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Sign up todayThe Learners
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreA young graphic designer fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy has just landed his first job at a wacky advertising firm filled with eccentric creative artists. Everything is going great until Happy is assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department. Happy can’t resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty—chiefly his own.
Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, this stand-alone sequel to Chip Kidd’s previous novel, The Cheese Monkeys, again shows that Kidd’s writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.
Chip Kidd is a writer and graphic designer in New York City whose book-jacket designs have helped spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging. He has written about popular culture for McSweeney’s, Vogue, New York Times, New York Observer, Entertainment Weekly, Details, 2WICE, and others.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Reviews
“The Learners is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art, and as a story of self-discovery…the book is packed with sharp insights…Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer.”
“Required reading.”
“Kidd shares his deep knowledge of graphic design with his readers in inventive and generally delightful ways…His wit, astute observation, and compassion make The Learners that rarest of offerings—[an] immensely enjoyable novel.”
“Snappy…Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles. A-.”
“[A] major writing talent…[Chip Kidd is] an author to watch.”
“Ingenious…The Learners seduces the reader through a deceptive manipulation of form and content: It’s a matryoshka, or stacking doll, that hides a startling, dark content. By the time we get to the end of the first of its three parts, we are dropped into a creepy, disturbing, sociopolitical satire.”
“Wild and winning, funny and moving.”
“Arresting and hip…captivating.”
“Kidd has held up an engrossing, distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined.”
“Narrator Bronson Pinchot…offers a fresh perspective and a perfectly played performance that captures the essence of Kidd’s work. Pinchot assumes the personality of Happy with such vigor that he seems the only possible choice to narrate the novel…A witty story told by an even wittier narrator is a perfect combination.”
“Whimsical…keen-edged and original.”
“Pinchot’s fully voiced performance is electrifying. He moves easily between the comic and the somber elements in the novel.”
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