Why Read
Selected Writings 2001-2021
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Why Read
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Narrated by:
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Will Self
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By:
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Will Self
About this listen
From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literature
From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, Will Self’s Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.
Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback, and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell, and Conrad. He writes movingly on W. G. Sebald’s childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs’s Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask audiences how, what, and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self’s trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humor infuse every piece.
A book that examines how the human stream of consciousness flows into and out of literature, Why Read will satisfy both old and new audiences of this icon of contemporary literature.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 86
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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High Weirdness
- Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
- By: Erik Davis
- Narrated by: Erik Davis
- Length: 20 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 171
A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality - but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?
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5 out of 5 stars
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High Weirdness
- By Amazon Customer on 09-17-20
By: Erik Davis
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Time Travel
- A History
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 505
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 446
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Story4 out of 5 stars 439
James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fiction gives us Truth by connecting the dots
- By Gary on 04-21-17
By: James Gleick
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Origins of The Wheel of Time
- The Legends and Mythologies That Inspired Robert Jordan
- By: Michael Livingston, Harriet McDougal - contributor, Robert Jordan
- Narrated by: Harriet McDougal, Kate Reading, Michael Kramer, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 136
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 136
Take a deep dive into the real-world history and mythology that inspired the world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time®. This companion to the internationally bestselling series will delve into the creation of Jordan’s masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes. Michael Livingston tells the behind-the-scenes story of who Jordan was, how he worked, and why he holds such an important place in modern literature. Origins of The Wheel of Time will provide exciting knowledge and insights to both new and longtime fans.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Agenda driven ideological bend.
- By Maxwell on 06-19-23
By: Michael Livingston, and others
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On the Natural History of Destruction
- By: W. G. Sebald, Anthea Bell - Translator
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things - such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF - too terrible to bear.
By: W. G. Sebald, and others
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Gods of the Upper Air
- How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- By: Charles King
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 259
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 257
A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Book, Much Needed despite poor performance
- By J. Kahn on 08-21-19
By: Charles King
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,066
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 940
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 934
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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4 out of 5 stars
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- By: Spencer Klavan
- Narrated by: Spencer Klavan
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 188
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 171
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Story5 out of 5 stars 169
It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Spectacular! A must read!
- By M.A. on 02-15-23
By: Spencer Klavan
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Parfit
- A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality
- By: David Edmonds
- Narrated by: Zeb Soanes
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story5 out of 5 stars 41
Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it
- By Anna Karenina on 07-05-23
By: David Edmonds
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- By: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 38
Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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5 out of 5 stars
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand-copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Papyrus is the story of the book’s journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. Irene Vallejo evokes the great mosaic of literature in the ancient world, all the while illuminating how ancient ideas about education, censorship, authority, and identity still resonate today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
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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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William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 97
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 83
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Story5 out of 5 stars 83
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch