Download Popular Authors Audiobooks in Arts & Entertainment, Music

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Title: Johann Sebastian Bach

Author: Herbert Francis Peyser

Narrator: Tom S. Weiss

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-21-17

Publisher: Spoken Realms

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He enriched established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organization, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Mass in B minor, two Passions, and over 300 cantatas of which around 200 survive. His music is revered for its technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth. Bach's abilities as an organist were highly respected during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognized as a great composer until a revival of interest in and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. Bach's life had none of the drama and spectacular conflicts that marked the careers of men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. His travels, far less extensive than those of his great contemporary, Handel, were confined to areas of a few hundred miles at most in central and northern Germany and were undertaken chiefly for sober professional purposes.

This record (according to the author) advances no claim whatever to any new or original slant, aims to do no more than furnish for those who listen a meager background of a few isolated high spots in Bach's outward life and a momentary side glance at a tiny handful of his supreme creations.

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Title: Light Come Shining

Subtitle: The Transformations of Bob Dylan

Author: Andrew McCarron

Narrator: Stephen Paul Aulridge Jr.

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-16-17

Publisher: Wetware Media

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 13 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

Bob Dylan is the prince of self-reinvention and deflection. Whether it's the folkies of Greenwich Village, the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s, born-again Christians, the Chabad Lubavitch community, or English department postmodernists, specific intellectual and sociopolitical groups have repeatedly claimed Bob Dylan as their spokesperson. But in the words of filmmaker Todd Haynes, who cast six actors to depict different facets of Dylan's life and artistic personae in his 2009 film I'm Not There, "The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was."

In Light Come Shining, writer Andrew McCarron uses psychological tools to examine three major turning points - or transformations - in Bob Dylan's life: the aftermath of his 1966 motorcycle "accident", his born-again conversion in 1978, and his recommitment to songwriting and performing in 1987. With fascinating insight, McCarron reveals how a common script undergirds Dylan's self-explanations of these changes; and, at the heart of this script, illuminates a fascinating story of spiritual death and rebirth that has captivated us all for generations.

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Title: Old Thunder

Subtitle: A Life of Hilaire Belloc

Author: Joseph Pearce

Narrator: Kevin F. Spalding

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-26-16

Publisher: TAN Books

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

Hilaire Belloc is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. At turns reviled or revered, depending on the audience, he was a razor sharp social commenter and a master of both poetry and prose who continues to captivate readers. In Old Thunder, Joseph Pearce examines Belloc's enduring impact on British intellectual life.

Along the way, Pearce uncovers Belloc's relationships with Chesterton, Waugh, and Sassoon, among others. Pearce also illuminates another side of Belloc's personality by relaying his long courtship with Elodie Hogan, her brief stint in a convent, and his ultimate grief at her death.

In this updated biography, with a new introduction by Dale Alhquist, Joseph Pearce uses previously unpublished letters and photographs to reveal in Belloc a romantic, complex, and solitary man, who is one of the true giants of the Catholic revival in the last century.

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Title: Agatha Christie Close Up

Subtitle: BBC Archive Recordings

Author: Agatha Christie

Narrator: Agatha Christie, Margaret Lockwood, Richard Attenborough

Format: Original Recording

Length: 1 hr and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-17-16

Publisher: BBC Worldwide Ltd.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

A fascinating collection of archive radio programmes focusing on the life and work of crime fiction's grande dame and featuring Agatha Christie in her own words.

Dame Agatha Christie published 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections in her lifetime, but to the public she remained an enigmatic figure. This quartet of BBC radio programmes looks at the woman behind the books and explores the career of one of Britain's most famous mystery writers.

Agatha Christie Close Up (1955) tells the story of the celebrated author, with contributions from Richard Attenborough, Allen Lane, Margaret Lockwood and Peter Saunders, while in The Mysterious Dame Agatha (1975), Cliff Michelmore presents an 85th birthday tribute with Peter Saunders, Nigel Stock and Julian Symons. Women of Mystery: Queen of Crime (1982) sees Jessica Mann investigating women crime writers and Christie in particular, and in Agatha Christie: Speaking Her Own Words (2015), we hear specially selected excerpts from the initial dictated version of Christie's autobiography.

Recorded in 1965, these unedited personal tapes were discovered by her grandson, Matthew Prichard, who introduces the programme. Featuring the voices of fellow writers, friends, family and the Queen of Crime herself, this wide-ranging collection sheds new light on the best-selling novelist of all time.

Duration: 2 hours approx.

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Title: American Legends: The Life of Charles Bronson

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Scott Clem

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-04-16

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

The leading men of the 1940s and '50s ably represented the visual and cultural expectations of those decades in their iconic films. Some were handsome and glib with quasi-classical dialogue, some could sing, and a few could dance, while others brought imposing athletic presences to thrillers, Westerns, and urban crime dramas.

However, with the advent of the early 1960s, popular culture entered a heightened age of verismo, a more frank and severe view of societal reality. Motion picture studios on both sides of the Atlantic, aware of the changing times, were quick to reflect it. The harsher light of violent new genres required a different sort of male protagonist, a character type who could put his humanity and uncertainty aside to act as a more ruthless hero than his predecessors. Paralleling real concerns over crime and an increasing disrespect for life and property, the public fell in love with the new "avenging angel" image and with Charles Bronson, the actor born at the perfect time in which to symbolize it in the grittier new films.

