Listen free for 30 days
-
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
- Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
- Narrated by: Caitlin Thorburn
- Length: 23 hrs and 31 mins
- Categories: Arts & Entertainment, Art
People who bought this also bought...
-
Funny Weather
- Art in an Emergency
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.
-
-
A wonderful inspiring hopeful read
- By Anonymous User on 10-08-20
-
Ninth Street Women
- Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
- By: Mary Gabriel
- Narrated by: Lisa Stathoplos
- Length: 40 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-century abstract painting - not as muses but as artists.
-
-
Unexpectedly astonishing
- By Strayficshion on 11-10-20
-
How to Be an Artist
- By: Jerry Saltz
- Narrated by: Jerry Saltz
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the witty and passionate chief art critic for New York magazine, Jerry Saltz is often approached by artists, both amateur and professional, asking him for advice: How do I get started? How do I get better? Is what I'm doing even art at all? They want to know, in short, how to be an artist. Now, expanding on his viral cover story for New York magazine - and drawing on his decades of immersion in the art world - Saltz has the answers. How to Be an Artist is an indispensable book of practical inspiration for creative people of all kinds.
-
-
Loved it! Actually made me work!
- By Thomasson on 26-06-20
-
Intimations
- Six Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
-
-
So eloquently captures the complexity of feeling
- By Ms. N. K. Jones on 27-10-20
-
Art & Fear
- Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
- By: David Bayles, Ted Orland
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing free will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.
-
-
Valuable insight from experienced artists
- By Jane on 07-06-16
-
Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
-
-
Five Star
- By Hugh M. Clarke on 01-04-17
-
Funny Weather
- Art in an Emergency
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.
-
-
A wonderful inspiring hopeful read
- By Anonymous User on 10-08-20
-
Ninth Street Women
- Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
- By: Mary Gabriel
- Narrated by: Lisa Stathoplos
- Length: 40 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-century abstract painting - not as muses but as artists.
-
-
Unexpectedly astonishing
- By Strayficshion on 11-10-20
-
How to Be an Artist
- By: Jerry Saltz
- Narrated by: Jerry Saltz
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the witty and passionate chief art critic for New York magazine, Jerry Saltz is often approached by artists, both amateur and professional, asking him for advice: How do I get started? How do I get better? Is what I'm doing even art at all? They want to know, in short, how to be an artist. Now, expanding on his viral cover story for New York magazine - and drawing on his decades of immersion in the art world - Saltz has the answers. How to Be an Artist is an indispensable book of practical inspiration for creative people of all kinds.
-
-
Loved it! Actually made me work!
- By Thomasson on 26-06-20
-
Intimations
- Six Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
-
-
So eloquently captures the complexity of feeling
- By Ms. N. K. Jones on 27-10-20
-
Art & Fear
- Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
- By: David Bayles, Ted Orland
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing free will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.
-
-
Valuable insight from experienced artists
- By Jane on 07-06-16
-
Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
-
-
Five Star
- By Hugh M. Clarke on 01-04-17
-
Keeping an Eye Open
- Essays on Art
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, for a variety of journals and magazines. Gathering them for this book, he realised that he had unwittingly been retracing the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.
-
-
'allo 'allo
- By Matthew on 26-08-15
-
The Lonely City
- Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Zara Ramm
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-30s, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Fascinated by the experience, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Humane, provocative and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art.
-
-
Human loneliness, art and now.
- By R P on 13-10-20
-
Just Kids
- By: Patti Smith
- Narrated by: Patti Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Scribner’s Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol’s Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc
-
-
The most spectacular experience
- By Emma on 01-12-15
-
The Descent of Man
- By: Grayson Perry
- Narrated by: Jonny Philips
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Grayson Perry has been thinking about masculinity - what it is, how it operates, why little boys are thought to be made of slugs and snails - since he was a boy. Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place for everyone? What would happen if we rethought the old, outdated macho version of manhood and embraced a different idea of what makes a man?
-
-
Truely brilliant!!
