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Benjamin's Crossing Audiobook
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Publisher Description
The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days--adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini.
It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin--the German-Jewish critic and philosopher--has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.
Beloved biographical novelist Jay Parini's thrilling tale of escape is beautifully interwoven with vignettes of Benjamin's complex, cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years with the German Youth Movement, his university days. His close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, and many other well-known artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's intimate circle between the two world wars. Part tragedy, part dark comedy, this sharply realized historical novel tells one of the great and most moving peripheral stories of the Holocaust.
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"Benjamin’s Crossing is a stunning novel of war, intellectual history, and the great divide civilization crossed in the year 1940. . . . Humorous, profound, and affecting."
— Erica Jong
Quotes
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A piercing, magnificent novel.
— Amos Oz -
Painstakingly researched and dramatically recounted. . . . [Benjamin’s Crossing] has something important to tell us.
— The New York Times Book Review -
Jay Parini has written an exciting ‘adventure story,’ part Chaplin, part Kafka, and wholly emblematic of our dark age.
— Gore Vidal -
Parini’s re-creation of [Walter Benjamin’s] life is a tender, wise and even sadly funny achievement.
— Daily News -
Poignant and eloquent.
— Harold Bloom
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About Jay Parini
Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. His six novels also include Benjamin’s Crossing and The Apprentice Lover. His volumes of poetry include The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. In addition to biographies of Gore Vidal, John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, he has written a volume of essays on literature and politics, as well as The Art of Teaching. He edited the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications.
About the Narrators
Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, director, film producer, and multiaward–winning narrator. He has won several Audie Awards for best narration, including for 2019’s Best Male Narrator of the Year. He was named by Booklist as winner of their 2023 Voice of Choice Award, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, from classics to modern masters, from bestsellers to the inspirational, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners to spine-tingling series, and much more. In television and film, he is best known for his roles in A Murder at the End of the World, The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush, and Romeo Must Die. He is also trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.
Kathleen Gati is an award-winning actress who has starred in a number of Hungarian television series and films.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.
Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she’s played on-screen.
JD Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. He is a classically trained actor, and his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, Law & Order, Hack, Sherrybaby, Diary of a City Priest, and Lucky Number Slevin. He is the recipient of more than a dozen Earphones Awards for narration and an Odyssey Honor for G. Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy, and he was also named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013. An adjunct professor at Los Angeles Southwest College, he has an MFA in theater from Temple University.