Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in World Literature

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and often funny.In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new ones with some of the most important writers of our times.

Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington returns to his hometown of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania—just north of the Mason-Dixon Line—to learn more about the death of his father. Washington discovers that his father was researching a mystery of his own: why 13 escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all.

After a tour of combat abroad, a young man determined to keep to himself is drawn into the dramas of his East Village neighbors. World War II veteran Richard Stone is attempting to transition back into normal life. An aspiring writer, he’s surviving off the GI Bill and the help of friends. Living free of attachments and responsibilities, he thinks, is the best way to defend himself from the world’s pain, like his unhappy upbringing or his best friend’s death in the war. But his neighborhood on Second Avenue won’t permit such seclusion.

Michael Ruane is an obscure American opera singer who arrives in Naples to play a small part in an important production of Tosca and star in his own staging of a little-known Benjamin Britten opera. The work comes at a particularly trying time, when he’s still raw with grief after his New York lover’s death from AIDS. As the productions get under way, Ruane is offered an unusual part: That of the “uncle from Rome” at a local wedding.

What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both scientific realism and the more ego-driven energies of Romanticism.

In The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820-21), Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. In two sketches, he experiments with tales transplanted from Europe, thereby creating the first classic American short stories: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".

The prolific writings of Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, continue to inspire a devoted international following and have transformed modern Arabic literature. In this volume of early writings, Gibran’s simple yet lyrical style crosses from prose to poetry and yields insight into his dedication and inner vision of beauty, including the tale of a strange hermit in “The Tempest”, the discovery of love lost to war in “The Mermaids”, and the long voyage of sea and soul in the prose poem “Between Night and Morn”.

The Complete Angler has been in print for over 350 years. Just a how-to book on fishing would not have created such a popular work. Walton's comments on how to catch and prepare numerous varieties of fish create a pleasant leisure read for any fisherman. His anecdotes are as fresh and contemporary today as they were in his century.

In this biography of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia.

The sheer volume of commentaries on the Mahabharata is awe-inspiring. So, what is it in the Mahabharata that gives it its timeless magic? Is it the mythical characters with which it is replete that makes the epic so enchanting? Or is it the great wealth of philosophical and metaphysical ideas in it that dazzles its audiences? Or could it be a combination of all these that makes it ever-fascinating to scholars and audiences around the world? And, most of all, what accounts for its incredible effect on the subconscious of millions of Indians through several generations?

Figlia di un papa, tre volte moglie (un marito assassinato), un figlio illegittimo... tutto in pieno Rinascimento. Una vita da raccontare. Ci hanno provato scrittori, filosofi... Dario Fo, staccandosi da ricostruzioni scandalistiche o puramente storiche, ci rivela in un romanzo tutta l’umanità di Lucrezia liberandola dal cliché di donna dissoluta e incestuosa e calandola nel contesto storico di allora e nella vita quotidiana. La registrazione dalla quale è stato estratto l’audio è del 2014.

Poetry. Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically- longated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly.

Sweeping from Russia to Jerusalem, from New York to Nazi-occupied Germany, and finally to Israel, this is the richly layered story of an extraordinary woman whose epic struggle mirrors the battle of an emerging nation to forge its own identity. Chavala Rabinsky is 16 when her mother dies and she becomes the caretaker of her five siblings. Beautiful and wise beyond her years, Chavala catches the eye of Dovid Landau, a poor cobbler whose dreams transform her life when he marries her.

Este libro ejemplifica como pocos la idea de que la obra postrera de un autor se transforma en involuntario legado. Austerlitz es el último libro que Sebald publicó en vida, y sin duda una de las novelas más ineludibles de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Pero es también una novela fantasma: el retrato fascinado de una Europa recién desaparecida. A través de los encuentros entre el narrador y el misterioso Jacques Austerlitz, al que conoce accidentalmente en la estación de Amberes, se va desplegando un recorrido espectral por la civilización europea del siglo XX, un mundo de fortalezas, estaciones de tren, campos de concentración, librerías.

It’s July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq. Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family.

In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They’re soon joined by Husha’s ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio. Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother’s house.

Priya, Jamini and Deepa, Dr Nabakumar Ganguly's daughters, live in Ranipur, Bengal, safe from the rising turbulence in the country. When their father is killed on Direct Action Day, their world turns upside-down.

It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival - until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree....

Tras terminar sus estudios de arquitectura en Europa, Lavinia regresa a Latinoamérica para emprender su camino como mujer independiente. Pero sus planes cambian cuando conoce a Felipe, con quien establece una profunda relación sentimental. A su lado le llega la oportunidad de implicarse en las luchas populares y los movimientos de liberación de la dictadura de su país, conectando de ese modo con Itzá, una indígena que luchó contra los invasores españoles y que ahora despierta reencarnada en un naranjo para acompañar, apoyar e inspirar a Lavinia.

Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.