Audiobooks by Adam Gopnik

So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin

Steve Martin is more candid than he’s ever been about his creative life—in this engrossing audio-biography centered around a series of conversations recorded over many afternoons at home with his friend and neighbor, writer Adam Gopnik. Steve Martin met his good friend Adam Gopnik three decades ago, and in that time, Gopnik has always marveled at Martin’s ability to flourish in a wide variety of artforms: magic, comedy, art collecting, writing, and music. In So Many Steves, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik creates a new type of profile: a year’s worth of conversations with Martin where Gopnik pulls back the curtain on his friend’s illustrious career. This biography places you in Martin’s apartment across from Steve and Adam, listening as their conversation flows from Steve’s first job in a magic shop to selling out stadiums as a standup comedian, starring in major motion pictures, writing his first novel, teaching himself to play the banjo, and starting a respected art collection. Through it all you’ll hear clips from Steve Martin’s iconic stand up routines and movies as well as excerpts from his writing and tv appearances, all knit together by an original banjo score created and played by Steve. Widely praised for his dada persona and portrayal of funny-yet-relatable parents, Steve shares behind the scenes anecdotes from his films―L.A. Story, The Jerk, Three Amigos, and more―giving listeners a taste of life on set. More than a history, this series of intimate conversations between old colleagues reveal Martin's thoughtful approach to both art and life. As Steve develops as an artist, challenging himself with learning new crafts, Adam sees his friend growing and evolving as a person: becoming warmer, more gregarious, and even more gracious.

Adam Gopnik, Steve Martin (Author), Adam Gopnik, Steve Martin (Narrator)

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At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York

From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers' Gate builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York through the story of this couple's journey--from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side, and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. He takes us through his professional meanderings, from graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the corridors of Condé Nast and the galleries of MoMA. Between tender and humorous reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others, Gopnik discusses the ethics of ambition, the economy of creative capital, and the peculiar anthropology of art and aspiration in New York, then and now.

Adam Gopnik (Author), Adam Gopnik (Narrator)

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The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food

Multiple award-winning author Adam Gopnik has written for the New Yorker since 1986. In this work, Gopnik charts America's transformation from being simply aware of what they eat to being obsessive about it. This fascinating culinary journey will transport listeners from 18th-century France and the origin of America's popular modern tastes to the kitchens of the White House and beyond.

Adam Gopnik (Author), Adam Gopnik (Narrator)

Audiobook

Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people understood that life on earth was a story of continuous evolution, and the Civil War had proved that a democracy could fight for principles and endure. And with these signal insights much else had changed besides. Together, Darwin and Lincoln had become midwives to the spirit of a new world, a new kind of hope and faith. Searching for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating double life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his "Great Idea" for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find-for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence? Such human questions and their answers are the stuff of this book. Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwin as thinkers and writers-as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly modern times: a hundred years after the Enlightenment, the old rule of faith and fear finally yielding to one of reason, argument, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the judgment of divinity at last submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time-both reshaped our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning. And they invented a new language to express that understanding. Angels and Ages is an original and personal account of the creation of the liberal voice-of the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public. Showing that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik reveals why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves, and endowed with the gift to speak for us all.

Adam Gopnik (Author), Adam Gopnik (Narrator)

Audiobook

Paris to the Moon

Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, breathtaking facades around every corner, in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. For Gopnik this was above all a personal pilgrimage to the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, and wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Yet, at the end of the day, there was still the matter of raising a child and carrying on with the day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. As Gopnik describes, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys, both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. Weaving the magical with the mundane, he offers a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century.

Adam Gopnik (Author), Adam Gopnik (Narrator)

Audiobook

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

Adam Gopnik (Author), Adam Gopnik (Narrator)

Audiobook