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Carson McCullers
- A Life
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals
V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.”
She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.
While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.
Cover image: Carson McCullers, 1940 [detail] by Louise Dahl-Wolfe © 2024 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artists Rights Society (ARS)
Critic reviews
“The time is ripe, then, for a more clear-eyed appraisal [of McCullers’s life and legacy]. With Carson McCullers: A Life, Mary V. Dearborn delivers . . . Dearborn approaches her subject with admiration and also with a healthy skepticism. She’s armed with archival material unavailable to many of her predecessors.” —Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker
"A colorful and finely detailed portrait of McCullers’ public and private lives . . . Dearborn weaves careful, critical readings of McCullers’ writings with detailed descriptions of the author’s life, producing an exemplary critical biography of one of our greatest writers.” —BookPage, starred
“A necessary book . . . [Carson McCullers: A Life] builds on [previous biographies] and considers newly released material, including letters and journals and, most tantalizingly, transcripts of McCullers’s late-life psychiatric sessions with the female doctor who would become her lover and gatekeeper . . . [The book] functions as a rich history of queer culture during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s . . . It’s to Dearborn’s credit that she suggests McCullers’s deep humanity, her subversive talents as a writer and lonely observer, and a strong sense of what McCullers herself called ‘her sad, happy life.’” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
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the brightest stars can self destruct
- By Placeholder on 09-22-21
By: Gerald Clarke
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Reflections in a Golden Eye
- By: Carson McCullers
- Narrated by: Christopher Kipiniak
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter.
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Square pegs and round holes
- By Darwin8u on 02-01-20
By: Carson McCullers
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Bitter Crop
- The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year
- By: Paul Alexander
- Narrated by: Maya Days
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.
By: Paul Alexander
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The Other Olympians
- Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
- By: Michael Waters
- Narrated by: Jennifer Pickens
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era.
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Wonderful Story from History
- By Travis Osland on 07-07-24
By: Michael Waters
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Rabbit Heart
- A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story
- By: Kristine S. Ervin
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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For readers of My Dark Places and I'll Be Gone in the Dark, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother.
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The best part of this book is the title
- By Liz Mc on 05-25-24
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No Judgment
- Essays
- By: Lauren Oyler
- Narrated by: Lauren Oyler
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In her writing for Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature—whether celebratory or scarily harsh—have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today’s fraught environment?
By: Lauren Oyler
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American Zion
- A New History of Mormonism
- By: Benjamin E. Park
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 in the so-called "burned-over district" of upstate New York, which was producing seers and prophets daily. Most of the new creeds flamed out; Smith's would endure, becoming the most significant homegrown religion in American history. In American Zion Benjamin E. Park presents a fresh, sweeping account of the Latter-day Saints.
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Lots of commentary and broad non-Mormon historical generalities, thin on detailed Mormon history.
- By anonymous on 02-13-24
By: Benjamin E. Park
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Cocktails with George and Martha
- Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- By: Philip Gefter
- Narrated by: Alexa Morden
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. The play transpires over one long, boozy night, laying bare the lies, compromises, and scalding love that have sustained a middle-aged couple through decades of marriage. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn’t be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.
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Another Bad Narration
- By TPH on 02-25-24
By: Philip Gefter
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Shakespeare's Sisters
- How Women Wrote the Renaissance
- By: Ramie Targoff
- Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare’s England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-sixteenth century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men.
By: Ramie Targoff
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Miss May Does Not Exist
- The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius
- By: Carrie Courogen
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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As part of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, May revolutionized sketch comedy before striking out on her own to make history as the third woman to be admitted into the Directors Guild of America when she wrote, directed, and starred in 1971’s A New Leaf. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, May was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters and script doctors and one of the only women directing within the studio system. After a box-office bomb, May never directed a feature again, though she continued to write films.
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A Rose-Colored Apologia for Elaine May
- By Yenrab Namrehs on 06-30-24
By: Carrie Courogen
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Cloistered
- My Years as a Nun
- By: Catherine Coldstream
- Narrated by: Catherine Coldstream
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Cloistered takes the listener deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery as it approaches the third Millennium and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfold her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, quite unaware of the complexity and dangers that lie ahead.
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So boring.
- By 7twists on 07-06-24
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Whiskey Tender
- A Memoir
- By: Deborah Taffa
- Narrated by: Charley Flyte
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
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I liked the evolution of the main character and her relationship to her father.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-06-24
By: Deborah Taffa
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Reading Genesis
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.
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I couldn't finish it
- By Customer on 04-17-24
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Flight of the WASP
- The Rise, Fall, and Future of America's Original Ruling Class
- By: Michael Gross
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From Colonial America's founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the clans progress, prosper, and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge.
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way too long
- By Marietta Whittlesey, M.S. on 05-17-24
By: Michael Gross