Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman's The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.
No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies

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Explains how to listen from the composers point of view.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A book club discuss the works of Jane Austen and experience their own affairs of the heart in this charming “tribute to Austen that manages to capture her spirit” (The Boston Globe).
In California’s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements...

""It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . ." " So begins this novel-from-life by the best-selling author of "Girl, Interrupted, " an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of "Cambridge, " would rather be home than in any of these places....

"His novel, The Art Thief, was a bestseller in five countries and is translated into 17 languages. His The Art of Forgery, Stealing the Mystic Lamb and Slovenology were international bestsellers. His book Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Charney is now a professor at University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, where Charney has lived for many years"-- Interested in art but feel under-informed?...

A self-styled intellectual rebel, William Deresiewicz never thought Jane Austen's novels had anything to offer him. But when he was assigned to read Emma as a Columbia graduate student, something extraordinary happened. Austen's devotion to the everyday and her belief in the value of ordinary lives ignited something in him. Viewing the world through her eyes and treating people as generously, his life suddenly acquired the fascination of a novel.

This program is read by the author. From the chief architect of the Pandora Radio's Music Genome Project comes a definitive and groundbreaking examination of how your mind, body, and upbringing influence the music you love. Everyone loves music. But what is it that makes music so universally beloved and have such a powerful effect on us? In this sweeping and authoritative audiobook, Dr. Nolan Gasser-a composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the...

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....