Death in Midsummer: And Other Stories
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Narrated by:
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Brian Nishii
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By:
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Yukio Mishima
About this listen
Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan, where the form is practiced as a major art.
Nine of Yukio Mishima’s finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.
©1966 New Directions Publishing Corporation (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Anonymous User on 03-12-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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Voices of the Fallen Heroes
- And Other Stories
- By: Yukio Mishima, Stephen Dodd - editor, John Nathan - introduction
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A new selection of 14 of Yukio Mishima's best short stories from the 1960s—his final decade—Voices of the Fallen Heroes offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers. In the title story, "Voices of the Fallen Heroes," a séance brings forth the spirits of young officers in the Imperial Army and the kamikaze pilots of World War II, who reproach the Emperor and mourn Japan’s modern decline. In another, Mishima recounts the true story of the time a deranged fan broke into his home at dawn, insisting on meeting the author and imploring him to "tell the truth."
By: Yukio Mishima, and others
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Sun and Steel
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Matthew Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known - and controversial - writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end, fits into none of them. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal.
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SNOOZEFEST
- By Anonymous User on 04-17-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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Kitchen
- By: Banana Yoshimoto
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
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First Time is the Charm
- By Anonymous User on 08-22-19
By: Banana Yoshimoto
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The Devotion of Suspect X
- By: Keigo Higashino, Alexander O. Smith Translated by
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor.
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not really like Larsson -- but that's OK
- By Anonymous User on 02-04-11
By: Keigo Higashino, and others
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Self-Portraits
- Stories
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing.
By: Osamu Dazai
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Satantango
- By: László Krasznahorkai
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. “Their world,” in the words of the translator George Szirtes is “rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”
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Tone. Sound. Psychology. Humor.
- By Anonymous User on 12-19-23
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Selected Non-Fictions, Volume 3
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger - editor translator, Esther Allen - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Diego Diment
- Length: 25 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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It will come as a surprise to some that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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In Praise of Shadows
- By: Junichiro Tanizaki
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 1 hr and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Through architecture, ceramics, theatre, food, women, and even toilets, Tanizaki explains the essence of shadows and darkness, and how they are able to augment beauty. He laments the heavy electric lighting of the West and its introduction to Japan, and shows how the artificial, bright, and polished aesthetic of the West contrasts unfavorably with the moody and natural light of the East.
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How to listen
- By Anonymous User on 03-25-18
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The Last Dream
- By: Pedro Almodóvar
- Narrated by: Colman Domingo, Rachel Weisz, Juan Diego Botto, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Making his English language debut, the iconoclastic, two-time Academy award-winning writer and director reveals his singular mind as never before in this collection of twelve remarkable stories spanning memoir, comedy, autofiction, parody, pastiche, and gothic fiction.
By: Pedro Almodóvar
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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
- By: Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer - foreword
- Narrated by: Jon Padgett, Linda Jones
- Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.
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Incredible!
- By Anonymous User on 02-27-23
By: Thomas Ligotti, and others
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Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- By: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
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Glad to have existed to enjoy reading this book!
- By Anonymous User on 08-11-21
By: Jean-Paul Sartre
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Out
- A Novel
- By: Natsuo Kirino
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot's ringleader but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society.
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Out...
- By Anonymous User on 06-24-16
By: Natsuo Kirino
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War and Peace
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 61 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is clearly seen in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle, all of them fully realized and equally memorable.
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Glad I finally decided to read it
- By Anonymous User on 09-25-05
By: Leo Tolstoy
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Earthlings
- A Novel
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.
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Intriguing but disturbing
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-21
By: Sayaka Murata
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Napoleon
- A Life
- By: Andrew Roberts
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 32 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Roberts' Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon's thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine.
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What a dynamo!
- By Anonymous User on 01-16-15
By: Andrew Roberts
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Musashi
- By: Eiji Yoshikawa, Charles S. Terry - translator
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 53 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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