By the time Bronson emerged from a series of miniscule uncredited roles in the mid-1950s, the singing cowboy was two generations gone, save vestiges in television serials, such as Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The dancing romantic lead of the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire variety would soon exhaust itself as a genre in an age increasingly bent on realism and a more severe form of escape. Bronson possessed none of the gifts common to the heroes of the previous era. Lightheartedness did not become him, and by all accounts he was neither a singer nor a dancer. He could not offer the heft of Gary Cooper or John Wayne, although he shared a reserved quality with the former. He did not possess the pristine good looks of Gregory Peck. In fact one good-natured description making the rounds in Bronson's heyday likened him to "a Clark Gable who has been left out in the sun too long."

To accompany the rough-hewn appearance of Bronson's new class of hero, the typical script gave his remarkably enduring persona little to say in terms of dialogue that would reveal his inner thoughts. With minimal text, even those he attempted to help were unsure of his intentions, and few clues were offered by which the viewer could come to know his mind. As the grotesqueness of his characters' violent acts increased, so did the heinous deeds of the criminals he fought, upping the ante to an eager public in search of a simple cure for its social ills. In a career of almost 80 films and a total body of work totaling 160 appearances including on television, Bronson pushed the envelope of what graphic action the studios were willing to offer, what the censors would accept, and what the sensibilities of moviegoers were able to endure more than anyone in his era.

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Title: When I Was Old

Author: Georges Simenon

Narrator: Sean Barrett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-20-16

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 5 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

For personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of 60.

Georges Simenon's autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties and 'all the silly ideas that pass through my head', are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper.

Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships and his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find and to escape himself.

Critic Reviews:

"As revealed in these notebooks, Simenon's is a shrewd, lucid mind...the balance tips toward the real, the immediate, the mysteries of human complexity above all.... Utterly unpretentious." (The New York Times)

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Title: Catullus' Bedspread

Subtitle: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet

Author: Daisy Dunn

Narrator: Mike Grady

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-05-16

Publisher: HarperAudio

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

A vivid narrative that re-creates the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome's first modern poet, and follows a young man's journey through a world filled with all the indulgences and sexual excesses of the time, from doomed love affairs to shrewd political maneuvering and backstabbing - an accessible, appealing look at one of history's greatest poets.

Born to one of Verona's leading families, Catullus spent most of his young adulthood in Rome, mingling with the likes of Caesar and Cicero and chronicling his life through his poetry. Famed for his lyrical and subversive voice, his poems about his friends were jocular, often obscenely funny, while those who crossed him found themselves skewered in raunchy verse, sudden objects of hilarity and ridicule. These bawdy poems were disseminated widely throughout Rome. Many of his poems recalled his secret longstanding affair with the seductive older Clodia.

While Catullus and Clodia made love in the shadows, the whole of Italy was quaking as Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus forged a doomed alliance for power. During these tumultuous years, Catullus increasingly turned to darker subject matter, and he finally composed his greatest work of all: a poem about the decoration on a bedspread, which forms the heart of this biography, a work of beauty that will achieve immortality and make Catullus a legend.

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Title: A Stew or a Story

Subtitle: An Assortment of Short Works by M.F.K. Fisher

Author: M.F.K. Fisher

Narrator: Carolyn Cook

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 06-16-16

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

Like the savory, simple dishes she favored, M. F. K. Fisher's writing was often "short, stylish, concentrated in flavor, and varied in form", writes Joan Reardon in her introduction to this eclectic, lively collection. Magazine writing launched and helped to sustain Fisher's long, illustrious career and in these 57 pieces, we experience again the inimitable voice of the woman widely known to have elevated food writing to a literary art.

A Stew or a Story covers five decades of Fisher's writing for such notable and diverse publications as Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Ladies Home Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vogue. But collected here also are articles nearly impossible to find from lesser-known, more ephemeral magazines. Essays on people, places, and of course food, mix here with delightful fiction to become a delectable feast.

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Title: The Story of Alice

Subtitle: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland

Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Narrator: Shaun Grindell

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-24-16

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

Following his acclaimed biography of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll's imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland.

The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they were. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell's death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll's books and other works of Victorian literature.

Critic Reviews:

"[C]atnip for serious Carroll enthusiasts and academics." (Booklist)

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Title: Shadow Box

Subtitle: An Amateur in the Ring

Author: George Plimpton, Mike Lupica - foreword

Narrator: Jeff Bottoms

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 05-04-16

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 5 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

George Plimpton makes his riskiest foray into participatory journalism - stepping into the ring against a champion boxer - in Shadow Box, now including never-before-heard content from the Plimpton archives.

Stepping into the ring against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, George Plimpton pauses to wonder what ever induced him to become a participatory journalist. Bloodied but unbowed, he holds his own in the bout - and lives to tell in this timeless book on boxing and its devotees, among them Ali, Joe Frazier, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer.

Shadow Box is one of Plimpton's most engaging studies of professional sport, told through the eyes of an inquisitive and astute amateur. From the gym, from the locker room, ringside, and even in the harsh glare of the ring itself, Plimpton documents what it is like to be a boxer, an artist of mayhem.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

Critic Reviews:

"Excellent sports reporting. The chapters on Muhammad Ali are delightful, and Ali is not easy to write about." (Time)

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