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A Tale of a Tub
- Narrated by: Peter Wickham
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
Swift's allegorical satire about religion and politics follows the lives of three brothers, Martin, Peter, and Jack, each of who represents a faction of the Christian faith - Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and the dissenting faiths, respectively. Each brother inherits a coat (representing religious practice) from their father (God) on the condition that they do not change it. But instead the three quarrelsome youths disobey their father and change their coats beyond recognition. A Tale of a Tub was Swift's first major work and was considered a personal favorite by the author.
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Gulliver's Travels
- By: Jonathan Swift
- Narrated by: John Tatlock
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Swift's classic novel about the loveable Lemuel Gulliver is one that is taught in high schools around the country, and for good reason. Gulliver, who is a surgeon aboard a ship, thinks that he is about to embark on a run-of-the-mill voyage to different ports. Throughout his journey, however, there are a few events that take place that redirect his ship to unfamiliar islands. Not only are they unfamiliar to him, but they are inhabited by natives who are shaped and sized much differently than he is.
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Great book gets a great narrator a MUST listen
- By Amazon Customer on 07-12-19
By: Jonathan Swift
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Tristram Shandy
- By: Laurence Sterne
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Laurence Sterne’s most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary 18th-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandyis commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram’s characteristic digressions on a whole range of unlikely subjects (including battle strategy and noses!) are endlessly surprising and make this one of Britain’s greatest comic achievements.
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Like discovering Frank Zappa in 250 years
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-14
By: Laurence Sterne
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A Sentimental Journey
- By: Laurence Sterne
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Published just months before his death in 1768, A Sentimental Journey is Sterne's lightly fictionalised account of his own European travels; and being Sterne, it is more about digressions, misunderstandings and risqué jokes than the places he visits. Narrated by the (apparently) innocent Parson Yorick, who appeared in Sterne's other masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, it is full of anecdote and incident, and is far more about the people than the landscapes on the road from Calais.
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Glad I Listened, But…
- By SandyK on 09-03-24
By: Laurence Sterne
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Notes from the Underground (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett - translator
- Narrated by: Pete Simonelli
- Length: 4 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Isolated from society in a tenement basement in St. Petersburg, a malicious former civil servant vents his resentments. In the rambling notes that follow, we are exposed to the inner turmoil of the Underground Man, who represents the voice of his generation. An emotional, paranoid knot of contradictions, the spiteful narrator is also desperate to join a society he loathes, if only to prove his superiority to it.
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Amazing
- By Bryan on 02-19-19
By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others
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The Life of Samuel Johnson
- By: James Boswell
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 51 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the greatest biographies in the history of world literature. The book is full of humorous anecdote and rich characterization, and paints a vivid picture of 18th-century London, peopled by prominent personalities of the time.
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Wonderful!
- By Tad Davis on 02-02-18
By: James Boswell
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Plato's Republic
- By: Plato
- Narrated by: Ray Childs
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The Republic poses questions that endure: What is justice? What form of community fosters the best possible life for human beings? What is the nature and destiny of the soul? What form of education provides the best leaders for a good republic? What are the various forms of poetry and the other arts, and which ones should be fostered and which ones should be discouraged? How does knowing differ from believing?
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BEWARE: shortened version
- By Dranu on 03-08-20
By: Plato
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Dead Souls
- By: Nikolai Gogol, C. J. Hogarth - translator
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types.
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Captures absurdity of mid 19th century Russia
- By Darwin8u on 10-26-12
By: Nikolai Gogol, and others
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Flatland
- A Romance of Many Dimensions
- By: Edwin A Abbott
- Narrated by: Philip Harburgh
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In Flatland, originally published in 1884, a humble square describes his two-dimensional world to benefit the inhabitants of Spaceland, the three-dimensional realm he discovers when he is visited by a being from beyond his plane. With dry wit and wild imagination, author Edwin Abbott Abbott builds a meticulous fantasy world rooted in an astute apprehension of psychology, politics, and social structures, as well as basic geometry. The story of Flatland, at once ridiculous and profound, delivers an incisive satire of social discourse that remains remarkably relevant today.
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Philip Harburgh is a much better narrator
- By Joy Owleyes on 12-08-22
By: Edwin A Abbott
What listeners say about A Tale of a Tub
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- mICHELLE bACON
- 11-28-23
Where's the satire?
if you are a Latin, philosophy scholar then maybe this work will interest you and you will understand it. I find some literature to be enjoyable and sometimes challenging, but this one went way above and beyond my level of intellect. Swift was indeed a very smart man.
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- TiffanyD
- 10-14-18
Sometimes drifted into background noise
I tried really hard to pay attention through all of this but the truth is that I had many moments where my eyes started to glaze over (or what's the equivalent for ears?) and A Tale of a Tub just became background noise. Then I'd rewind an try again and the same thing would happen. I don't think that's the narrator's fault. I thought he was pretty good.
But I think my historical knowledge is not comprehensive enough to get all of the satire without significant annotations and an audiobook version doesn't really lend itself to copious footnotes. I have enjoyed Jonathan Swift in the past, but I kept getting lost in this. The "tale" itself was challenging to keep track of (Peter and Martin were obvious enough stand ins for Catholics and Lutherans but I confess I needed google to get who Jack was) and the digressions were even harder. Still a fan of Swift, and I bet audiobooks of Gulliver's Travels are great, but I couldn't make the format plus the content work for me here.
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1 person found this helpful