The Eye You See With
Selected Nonfiction
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The Eye You See With
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Narrated by:
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Robert Fass
About this listen
"The definitive collection of nonfiction from war reporting to literary criticism to the sharpest political writing from the legend of American letters." (Vanity Fair)
Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels - including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate - earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.
The Eye You See With - the first and only collection of Robert Stone's nonfiction - was carefully selected by award-winning novelist and Stone biographer Madison Smartt Bell. Divided into three sections, the collection includes the best of Stone's war reporting, his writing on social change, and his reflections on the art of fiction. This is an extraordinary volume that offers up a clear-eyed look at the 20th century and secures Robert Stone's place as one of the most original figures in all of American letters.
©2020 Robert Stone, Madison Smartt Bell (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin HarcourtListeners also enjoyed...
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,318
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,134
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,130
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4 out of 5 stars 50
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
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No Name in the Street
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 399
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 342
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Story5 out of 5 stars 338
This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A strange and terrible vehicle
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-20
By: James Baldwin
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Chasing the Light
- Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game
- By: Oliver Stone
- Narrated by: Oliver Stone
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 306
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 256
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Story5 out of 5 stars 253
An intimate memoir by the controversial, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Impressive
- By Merle O. Tanner on 10-07-20
By: Oliver Stone
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Notes on a Foreign Country
- An American Abroad in a Post-American World
- By: Suzy Hansen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 203
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 176
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 173
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A MUST-READ for all Truth-Seeking American wh
- By Parveen Mehdi-Newton on 12-08-17
By: Suzy Hansen
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 213
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 186
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 21
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Yet another Gornick masterpiece
- By Lo on 01-14-23
By: Vivian Gornick
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 182
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 152
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 151
Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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The Mind Parasites
- The Supernatural, Metaphysical Cult Thriller
- By: Colin Wilson
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4 out of 5 stars 64
Wilson has blended H. P. Lovecraft's dark vision with his own revolutionary philosophy and unique narrative powers to produce a stunning, high-tension story of vaulting imagination. A professor makes a horrifying discovery while excavating a sinister archaeological site. For over 200 years, mind parasites have been lurking in the deepest layers of human consciousness, feeding on human life force and steadily gaining a foothold on the planet. Now they threaten humanity's extinction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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wow
- By Esmeralda on 09-26-18
By: Colin Wilson
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 149
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 104
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 103
From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 166
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 140
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Story5 out of 5 stars 141
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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Humankind
- A Hopeful History
- By: Rutger Bregman, Erica Moore, Elizabeth Manton
- Narrated by: Rutger Bregman, Thomas Judd
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,070
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,792
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1,784
If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.
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2 out of 5 stars
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He’s correct but he misrepresented the data
- By Andrea Allen on 02-09-21
By: Rutger Bregman, and others
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others