
The Bell Jar
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Narrated by:
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Maggie Gyllenhaal
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By:
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Sylvia Plath
About this listen
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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Regretting You
- By: Colleen Hoover
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby, Lauren Ezzo
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Morgan is determined to prevent her daughter from making the same mistakes she did. By getting pregnant and married way too young, Morgan put her own dreams on hold. Clara doesn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her predictable mother doesn’t have a spontaneous bone in her body.
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Great book, terrible narration
- By LaurenV2003 on 01-17-20
By: Colleen Hoover
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Spring House
- By: Mary Ellen Taylor
- Narrated by: Shannon McManus
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Pregnant and still grieving the death of her fiancé, historian Megan Buchanan is forging ahead on a dream project: to restore to its original glory the landmark hunting lodge her own great-great-grandfather built on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. With the help of her fiancé’s caring best friend, it’s sure to draw much-needed tourist revenue to Cape Hudson, a town rich in southern history. However, it’s Spring House, the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds, that holds the most intriguing history for Megan.
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This is a sequel... very confusing!
- By Maria on 07-17-19
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The Last Dress from Paris
- By: Jade Beer
- Narrated by: Tamsin Topolski
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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London, 2017. There’s no one Lucille adores more than her grandmother. So when her beloved Granny Sylvie asks for Lucille’s assistance with a small matter, she’s happy to help. The next thing she knows, Lucille is on a train to Paris, tasked with retrieving a priceless Dior dress. But not everything is as it seems, and what Lucille finds in a small Parisian apartment will have her scouring the city for answers to a question that could change her entire life.
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The Last Dress from Paris
- By Mona-Alisa on 07-01-22
By: Jade Beer
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Children of the Stars
- By: Mario Escobar
- Narrated by: Zach Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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August 1942. Jacob and Moses Stein, two young Jewish brothers, are staying with their aunt in Paris amid the Nazi occupation. The boys’ parents, well-known German playwrights, have left the brothers in their aunt’s care until they can find safe harbor for their family. But before the Steins can reunite, a great and terrifying roundup occurs. The French gendarmes, under Nazi order, arrest the boys and take them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver - a massive, bleak structure in Paris where thousands of France’s Jews are being forcibly detained.
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Innocence can only be lost once
- By Kenny Russell on 09-01-21
By: Mario Escobar
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The Roanoke Girls
- A Novel
- By: Amy Engel
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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After her mother's suicide, 15-year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran...fast and far away. Eleven years later Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run, too? Or something worse?
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Ick, ugh, yuck! Spoilers ahead!
- By NMwritergal on 03-12-17
By: Amy Engel
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Piranesi
- By: Susanna Clarke
- Narrated by: Chiwetel Ejiofor
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.
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Fascinating Social Study
- By Henry V on 02-26-21
By: Susanna Clarke
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Recursion
- A Novel
- By: Blake Crouch
- Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom, Abby Craden
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At first, it looks like a disease. An epidemic that spreads through no known means, driving its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. But the force that’s sweeping the world is no pathogen. It’s just the first shock wave, unleashed by a stunning discovery - and what’s in jeopardy is not our minds but the very fabric of time itself. In New York City, Detective Barry Sutton is closing in on the truth - and in a remote laboratory, neuroscientist Helena Smith is unaware that she alone holds the key to this mystery...and the tools for fighting back.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Breezybealle on 06-12-19
By: Blake Crouch
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All We Ever Wanted
- A Novel
- By: Emily Giffin
- Narrated by: Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Milton Bagby, Catherine Taber
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Nina Browning is living the good life after marrying into Nashville's elite. More recently, her husband made a fortune selling his tech business, and their adored son has been accepted to Princeton. Yet sometimes the middle-class small-town girl in Nina wonders if she's strayed from the person she once was. Tom Volpe is a single dad working multiple jobs while struggling to raise his headstrong daughter, Lyla. His road has been lonely, long, and hard, but he finally starts to relax after Lyla earns a scholarship to Windsor Academy, Nashville's most prestigious private school.
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Narrator choice for Tom is bizarre!
- By R. Cornelius on 06-28-18
By: Emily Giffin
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My Own Words
- By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mary Hartnett, Wendy W. Williams
- Narrated by: Linda Lavin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book from Ruth Bader Ginsburg since becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1993 - a witty, engaging, serious, and playful collection of writings and speeches from the woman who has had a powerful and enduring influence on law, women's rights, and popular culture. My Own Words is a selection of writings and speeches by Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and more.
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Spectacularly Dry
- By CMP on 07-27-18
By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others
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The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter
- By: Theodora Goss
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Jekyll, alone and penniless following her parents' deaths, is curious about the secrets of her father's mysterious past. One clue in particular hints that Edward Hyde, her father's former friend and a murderer, may be nearby, and there is a reward for information leading to his capture...a reward that would solve all of her immediate financial woes. But her hunt leads her to Hyde's daughter, Diana, a feral child left to be raised by nuns.
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Cute, erratic, sloppy but not without charm
- By Rachel on 07-07-17
By: Theodora Goss
What listeners say about The Bell Jar
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- Keelyn Henning
- 02-05-16
A classic done right
Maggie Gyllenhaal was the best choice to narrate this wonderful classic. Her smooth yet demanding voice made me not want to stop listening. If you loved this book in print you will love listening to Maggie tell you the story as well
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26 people found this helpful
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- Richard Delman
- 07-23-18
A remarkable achievement; the perfect narrator.
