Showing titles in Art & Literature

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to. Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes listeners on an epic border-crossing journey.

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of being Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain.

Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He worshipped the sun and the sea, his own bronzed body, Frank Sinatra, and beautiful women. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He’d return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars—Ava Gardner, maybe Liz Taylor—“couldn’t keep their eyes off . . . your father.” He had countless affairs and didn’t do much to hide them.

Un poeta, un físico y un filósofo exploraron los mayores enigmas del universo: la naturaleza del libre albedrío, el extraño tejido del cosmos y los verdaderos límites de la mente, y descubrieron, cada uno a su manera, una reveladora verdad sobre nuestro lugar en el mundo. Porque como estos pensadores ponen de manifiesto, todos creamos una imagen sustancialmente incompleta del mundo.

Joy Is My Middle Name documents crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasy cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with conversational ease.

В этой аудиокниге представлены автобиографические новеллы одного из величайших писателей двадцатого века - Исаака Бабеля. Каждая из них воссоздает особый мир, запечатлевшийся в памяти автора: воспоминания о детстве и первой любви, колоритной Одессе с ее криминальными легендами и беспощадные описания революционного Петрограда. Сочетая сострадание Достоевского с язвительным остроумием Чехова, Бабель создал свой собственный точный с журналисткой точки зрения и в тоже время лиричный литературный стиль, который отличает его от всех других писателей постсоветской России.

Генрих Манн, родившийся в 1871 году, был не только литературным тяжеловесом своего времени, но и убежденным критиком политических условий и борцом за социальную справедливость. Его жизнь, отмеченная изгнанием и сопротивлением национал-социализму, можно узнать по его работам, которые часто поднимают моральные вопросы и заставляют задуматься о моральных и этических аспектах человечества. Повесть Кобес не является исключением и в полной мере отражает мастерство автора в изображении человеческих конфликтов и социальной несправедливости.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, deutsche Autorin und Erfinderin der Kriminalnovelle: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Susan Sontag, amerikanische Feministin und Kulturkritikerin: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Johanna Spyri, Schweizer Autorin und Erschafferin von Heidi: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Joanne K. Rowling, Erschafferin einer Welt der Magie: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Virginia Woolf, englische Autorin von Weltrang: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Alice Schwarzer, Frauenrechtlerin und Journalistin: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp.

Mary Shelley, Autorin und Erschafferin von Frankenstein: Leben und Werk in einer Kurzbiografie! Alles, was man wissen muss, kurz und knapp. Infotainment, Bildung und Unterhaltung vom Feinsten!

Previo al enorme éxito internacional de sus libros, antes de que su nombre apareciera en el horizonte de lo que cierta crítica ahora llama “literatura mundial”, Roberto Bolaño perpetraba pequeños actos de subversión simbólica. Tras presenciar uno de éstos en la feria del libro de París en 2003, donde Bolaño pasaba como anónimo entre varios editores franceses, Oswaldo Zavala — autor de La guerra en las palabras — decidió hacer una exploración de la obra del autor chileno como un gran proyecto literario, donde lo “marginal” se oponía a la producción cultural “hegemónica”.

Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.

Kafka is one of 161 inspired-and inspiring-minds, among them, novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, who describe how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do, whether by waking early or staying up late; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks.

Inheritance is an audiobook about secrets - secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than 50 years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history.