Showing results by narrator "Lili Taylor" in All Categories

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn—has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.

When Mia mysteriously disappears from her college campus, her mother Joyce fears the worst — and a warning from Mia’s ex-boyfriend reveals she may have left the country to join a cult. Joyce impulsively launches a cross-continental trip to rescue her, gradually learning more about the seductive cult leader via audio tapes her daughter left behind.

What’s the cost of comfort? In The Fever, playwright, actor, and cultural icon Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with André, The Designated Mourner) captures the crisis of conscience of a privileged American traveler visiting a war-torn country. Faced with the disparity between her rarified world and the real world, she can’t help but wonder if she’s part of the solution or part of the problem.

Big Cats opens with "Charlotte", in which a young girl with a broken pelvis spies on her voluptuous neighbor during a long, hot summer night, setting the tone of irrepressible curiosity and yearning that is evident throughout the collection. In "Get Away from Me, David", a bank manager tries to overcome his haunted past as he deals with the aftermath of a minor earthquake and the body of a customer who died in the lobby.

Ida B. Applewood is a fourth grader like no other, living a life like no other, with a voice like no other, and a family like no other, and her story will resonate long after this audiobook has ended. How does Ida B. cope when outside forces, life, really, attempt to derail her and her family and her future? She enters her Black Period, and it is not pretty.