I believe that most people, at least most of the Boomer generation, know this book as a true classic of the 20th century. Few books have tackled the harsh realities of a suicidal decline by the author. This alone, the fact that the book is largely autobiographical, is an important part of what makes it such an overwhelming accomplishment. The first half of the book is much lighter than the second half. During the first half Esther Greenwood, the protagonist/stand-in for Ms. Plath, has some enjoyable moments, particularly in a month that she spends in New York City, working as a kind of student intern at a fashion magazine. There are maybe twenty of these "girls," in the program, all of them staying at a hotel that is called the Amazon but is, I believe, a very thinly disguised version of the Barbizon, a proper hotel for women in which no men are allowed in a woman's room at any time. This part of the book is not light-hearted fun: Esther clearly demonstrates the very early signs of the depression that eventually claims her life. However, she and a couple of girlfriends enjoy the city and its amazing gifts in ways that are occasionally fun, if rather grim fun. One particularly grim fun episode is a luncheon at which the girls all eat a cocktail made from an "avocado pear" (I believe that here on the Left Coast we just call this an avocado). The cocktail features a scooped-out avocado half that is filled with crabmeat, mayonnaise, paprika and so forth. Either the crab or the mayo or both is "loaded with ptomaine," and the poor girls throw up their insides for an entire night. If comedy is tragedy plus time, then this episode is a good example of how we can laugh at something which was truly horrendous in the moment.
The second half of the book is much rougher. Esther begins to come apart, and there is no room for denial on anyone's part. Her mother tries very hard to provide for Esther, and to get the "right" kinds of treatment for her. Some of what she gets is the perfectly wrong treatment, i.e., hospitalization and shock treatments at a private hospital run by a psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon. While it is true that electroshock treatment can be helpful in the cases of treatment-resistant severe depression, the experience that Esther endures is so painful and so intimately described that one can just barely listen to the words without yelling "Stop!" at the callow psychiatrist. During my training I actually administered EST at a Veteran's Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina. Nothing will make you think a thousand times about its so-called efficacy as having to administer this awful procedure to a patient. Even when the process was improved to the point where a grand mal seizure was suppressed, no one could mistake the profound shock, literally and figuratively, that the patient was going through. Needless to say, the treatments didn't work for Esther, and so she continued down the slippery slope into the abyss.
The good news about this audiobook is Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is one of my favorite actors on the screen. I didn't know that she narrated audiobooks, but I am thrilled about it. If you saw her and James Spader in the deeply troubling movie "Secretary," you hold the image of Maggie portraying one of the most challenging parts anywhere in either literature or movies. I won't go on about this except to say that the relationship between the two leads (Spader is a lawyer who is his usual extremely creepy self, and Maggie is his secretary) quickly progresses from brand new to a spanking connection. Quite literally. Maggie Gyllenhaal pulls this off perfectly, with her extraordinarily expressive face and her stellar abilities as an actor. She applies these same skills, without the visuals, in The Bell Jar, and I think that I will remember this performance for as long as I will remember the tortured young woman in "Secretary." From this point forward, I will gladly listen to almost anything that Maggie narrates. Jake may get more work, but IMHO Maggie is the superior sibling by leaps and bounds. As Esther descends, Maggie's depiction of the awful metamorphosis is spellbinding. Even though we know that the end is coming, somehow the nutty optimist in all of us keeps hoping that she will by some miracle be saved. We think: she's just too good and sensitive a person to die like this.
Buy this book. Although it is quite difficult in some parts, the sheer talent on view, so to speak, is towering.
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7 people found this helpful
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- M. Ryder
- 04-12-16
Why All The Hype?
I'm still trying to figure out what I seem to be missing because clearly, everybody but me loves this book. Despite the story being based on the author's real life, I honestly found the story itself to be rather boring, with very little ever happening in Esther's actual life. With regard to her psychiatric treatment, even that part was not in the least enthralling. I kept thinking there had to be so much more to come. However, the narration was pretty good, though once again, not what I would call outstanding. There are plenty of great books to choose from that are far more worth your time! 😉👎🏼
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5 people found this helpful
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- Oriana
- 03-29-23
THE ANNOYING MUSIC
Maggie did a good job. She wasn't the problem. But what the hell was that music? And why was it so loud?! The most annoying thing was to have that music in the middle of the chapter while I'm listening to this in bed trying to relax before bed, and it doesn't help how loud it is. Horrible.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Christina Bridges
- 04-03-23
Everything was great except… that music?
What? Why? I don’t understand. It was so unnecessary and I had to turn my volume down every time.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Alex Troy
- 04-23-18
Esther Greenwood, unforgettable hero
An exquisitely poignant tale. This novel touched me as few others have. The hero, Esther Greenwood, is both bard and hero of her own epic. She tells the tale of her descent into madness, her journey through its dark landscape, and her possible reemergence to the light. When the book ended, I was hopeful for Esther, and also craving more of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s voice. Ms Gyllenhaal’s sensitive performance gave life to the tale’s many voices and especially Esther’s.
The prose is lyrical, the work of a great artist.
Outstanding
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- Brittany Stephanie
- 11-03-17
Poetic in nature, well done like a oven top Salmon
She went though, step by step almost, of a nervous break down, reflecting on her life though the glass of a bell jar.
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- Kim
- 02-08-17
I felt I coul felt I could see the world through her eyes!
Each chapter drew me in wondering what would happen next.
Loved Maggie' reading.
Wonderfully written. I chuckled, I felt sad, I didn't know what to think sometimes.
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- KJG
- 12-28-18
Perfection
Please have Maggie Gyllenhaal perform more novels - the performance is engrossing, the novel made better by her reading it
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- chagley
- 10-05-18
Only Sylvia Plath Book I've Ever Read
Was not sure what to expect from this classic - but Maggie Gylienhaal had the perfect voice to guide you through the time period. Plath's matter of fact writing style made this book and the story easy to visualize. Too bad she left us before her time.
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