year search for her Iranian birth father and her own adoption history. She links this narrative to the wider story that she uncovered during her search - of the many missing Iranian military fathers, who disappeared after the Iranian Revolution, but who are still sought by so many Iranian love-children in Britain today. Her narrative is a meditation on the importance of both birth and adoptive families.

Ben Downing’s Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at 18 and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races.

Born in Boston, Stephen Bodio wandered into Magdalena, New Mexico, in the 1970s while on his way to Montana and never left. He was accompanied by Betsy Huntington, who was twenty years his senior; the couple had been inseparable from the day they met. After stumbling upon a vintage home along the highway, they settled into a country life; it was the perfect way for the two of them to make their lives together in an out-of-the-way place.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. In this wonderfully entertaining audiobook, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

This is the story of an independent woman who is a model for our time—photographer Toby Molenaar. It begins in Holland during World War II, when her country is decimated by the occupying German army and she is literally left to starve. As a little girl, she learns to be self-sufficient—survival is the order of the day. Courage, indomitable spirit, an open mind, and accountability only to herself are the stuff of this fascinating and inspirational story.