Art audiobooks

Audience-ology

By: Kevin Goetz

Narrated by: Kevin Goetz

Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Discover the fascinating and secretive process of audience testing of Hollywood movies through these firsthand stories from famous filmmakers, studio heads, and stars.

Audience-ology takes you to one of the most unknown places in Hollywood—a place where famous directors are reduced to tears and multi-millionaire actors to fits of rage. A place... Read more

A Wonderful Guy

By: Eddie Shapiro

Narrated by: Donald Corren, Beresford Bennett & Christopher ...

Length: 20 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Fascinating, never-before-published interviews with Broadway's leading men offer behind-the-scenes looks at the careers of some of the most beloved perfomers today.
In A Wonderful Guy, a follow up to Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater, theatre journalist Eddie Shapiro sits down for intimate,... Read more

Authority and Freedom

By: Jed Perl

Narrated by: Daniel Oreskes

Length: 3 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts—musical, literary, and visual—and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us.

As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl... Read more

A Companion to Martin Scorsese, Revised Edition

By: Aaron Baker

Narrated by: Charles Constant

Length: 21 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

A Companion to Martin Scorsese is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America's most prominent contemporary filmmakers.



● Contains contributions from prominent scholars in North America and Europe that use a variety of analytic approaches



● Offers fresh interpretations of some of Scorsese's most influential... Read more

Men, Women, and Chain Saws

By: Carol J. Clover

Narrated by: Eva Wilhelm

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been... Read more

Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect

By: Victoria Kastner

Narrated by: Victoria Kastner & Cindy Kay

Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

This new biography—featuring over 150 archival images and full-color photographs printed throughout—introduces Julia Morgan as both a pioneering architect and a captivating individual.

Julia Morgan was a lifelong trailblazer. She was the first woman admitted to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first licensed to... Read more

Up All Night

By: Lisa Napoli

Narrated by: Lisa Napoli

Length: 9 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

The wild inside story of the birth of CNN and dawn of the age of 24-hour newsHow did we get from an age of dignified nightly news broadcasts on three national networks to the age of 24-hour channels and constantly breaking news? The answer—thanks to Ted Turner and an oddball cast of cable television visionaries, big league rejects, and nonunion... Read more

Competing with Idiots

By: Nick Davis

Narrated by: Nick Davis

Length: 13 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

A fascinating, complex dual biography of Hollywood's most dazzling—and famous—brothers, and a dark, riveting portrait of competition, love, and enmity that ultimately undid them both.

One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles, as most recently portrayed in David Fincher's acclaimed Netflix film, Mank); the other, All... Read more

Shakespeare & Company

By: Bella Merlin & Tina Packer

Narrated by: Bella Merlin & Tina Packer

Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Shakespeare Company: When Action is Eloquence is the first comprehensive insight into this internationally acclaimed company founded in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, by actor-director Tina Packer and voice pioneer Kristin Linklater, with the transformative power of Shakespeare’s language at its heart. Why act Shakespeare? What’s his relevance in... Read more

Dress Codes

By: Richard Thompson Ford

Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn

Length: 13 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina's "Negro Act" made it... Read more

The Renaissance

By: Jerry Brotton

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 4 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

More than ever before, the Renaissance stands out as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics, and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but the entire world.




In this wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance, Jerry Brotton... Read more

Postmodernism

By: Christopher Butler

Narrated by: Christine Williams

Length: 4 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly engaging introduction, the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct. The... Read more

Film Music

By: Kathryn Kalinak

Narrated by: Amy Rubinate

Length: 4 hours

Abridged: No

Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world.



Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid,... Read more

Documentary Film

By: Patricia Aufderheide

Narrated by: Tamara Marston

Length: 5 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide,... Read more

Citizen Trump

By: Robert Orlando

Narrated by: Charles Constant

Length: 2 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Writer/director Robert Orlando, locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic, learned Citizen Kane was Trump's favorite film, and the parallels were astonishing. Both Kane and Trump are swaggering masters of media, and both claim to stand for the working man. "Orson Welles, the boy genius of Kane, was possessing me from the grave," states Orlando.



In... Read more

A Companion to Steven Spielberg

By: Nigel Morris

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Length: 29 hours

Abridged: No

A Companion to Steven Spielberg provides an authoritative collection of essays exploring the achievements and legacy of one of the most influential film directors of the modern era.



● Offers comprehensive coverage of Spielberg's directorial output, from early works, including Duel, The Sugarland Express, and Jaws, to recent films



● Explores... Read more

Contemporary Art

By: Julian Stallabrass

Narrated by: Corrie James

Length: 5 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Contemporary art has never been so popular—but the art world is changing. In a landscape of increasing globalization there is growing interest in questions over the nature of contemporary art today, and the identity of who is controlling its future. In the midst of this, contemporary art continues to be a realm of freedom where artists shock,... Read more

Garbo

By: Robert Gottlieb

Narrated by: Maria Tucci

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her.

“Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams.” Strikingly glamorous and famously... Read more

A Practical Handbook for the Actor

By: Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Oln...

Narrated by: Rose Byrne, Chris Bauer, Alison Wright, David M...

Length: 2 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

For anyone who has ever wanted to take an acting class, "this is the best book on acting written in the last twenty years" (David Mamet, from the Introduction).

This book describes a technique developed and refined by the authors, all of them young actors, in their work with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, actor W. H. Macy, and... Read more

Respect the Mic

By: Peter Kahn, Hanif Abdurraqib, Dan "Sully" Sulli...

Narrated by: Ron Butler, Reynaldo Piniella, Michael Pogue, S...

Length: 3 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

An expansive, moving poetry anthology, representing 20 years of poetry from students and alumni of Chicago's Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club.

"Poets I know sometimes joke that the poetry club at Oak Park River Forest High School is the best MFA program in the Chicagoland area. Like all great jokes, this one is dead serious."... Read more

Artrage

By: Everett Aison

Narrated by: Jack Estes

Length: 5 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Mace Caslon is a successful New York attorney and a serious collector of art. So why does he decide to walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spray acid over a $41 million painting by Picasso, in broad daylight and in front of shocked museum-goers? And how does that act affect the lives of thousands of people, especially those close to him? Read more

Who Is Elton John?

By: Kirsten Anderson & Who HQ

Narrated by: Daniel Henning

Length: 54 minutes

Abridged: No

How does a little boy from the London suburbs named Reginald Kenneth Dwight grow up to become one of the biggest pop stars of all time? A lot of talent and a lot of personality! Elton John, as he would later call himself, started playing piano at the age of three. Although he was trained to play classical music, Elton's real love was rock and... Read more

Who Was Aretha Franklin?

By: Nico Medina & Who HQ

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

Length: 1 hour 6 minutes

Abridged: No

There is only one QUEEN OF SOUL! Discover why Aretha Franklin garners so much R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Aretha Franklin was a musical and cultural icon whose legacy spanned six decades! Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha got her start singing in front of her father's Baptist congregation and found minor success as a gospel singer. She then set her... Read more

Who Is Bono?

By: Pam Pollack, Meg Belviso & Who HQ

Narrated by: Tatiana Grey

Length: 56 minutes

Abridged: No

How did an Irish schoolboy become the lead singer of a world-famous rock band and the founder of several humanitarian groups? Track Bono's rise to fame in this exciting addition to the Who Was? series.

By age 16, Paul David Hewson was such a good singer that he had earned the nickname "Bono Vox," a Latin phrase that translates to "good voice."... Read more