Audiobooks by Alex Ross

Kingdom Come

"Now reimagined in audio, the world of KINGDOM COME, originally published to critical acclaim by DC Comics in 1996 as a four-issue comic book series, comes alive in a dynamic production featuring a full cast, sound effects, and music. In the near-future world of KINGDOM COME, superheroes are ubiquitous, but heroism is rare. After decades as Earth's champions, the members of the Justice League have all retreated out of the public eye, replaced with a new generation of anti-heroic crime-fighters whose brand of justice leaves humanity terrified, rather than inspired. With the planet's future in jeopardy, Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman must come out of retirement to make one last stand for truth and justice... Adapted from the work of writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross, this audio production brings one of the bestselling graphic novels into an original and exciting new format. Cast List: Edoardo Ballerini as Norman McCay Kerry Shale as Spectre Marc Thompson as Superman and Clark Kent Lorelei King as Wonder Woman Glenn Wrage as Batman William DeMeritt as Billy Batson Garrick Hagon as Wesley Dodds Tom Alexander as Magog John Chancer as UN Secretary Wyrmwood and Ray Porter as Lex Luthor With: Alan Marriott January LaVoy Harry Myers Tim Lounibos Ashleigh Haddad David Holt JD Jackson Martin Sherman Reba Buhr E.A. Castillo Vas Eli Laurence Bouvard Eric Meyers Nezar Alderazi Jennifer Armour Torrian Brackett Joe Duley Karen Bartke Laurel Lefkow Kai Christian Mortiz David Lee Huynh Theo Maggs And special guests: Mark Waid Mike Carlin Charles Kochman David Vinson Sandy Resnick"

Alex Ross, Mark Waid (Author), Edoardo Ballerini, Garrick Hagon, Glenn Wrage, John Chancer, Kerry Shale, Lorelei King, Marc Thompson, Ray Porter, Tom Alexander, William DeMeritt (Narrator)

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Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

"’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world."

Alex Ross (Author), Alex Ross (Narrator)

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Listen to This

"In Listen to This, Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, looks both backward and forward in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical-music history as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice in whatever genre. In Listen to This, Alex Ross will combine a selection of his New Yorker essays with new material that will serve as an introduction to some basic classical-music concepts and figures and will give an alternative view of recent pop music. It will demonstrate the essential equality of great musical creators in whatever genre. It begins with 'Listen To This', his most famous New Yorker essay, an autobiographical account of his early passion for classical music and belated discovery of pop music in college. It sets forth the themes of the book as a whole: how classical music can become a vital part of wider contemporary culture, how it can survive and even prosper in the face of proclamations of its decline. There follows a new essay tracing the history of the chacona, a dance form based on a descending bass line, which originated as an erotic Afro-Caribbean dance in the sixteenth century, then migrated to Europe and inspired such Baroque masterpieces as Bach's Chaconne in D minor, and later found echoes in the bass lines both of twentieth-century classical masterpieces and African-American blues. Led Zeppelin's 'Dazed and Confused' and Bob Dylan's 'Simple Twist of Fate', among other songs, extend the principle. This chapter develops, in a less personal way, the themes of 'Listen to This', and serves as a kind of whirlwind tour of five centuries of music history. Third in the introductory section is 'The Record Effect,' an account of technology's impact on pop and classical music."

Alex Ross (Author), Alex Ross (Narrator)

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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

"The scandal over modern music has not died down. While modern paintings by Picasso and Pollock sell for a hundred million or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences; yet the influence of modern sound can be felt everywhere. Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, shows how modern music has pervaded every corner of twentieth-century life. The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern sound, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to bohemian Paris, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We meet the maverick personalities who have defied the classical past, and we follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics on this sweeping tour of twentieth-century history as told through its music."

Alex Ross (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

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