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Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir Audiobook, by Deirdre Bair Play Audiobook Sample

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir Audiobook

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir Audiobook, by Deirdre Bair Play Audiobook Sample
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Read By: Suzanne Toren Publisher: Random House Audio Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 9.17 hours at 1.5x Speed 6.88 hours at 2.0x Speed Release Date: November 2019 Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9780593146866

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

43

Longest Chapter Length:

36:41 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

17 seconds

Average Chapter Length:

19:16 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

2

Other Audiobooks Written by Deirdre Bair: > View All...

Publisher Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.      Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.      Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life--its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.

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"[A] gripping ‘bio-memoir.’"

— Booklist (starred review)

Awards

  • A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
  • Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Biography
  • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019
  • Among shortlisted titles for Pulitzer Prize (Biography), 2020

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About Deirdre Bair

Deirdre Bair is an award–winning biographer whose Parisian Lives was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Shereceived the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by the New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Saul Steinberg were both New York Times Notable Books.

About Suzanne Toren

Suzanne Toren, award-winning narrator, has over thirty years of experience in narration. She was named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She has won the American Foundation for the Blind’s Scourby Award for Narrator of the Year, AudioFile magazine named her the 2009 Best Voice in Nonfiction & Culture, and she is the recipient of multiple Earphones Awards. She performs on and off Broadway and in regional theaters and has appeared on Law & Order and in various soap operas.