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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Yevgeny Zamyatin
About this listen
Set in the 26th century A.D., Yevgeny Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful "Benefactor." Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984, We is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-Utopia: a great prose poem detailing the fate that might befall us all if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than 60 years' suppression.
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- Unabridged
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
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H. P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural
- 20 Classic Tales of the Macabre, Chosen by the Master of Horror Himself
- By: Henry James, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and others
- Narrated by: Davina Porter, Steven Crossley, Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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H. P. Lovecraft is arguably the most important horror writer of the 20th century. Culled from his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature”, Lovecraft acknowledges those authors and stories that he feels are the very finest the horror field has to offer, including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle. This chilling collection includes 20 works, each prefaced by Lovecraft's own opinions and insights in each author’s work.
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Not all the stories are complete
- By SteffiT on 10-21-13
By: Henry James, and others
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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A Happy Death
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early 20s and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.
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Camus Secret Masterpiece
- By Samuel Cohen on 08-03-19
By: Albert Camus
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Anthem
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: B. J. Harrison
- Length: 2 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.” Deep issues of conscience are explored in Ayn Rand’s dystopian tale of a man who dares to fight against a system that invades his very mind and identity.
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Triumphant! A beautiful molding of the mind.
- By Kari on 02-17-16
By: Ayn Rand
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The Early Ayn Rand
- A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction (Revised Edition)
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This remarkable, newly revised collection of Ayn Rand's early fiction ranges from beginner's exercises to excerpts from early versions of We the Living and The Fountainhead. Arranged chronologically, from 1926 through 1940, these works allow readers to follow the extraordinary trajectory of Rand's literary and intellectual growth, from a 21-year-old Russian immigrant struggling to master English to the brilliant prose stylist and sophisticated philosopher she was to become in her mature work.
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Want more Rand? Here it is.
- By John on 12-03-11
By: Ayn Rand
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The Napoleon of Notting Hill
- By: G. K. Chesterton
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, G. K. Chesterton creates a witty satire of staid government, set in a London of the future. Auberon Quinn, a common clerk who looks like a cross between a baby and an owl and is often seen standing on his head, is one day told that he has been randomly selected to be His Majesty the King. He decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement - with delightful results.
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Competent but over-stylized reading of great book
- By Nierestel on 02-16-18
By: G. K. Chesterton
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Great God Pan
- Esoteric Classics: Occult Fiction
- By: Arthur Machen
- Narrated by: Shea Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
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Machen's novella The Great God Pan is often cited as one of Lovecraft's most notable influences. In it, Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this "seeing the great god Pan". After much study of the human mind, he devises an experiment that involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakens she is terrified and mentally crippled.
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classic horror
- By Shantee on 05-04-16
By: Arthur Machen
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Michael York should stick to the stage and leave narration to the pros.
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In his final novel - which he considered his most important - Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and - to his amazement - give him hope.
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A great narration for a great book.
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Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists beyond the airport.
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Absolutely Stellar!
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What listeners say about We
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David
- 09-21-16
Rough inspiration for 1984
This classic of early science fiction was the prototype for nearly every dystopian novel written since. George Orwell identified We as his inspiration for 1984, and the similarities are obvious.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's "OneState" under its "Benefactor" are not as fully developed as Orwell's Oceania and Big Brother - Zamyatin wanted to represent ideas which were (obviously) allusions to the communist regime that he had to flee, but he didn't go as far as Orwell did in creating a society meant to be believable and similar to our own. Also, the prose (allowing for the translation from Russian) is often clunky, the dialog sometimes laughable, and the plot verges into the absurd. But it is an early work of science fiction and deserves its laurels for inspiring the better novels that came after it.
Besides the obvious dystopian elements of OneState and the iconic figurehead of a "Benefactor," one can also see Orwell's inspiration in the up-is-down, black-is-white logic of OneState, which holds annual elections so everyone can vote in perfect unanimity for the Benefactor and which manages to reify ideas into what Orwell would later call "thoughtctimes."
In OneState, everyone lives in a glass apartment building. Society runs according to strict scientific algorithms, making everyone equal and everything fair. For example, human beings have been freed from lust and jealousy by the simple expedient of making everyone a public good - if you want to have sex with someone, you just put in a request for their number and at an appointed time they will show up to perform their duty.
I can see a few obvious problems with this scheme that even a dystopian police state would have trouble controlling, but again, this book is more of a thought experiment than a carefully designed setting.
Zamyatin's tale of D-503, a scientist/drone whose previously unquestioned loyalty to OneState is suddenly shaken by a desire to get laid by someone sexier than his assigned short, plain, girlfriend O-90, is at heart a fairly typical story that even has a few pulp action scenes at the end. I can see it being an inspiration not only for George Orwell but also Isaac Asimov and other writers of the generation who would have read Zamyatin's novel growing up.
It was interesting to read, but We is very much an artifact of its time, and Zamyatin's writing unfortunately fell flat for me as most Russian writers tend to.
