
Alligator Tears
A Memoir in Essays
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $15.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Edgar Gomez
-
By:
-
Edgar Gomez
About this listen
“Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today
“Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace.” —James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A SALON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.©2025 Edgar Gomez (P)2025 Random House Audio
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
How Far the Light Reaches
- A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
- By: Sabrina Imbler
- Narrated by: Sabrina Imbler
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A fascinating tour of creatures from the surface to the deepest ocean floor: How Far the Light Reaches invites us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live. Conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea, from gelatinous chains that are both individual organisms and colonies of clones to deep-sea crabs that have no need for the sun, nourished instead by the chemicals and heat throbbing from the core of the Earth.
-
-
THIS IS A MEMOIR
- By Joseph Gee on 03-17-23
By: Sabrina Imbler
-
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
- A Novel
- By: Bob the Drag Queen
- Narrated by: Bob the Drag Queen
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show.
-
-
Entering and moving
- By Insane25 on 05-09-25
-
Black Skin, White Masks
- By: Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox - translator
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.
-
-
It was ok
- By Anne on 05-10-25
By: Frantz Fanon, and others
-
Another Word for Love
- A Memoir
- By: Carvell Wallace
- Narrated by: Carvell Wallace
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it—to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.
-
-
Beautiful
- By 3boys on 04-17-25
By: Carvell Wallace
-
Private Rites
- A Novel
- By: Julia Armfield
- Narrated by: Hannah van der Westhuysen
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
-
-
Beautifully Written, But Mainly Fluff and Filler
- By Megs on 02-26-25
By: Julia Armfield
-
Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
-
-
Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
-
How Far the Light Reaches
- A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
- By: Sabrina Imbler
- Narrated by: Sabrina Imbler
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A fascinating tour of creatures from the surface to the deepest ocean floor: How Far the Light Reaches invites us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live. Conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea, from gelatinous chains that are both individual organisms and colonies of clones to deep-sea crabs that have no need for the sun, nourished instead by the chemicals and heat throbbing from the core of the Earth.
-
-
THIS IS A MEMOIR
- By Joseph Gee on 03-17-23
By: Sabrina Imbler
-
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
- A Novel
- By: Bob the Drag Queen
- Narrated by: Bob the Drag Queen
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show.
-
-
Entering and moving
- By Insane25 on 05-09-25
-
Black Skin, White Masks
- By: Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox - translator
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.
-
-
It was ok
- By Anne on 05-10-25
By: Frantz Fanon, and others
-
Another Word for Love
- A Memoir
- By: Carvell Wallace
- Narrated by: Carvell Wallace
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it—to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.
-
-
Beautiful
- By 3boys on 04-17-25
By: Carvell Wallace
-
Private Rites
- A Novel
- By: Julia Armfield
- Narrated by: Hannah van der Westhuysen
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
-
-
Beautifully Written, But Mainly Fluff and Filler
- By Megs on 02-26-25
By: Julia Armfield
-
Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
-
-
Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
-
Bad Law
- Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America
- By: Elie Mystal
- Narrated by: Elie Mystal
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today—an urgent yet hopeful story for our current political climate
-
-
Chicken Soup for the Political Soul
- By Gracie on 05-22-25
By: Elie Mystal
-
Dawn
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Julienne Irons
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.
-
-
Too Sexual
- By Amazon Customer on 08-29-23
-
Bury Your Gays
- By: Chuck Tingle
- Narrated by: André Santana, Charlie Jane Anders, CJ Leede, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell. But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, "for the algorithm," in the upcoming season finale.
-
-
The hype is real.
- By Dan Bugbee on 10-03-24
By: Chuck Tingle
-
Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
-
-
Bizarre
- By Kevin on 04-23-25
By: Katie Kitamura
-
I Might Be in Trouble
- By: Daniel Aleman
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.
-
-
What a dumpster fire! (Grab some marshmallows, y’all…we’re makin’ S’Mores!)
- By Hans Christian Branderson on 12-12-24
By: Daniel Aleman
-
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time”. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.
-
-
fantastic
- By andrew on 09-07-18
By: Susan Sontag
Critic reviews
“Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.”—Paste magazine
“Through honest writing, Edgar Gomez beautifully depicts the importance of creating and having a queer community. At times funny, at others crucially poignant, Alligator Tears establishes Gomez as a voice of their generation.”—Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito
“Gomez is sweet and conversational, like a friend readers have known for life: nostalgic, playful, and caring. . . . It is beautiful to get to know the life of this artist, whose endearing world will remain with readers long after they’ve finished the book.”—Booklist
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Talk to Me
- Lessons from a Family Forged by History
- By: Rich Benjamin
- Narrated by: Rich Benjamin
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.
By: Rich Benjamin
-
High-Risk Homosexual
- A Memoir
- By: Edgar Gomez
- Narrated by: Edgar Gomez
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez's uncle's cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at 13-years-old to become a man. Listeners follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor's office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual".
-
-
Terrible recording
- By Xander on 05-21-25
By: Edgar Gomez
-
Finding Manana
- A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
- By: Mirta Ojito
- Narrated by: Mirta Ojito, Juan Arturo
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mirta Ojito was one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees who traveled to Miami during the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift. Growing up, Ojito was eager to fit in and join Castro’s Young Pioneers, but as she grew older and began to understand the darker side of the Cuban revolution, she and her family began to aspire to a safer, happier life. When Castro opened Cuba’s borders for those who wanted to leave, her family was more than ready to go: they had been waiting for the opportunity for twenty years.
