The Dead Ladies Project
Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
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The Dead Ladies Project
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Narrated by:
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Amy McFadden
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By:
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Jessa Crispin
About this listen
When Jessa Crispin was 30, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey - but it's also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in a literary map of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependent on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
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- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 117
Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Limonov
- The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia
- By: Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert - translator
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes."
By: Emmanuel Carrère, and others
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Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 52
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 52
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Difficult and Better in Print
- By Nick O. on 07-18-23
By: Rachel Cusk
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The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 27 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 124
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Story4 out of 5 stars 89
Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of a handful of truly great living writers. The internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author's storytelling shines in this epic love story, a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Okay, Salmon, We get that you're a genious already
- By Julie A Quinn on 04-23-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 119
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By: Kim Wright
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4 out of 5 stars 60
Che Milan's life is falling apart. Not only has her longtime lover abruptly dumped her, but her eccentric, demanding mother has recently died. When an urn of ashes arrives along with a note reminding Che of a half-forgotten promise to take her mother to Canterbury, Che finds herself reluctantly undertaking a pilgrimage. Within days she joins a group of women who are walking the 60 miles from London to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The Canterbury Sisters
- By Melissa on 09-22-19
By: Kim Wright
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 61
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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5 out of 5 stars
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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Manhood for Amateurs
- The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 240
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4 out of 5 stars 149
As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as a father, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Terrible
- By Ken on 10-14-09
By: Michael Chabon
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 136
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 124
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Story4 out of 5 stars 125
Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story5 out of 5 stars 24
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 69
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4 out of 5 stars 63
Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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The Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 643
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 571
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Story4 out of 5 stars 569
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are 35,000 feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent 40 years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A bit of a downer
- By Jody Cox on 08-01-18
By: Meg Wolitzer