

Pierre
or, The Ambiguities
Author: Herman Melville
Narrator: Robin Field
Unabridged: 19 hr 46 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 05/31/2016
Author: Herman Melville
Narrator: Robin Field
Unabridged: 19 hr 46 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 05/31/2016
Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York City. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839—a voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumously published novella Billy Budd.
Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.
I like to think of this as the Metal Machine Music of American literature. It's a crazy, baffling, totally alienating renunciation of readers of the 19th-century popular marketplace that mixes filial bile, Gothic satire, philosophical essay, and tantalizing hints of impropriety (threesome!) with som......more
Reading Pierre For Melville's Bicentennial This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 -- 1891). To commemorate the birth of one of my favorite writers, I read Melville's seventh novel "Pierre or the Ambiguities" published in 1852 just after "Moby-Dick". "Pie......more
there's no getting around it, melville's mastery of language is up there with shakespeare, faulkner, and woolf. it's the kind of language that draws so much attention to itself that, at times, you stop reading for the plot and start reading for the texture of the sentences themselves. pierre is not......more
A few weeks after finishing this, possibly Melville's best work even though it's almost never read, I remain overwhelmed by it and don't at the moment have the language, ability, or courage to approach it with a thorough review, so I'll just offer some general thoughts and advice. One of the hazards......more
“In one sense a kind of aftershock to Moby-Dick, Pierre also displays Melville’s magnificent artistic restlessness, the ruthless self-revisionism that leads him repeatedly to explode and reinvent the premises he works from. Melville had been the novelist of tropical islands, open oceans, and sailing voyages. But in Pierre he abruptly reinvents himself as a domestic novelist, proposing to write a psychodrama of family intimacy—and more particularly, to chart the emotional dependencies produced in the hyperaffectionate, inward-turning, hothouse family newly prominent in Melville’s time.” New York Times
“Herman Melville is one of American literature’s greatest figures.” Cambridge Guide to Literature in English