The Beautiful Ones Audiobook (Free)

Presented by Penguin.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Times, Sunday Instances and Telegraph Publication of the Year

‘A triumph … a masterclass in the bottling of its subject’s seductive substance. His presence in this book is so strong that it’s hard to trust he has really remaining the building’

MOJO

‘Handsomely presented, visually sumptuous’

THE TIMES

From Prince himself comes the brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of 1 of the greatest artists of all time-featuring never-before- about THE STUNNING Ones seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death.

Prince was a music genius, perhaps one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in pop history. But he wasn’t just a musician-he was also a startlingly first visionary with an creativity deep plenty of to make whole worlds, from your sexy, gritty funk paradise of his early records towards the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of Paisley Park. But his most significant creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, delivered in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop star of his period.

THE STUNNING Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince-a first-person account of a youngster absorbing the world around him and developing a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, prior to the hits and fame that could come to define him. The publication is informed in four parts. The foremost is composed of the memoir he was composing before his tragic death, pages that provides us into Prince’s years as a child world through his personal lyrical prose. The second part takes us into Prince’s early years like a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of Prince’s writing and photos. The third section displays us Prince’s development through candid pictures that take us up to the cusp of his ideal accomplishment, which we find in the book’s 4th section: his initial handwritten treatment for Purple Rain-the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we’ve observed in the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final days-a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated-and annotations that provide context to each one of the book’s images.

This work isn’t just a tribute to Prince, but a genuine and energizing literary work, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift towards the world.

‘Prince’s voice shows up through loud and obvious; his personality, joie de vivre and single-mindedness jumping from the page throughout.’

CLASSIC POP Journal

‘The Beautiful Ones is for everybody. It isn’t a go through, but an event, an immersion in the mind of a musical genius. You are steeped in Prince’s pictures, his words, his essence… The book can be a starting point for the Prince fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. In any event, it will deepen the connection of any audience with the musical icon.”

USA TODAY

‘The Beautiful Ones remains a jewel-like fragment, Piepenbring’s delicate introduction providing a snapshot from the Purple One’s last months at Paisley Recreation area and during the Piano and Mike tour’ Q Mag

‘An affirmation of Prince’s Blackness and mankind… Prince writes about his youth with clearness and poetic flair, very easily combining humorous anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis… Prince is among us – he just worked to manifest dreams that took him from the North Aspect of Minneapolis to the Super Bowl.’

HUFFPOST

‘A compelling interest that discovers its author orbiting around a few touchingly intimate encounters along with his sphinx-like subject matter … with passages, lyric bed sheets and photographs through the Purple One himself’

TELEGRAPH, Books of the entire year

‘A memoir that is compiled by Prince, actually. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1, acquiring us from his first memory space – his mother’s eye – through the early days of his career… The Beautiful Ones doesn’t paint a perfect picture. It’s not definitive. It can’t be, it must not be and, thankfully, it doesn’t make an effort to be. We’ll never know very well what it might have been if Prince acquired lived. But it’s an excellent start. Right now, it’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just like Prince wanted.’

NPR

‘Both a enjoyment and a shock … Prince took the project extremely significantly, and it shows in the task he shipped.. It shines a romantic and exposing light over the least-known period of his existence’

VARIETY

‘The Beautiful Ones is a book in pieces, fragments from the ground-breaking autobiography Prince had planned. Pieced together after his loss of life in 2016, it gathers his handwritten years as a child memoires, superb personal photographs and his selected co-writer Dan Piepenbring’s stunning accounts of their brief collaboration. Yet extremely despite the central absence, it still catches something of Prince between your gaps – a trace of perfume, a glance to camera, an initial kiss’ SUNDAY Occasions, Book of the entire year

‘This is a lovely book and a must-have for Prince completists’

DAILY EXPRESS

‘A ghostly memoir of a pop tale’

THE i