- By Amanda on 25-01-17
-
What I Loved
- By: Siri Hustvedt
- Narrated by: John Chancer
- Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1975 art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a New York gallery. He buys the work and tracks down its creator, Bill Weschler, and the two men embark on a lifelong friendship. This is the story of their intense and troubled relationship, of the women in their lives and their work, of art and hysteria, love and seduction and their sons - born the same year but whose lives take very different paths.
-
-
A dizzyingly stupid book
- By Garaiiburu on 20-04-20
-
The Cost of Living
- By: Deborah Levy
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 3 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.
-
-
Long Poem?
- By Bee on 14-04-18
-
Possession
- A Romance
- By: A. S. Byatt
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 21 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.
-
-
Great book made greater by superb performance
- By Falluntilyoufly on 19-04-19
-
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
- By: Jia Tolentino
- Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are living in the era of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. In these nine interlinked essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s brightest young talent, explores her own coming of age in this warped and confusing landscape.
-
-
Insightful and thought provoking
- By Paulo on 01-11-19
-
The Art of Cruelty
- A Reckoning
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.
-
Memories of the Future
- By: Siri Hustvedt
- Narrated by: Katherine Fenton
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A provocative, exuberant novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, which tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbour, Lucy Brite. As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S. H. transcribes her neighbour's bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one night when Lucy bursts into her apartment to rescue S. H. from a frightening situation.
-
-
Tried!
- By holly bird on 02-04-19
-
The Body Keeps the Score
- Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma
- By: Bessel van der Kolk
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this audiobook, Dr Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress. Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma - which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.
-
-
Good advice but hard to relate to
- By Deborah on 11-07-20
-
The Iliad & The Odyssey
- By: Homer
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 28 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Little is known about the Ancient Greek oral poet Homer, the supposed 8th century BC author of the world-read Iliad and his later masterpiece, The Odyssey. These classic epics provided the basis for Greek education and culture throughout the classical age and formed the backbone of humane education through the birth of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity.
-
-
And his armour fell rattling around him...
- By P. Ward on 03-11-11
Summary
As well as being a prize-winning, best-selling novelist, Siri Hustvedt is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the fields of neurology, feminism, art criticism and philosophy. She believes passionately that art and science are too often kept separate and that conversations across disciplines are vital to increasing our knowledge of the human mind and body, how they connect and how we think, feel and see.
The essays in this volume - all written between 2011 and 2015 - are in three parts. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women brings together penetrating pieces on particular artists and writers such as Picasso, Kiefer and Susan Sontag as well as essays investigating the biases that affect how we judge art, literature and the world in general.
'The Delusions of Certainty' is an essay about the mind/body problem, showing how this age-old philosophical puzzle has shaped contemporary debates on many subjects and how every discipline is coloured by what lies beyond argument - desire, belief and the imagination.
The essays in the final section, 'What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition', tackle such elusive neurological disorders as synesthesia and hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound consideration of suicide and a towering reconsideration of Kierkegaard.
Together they form an extremely stimulating, thoughtful, wide-ranging exploration of some of the fundamental questions about human beings and the human condition, delivered with Siri Hustvedt's customary lucidity, vivacity and infectiously questioning intelligence.
More from the same
What listeners say about A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jay P
- 27-03-19
Content great but narrator not
A fascinating series of essays spoiled by frequent mispronounciations and incorrect emphases from the narrator.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 24-01-20
Interesting book, awful narration
Siri Hustvedt has this distinct, beautifully cerebral and engaging prose that makes anything she writes both thought provoking and a joy to read. Sadly, none of that comes through here. Finishing this book has proven to be a challenge, not because of language or subject matter, but due to its narration: dull, inconsistent, with strange stops & confusing word emphasis, that make me question the narrator's understanding of punctuation. Get yourself a written copy and save yourself the 23+ hours of frustration.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
- Anonymous User
- 09-10-20
Knausgård-nausea?
Brilliant book. Irritating nnarrator. KNAUSGÅRD is mentioned over ten times, pronounced very wrong,it sounnds like nausea?