Showing titles in Art & Literature

After more than 40 years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.

Prof Steve Peters visits Audible to discuss his latest book, The Silent Guides, which draws on what we learnt from his best seller The Chimp Paradox. Steve Peters is an English psychiatrist who has worked with the British cycling team and other sports people, as well continuing to work in hospitals and setting up his organisation Chimp Management. In The Silent Guides, listeners will learn about 'neuroscience and psychological aspects of the developing mind, unconscious thinking, behaviours, habit formation and related topics in an easy to understand way'.

The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.

In this interview, geneticist Dr Giles Yeo discusses how genes influence our eating habits and tells us about his key areas of research. He visited Audible Studios to talk about his audiobook, Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity, and the truth about diets, and we talked about what role scientists should play in our ‘post-truth’ world, how much we know about the gut microbiome and why we should avoid extreme diets.  

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

Nicholas Sparks has published over 20 books, most of which have been international bestsellers. Many have gone on to be adapted in high-profile films. The adaptation of The Notebook has, of course, left most of us reaching for the tissue box. He visits the Audible Studios to talk about his amazing career, and his latest novel, See Me.

Found in a pillowcase, the fabulous long-lost memoirs of a legendary Hollywood designer - and a genuine Australian original. Orry-Kelly created magic onscreen, from Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon to Some Like It Hot. He won three Oscars for costume design. He dressed all the biggest stars, from Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe. He was an Australian. Yet few know who Orry-Kelly really was - until now.

Las memorias de Gabriel García Márquez: un recorrido por los días de su infancia y juventud en los que se fundó el imaginario que se reflejaría después en sus obras. Vivir para contarla es, probablemente, el libro más esperado de la primera década del siglo, compendio y recreación de un tiempo crucial en la vida de Gabriel García Márquez.

Salvador Dalí was a master of the surreal. His paintings are known as “dream photographs”: snapshots of nightmarish scenes brought to life in stunning detail. Dalí was a technical virtuoso, but unlike the grand masters he admired - like Johannes Vermeer and Diego Velázquez - he chose to use his skill to depict the unreal and the absurd. Anyone who has seen his famous painting of the melting watches The Persistence of Memory knows that his paintings are as confusing as they are striking.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Fergal Keane has spent his adult life witnessing war, travelling through dangerous or devastated places and reporting the atrocities back to the rest of the world. In the course of those decades, he has lost friends, sustained injuries and experienced countless near misses. He has patched up colleagues and seen the worst of humanity: mothers robbed of their children and bodies mutilated. Along the way, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he could not stop going back to the wars.

'Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs....' So begins the first letter that nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding school headmaster. For most of his life, Roald Dahl would continue to write weekly letters to his mother, chronicling his adventures, frustrations and opinions, from the delights of childhood to the excitements of flying as a World War II fighter pilot....

Epic fantasy writer and New York Times best seller Brandon Sanderson joined us in the Audible Studios to discuss Oathbringer, the third book in his Stormlight Archive, and he revealed his process for getting his books just right. Brandon also spoke about how others can sometimes discover that they're writing in the wrong genre and told us about the books he has unpublished.

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection. 

George Orwell's classic account of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, dramatised for radio by Mike Walker. Produced by Kate McAll.

This is a biography of James Baldwin, author, one-time preacher, and civil rights activist. He chose David Leeming, a close friend and colleague, to write his biography and granted him access to his correspondence. Leeming traces his life from his birth in Harlem in 1924 to his self-imposed exile in Europe, his later years as political activist, and his public funeral in 1987.

Ferdinand von Schirachs neues Buch verwebt autobiographische Erzählungen, paradoxe Aperçus, Betrachtungen und Reflexionen zu einem...

Thompson has previously worked on screen adaptations of Austen’s novels, including writing the screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, for which she won an Academy Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay. The film is still considered one of the all-time best screen adaptations of a Jane Austen novel and inspired the resurgence of Austen adaptations. Isabella Inchbald is a newcomer in comparison but very well versed in voice work, winning the prestigious BBC Carleton Hobbs Award 2017, and is perfect for our heroine, Emma Woodhouse. 

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling.