
Wonderworks
The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
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Narrated by:
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Jacques Roy
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By:
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Angus Fletcher
About this listen
This “fascinating” (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times best-selling author of Outliers) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs - rivaling scientific inventions - and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.
Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere - from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others - each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.
Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature - from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.
A “refreshing and remarkable” (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and “contains many instances of critical insight.... What’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology” (The New York Times).
©2021 Angus Fletcher. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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What I gained was so much more. it will require me to listen multiple times to gain all that I can from this book. In addition to discovering new ways to absorb literature, I was thoroughly entertained.
The writing is beautiful and engaging. I haven't thought this much, and at this depth, about literature since my honors program courses in college...and I don't mean just any of those particular courses -- I mean the best ones I ever took!
I highly recommend this for anyone who enjoys the magic of literature.
Amazing!
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Mind blowing.
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For writers and readers
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Powerful
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to find them all in one place
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Should have been dry and boring— it was not
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Wow!!!
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Greatest book ever...
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a useful way of understanding storytelling
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Kept coming back
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