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- Brian
- 12-26-16
The grand-daddy of all Dystopians
1984 is easily one of my all-time favorite books. So, when I heard that “We” was one of the stories that Orwell read that shaped his Big Brother world, I had to read it. I’m glad that I did.
“We” tells the story of D-503 in the 26th Century. While being written in the 20’s — some of the stories and ideas within “We” are still valid today, while others do feel a bit dated.
I can definitely tell where Orwell picked up some of his dystopian ideas for 1984 within this book — a lot of the plotlines seem similar “Benefactor” vs Big Brother, main male character writing his thoughts down (and ends up writing down thoughts against the world he currently lives in), and the way a girl/woman can pull them from their normal everyday lives to a new and unique life.
The narration is really well done, the book is very flowy until it’s choppy (which makes no sense until I explain it). Basically, the story is a journal from D-503. And sometimes he just stops writing because their leisure time is up, or his thoughts are confused. And others — D-503 writes long and crazy stories about what is happening to him and what is going to happen. It’s a bit crazy, but I really enjoyed it.
Overall, “We” is a must read for those who love dystopians. It’s one of the world’s first — and even though it’s almost 100 years old, a lot of the premises will still give you chills today.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-01-23
Outstanding performance!
The speaker was amazing! His voice was clear and articulate. There were times when the story dragged a little and was even a bit boring at times. However, the speaker made it interesting to listen too and allowed me to keep going.
The story itself was good. The overall premise of a dystopian world told from a believers point of view was unique to me and this is what set it apart.
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- omar
- 05-19-24
Everyone should read this book
I loved the story the logic behind and the way the writer made the “logic” of the protagonist work, makes you think about our ways of thinking, what we value in our society and the dangers of controlling information and disinformation.
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- Julie W. Capell
- 01-10-17
Couldn't be more topical . . . great narrator
It's a shame more people don't read "golden age" scifi like this gem. Even in translation from the original Russian, it is a tremendously powerful allegory of the politics of oppression and the dangers of giving up one's freedom for the perception of safety. Couldn't be more topical now, as citizens of the world's mature democracies vote for ever-escalating surveillance and run toward the candidate who promises to keep them "safe" . . . from what, exactly?
[I listened to this as an audio book performed by Grover Gardiner, who did an excellent job of conveying the irony of the book without sacrificing believability]
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- Ryan Bartlett
- 09-21-16
Orwell and Huxley Ripped Him Off!
Really a 3.5 on story, but sooo ahead of its time, I had to bump it up. Grover Gardner is always great - he and Simon Vance are tied for my #2 behind Jim Dale.
The story does bog down, and get very strange 2nd half - need to listen again. Main thrust is the main characrer's order versus soul battle.
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- Robin
- 09-25-16
WE are not impressed
Yevgeny Zamyatin may have been the first to write a story like this but I don't buy that robot to lust and jealousy constitutes a soul. It was more like complete control to complete (emotional at least) loss of control.
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- Tim
- 09-23-16
Anti-Utopia
I didn't know that George Orwell based "1984" off of Yevgeny Zamyatin's book "We." This classic science fiction novel has been retold before in many other forms. "We" feels very dated, but as a fan of this genre, I wanted to read the original of anti-Utopia. Will I remember Zamyatin's art? Probably not, but it explains a lot of the same plot that has been repeatedly told over and over in this genre.
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- Joel D Offenberg
- 11-30-11
Interesting history, prose a little outdated
WE tells the story of the "One State," a sanitized, regimented world in which the individuals ("numbers"...nobody has a name) live sanitized, regimented lives. Rocket scientist D305 lives his clockwork life as expected until he meets and falls in love with the revolutionary I330.
WE is one of the earliest examples of dystopian literature---you can see elements of WE in 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Anthem (Rand), Player Piano (Vonnegut) and many others.
The story is presented as D305's personal journal. The prose is a bit dated---it was written around 1920 and has very flowery internal narration and not a lot of dialog, and I started to find it getting tedious, until we got close to the end.
The audio book starts with a fairly long and involved history of WE and its publication (and the various translations). Usually, I find such intros boring and low-value, but in this case, I found it helpful.
Grover Gardner's narration is quite good...he doesn't really add anything to the story but he doesn't take anything away, either.
[Footnote: According to Wikipedia, Aldous Huxley denied having read WE before writing Brave New World, but Orwell definitely cited it as a source for 1984.] Of course, all have different themes and draw different conclusions.
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- Steve
- 10-06-15
Not you, not me, but WE
If you could sum up We in three words, what would they be?
Freedom from imagination
What other book might you compare We to and why?
1984, Brave New World. All three are about modern dystopia.
Have you listened to any of Grover Gardner’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have enjoyed Grover Gardner's performance elsewhere, but I really enjoyed his poem-like presentation in this book.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
No. I am not easily moved. I weigh 240 lbs.
Any additional comments?
I enjoyed reading the precursor to 1984. I enjoyed the story and expected the outcome, but the presentation was fantastic. I enjoyed how the character referred to Ancient Times and wondered why we were so difficult. I loved his explanation of our election process differences. It was a good story that ended too soon.
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12 people found this helpful