-
-
recommended by friend. Glad I bought in a big sale.
- By Carol Franks on 06-07-25
By: Mirta Ojito
-
The Grand Paloma Resort
- A Novel
- By: Cleyvis Natera
- Narrated by: Sixta Morel, EJ Lavery, Diana Bustelo
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Laura is a local Dominican woman who, through sheer hard work, has risen through the ranks to become manager at the Grand Paloma Resort. Her idea to pair a “platinum” guest with their own resort employee to attend to their every whim has been wildly successful, and she’s just weeks away from a promotion that could blaze a path for her off the resort and toward a life of opportunity. If only her younger sister, Elena—who she’s looked after since the death of their mother—could get with the program.
By: Cleyvis Natera
-
We Rip the World Apart
- By: Charlene Carr
- Narrated by: Tebby Fisher
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she's pregnant with a child she isn't sure she wants, her struggle to understand her place in the world as a person who is half-Black, half-white—yet feels neither—is amplified. Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child during the politically charged Jamaican exodus in the 1980s, only to realize they'd come to a place where Black men are viewed with suspicion—a constant and pernicious reality Evelyn watches her husband and son navigate daily. Years later, Evelyn's mother-in-law, Violet, moves in.
By: Charlene Carr
-
American Negra
- A Memoir
- By: Natasha S. Alford
- Narrated by: Natasha S. Alford
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In American Negra, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY. In smart, vivid prose, Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate New York and society’s flawed teachings about matters of identity.
-
-
Relatable to those who grew up in America
- By Oronde Creal on 03-24-24
-
Talk to Me
- Lessons from a Family Forged by History
- By: Rich Benjamin
- Narrated by: Rich Benjamin
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.
By: Rich Benjamin
-
High-Risk Homosexual
- A Memoir
- By: Edgar Gomez
- Narrated by: Edgar Gomez
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez's uncle's cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at 13-years-old to become a man. Listeners follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor's office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual".
-
-
Terrible recording
- By Xander on 05-21-25
By: Edgar Gomez
-
Finding Manana
- A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
- By: Mirta Ojito
- Narrated by: Mirta Ojito, Juan Arturo
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mirta Ojito was one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees who traveled to Miami during the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift. Growing up, Ojito was eager to fit in and join Castro’s Young Pioneers, but as she grew older and began to understand the darker side of the Cuban revolution, she and her family began to aspire to a safer, happier life. When Castro opened Cuba’s borders for those who wanted to leave, her family was more than ready to go: they had been waiting for the opportunity for twenty years.
-
-
recommended by friend. Glad I bought in a big sale.
- By Carol Franks on 06-07-25
By: Mirta Ojito
-
The Grand Paloma Resort
- A Novel
- By: Cleyvis Natera
- Narrated by: Sixta Morel, EJ Lavery, Diana Bustelo
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Laura is a local Dominican woman who, through sheer hard work, has risen through the ranks to become manager at the Grand Paloma Resort. Her idea to pair a “platinum” guest with their own resort employee to attend to their every whim has been wildly successful, and she’s just weeks away from a promotion that could blaze a path for her off the resort and toward a life of opportunity. If only her younger sister, Elena—who she’s looked after since the death of their mother—could get with the program.
By: Cleyvis Natera
-
We Rip the World Apart
- By: Charlene Carr
- Narrated by: Tebby Fisher
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she's pregnant with a child she isn't sure she wants, her struggle to understand her place in the world as a person who is half-Black, half-white—yet feels neither—is amplified. Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child during the politically charged Jamaican exodus in the 1980s, only to realize they'd come to a place where Black men are viewed with suspicion—a constant and pernicious reality Evelyn watches her husband and son navigate daily. Years later, Evelyn's mother-in-law, Violet, moves in.
By: Charlene Carr
-
American Negra
- A Memoir
- By: Natasha S. Alford
- Narrated by: Natasha S. Alford
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In American Negra, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY. In smart, vivid prose, Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate New York and society’s flawed teachings about matters of identity.
-
-
Relatable to those who grew up in America
- By Oronde Creal on 03-24-24
-
We Could Be Rats
- A Novel
- By: Emily Austin
- Narrated by: Candace Thaxton
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal, but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.
-
-
I cried
- By Hannah Putna on 05-12-25
By: Emily Austin
-
First in the Family
- A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
- By: Jessica Hoppe
- Narrated by: Jessica Hoppe
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.
-
-
What a beautiful story of survival and strength
- By Jess Henriquez on 10-10-24
By: Jessica Hoppe
-
Culture and Imperialism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landmark work from the intellectually auspicious author of Orientalism, this book explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. This classic study, the direct successor to Said's main work, is read by Peter Ganim ( Orientalism).
-
-
BRAVO, AUDIBLE!! WE NEED MORE SAID!! REAL BOOKS!!
- By AnthonyStevens on 02-27-11
By: Edward Said
-
Ibis
- A Novel
- By: Justin Haynes
- Narrated by: M.L. Sanchez
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an eleven-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad's government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions. New Felicity's superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they've brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before.
By: Justin Haynes
-
Patsy
- A Novel
- By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
- Narrated by: Sharon Gordon
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother - or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru. Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself first.
-
-
If heroes are required... Avoid!
- By Averil on 10-19-19
-
Love Forms
- A Novel
- By: Claire Adam
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.
By: Claire Adam
-
Plantains and Our Becoming
- Poems
- By: Melania Luisa Marte
- Narrated by: Melania Luisa Marte
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens Plaintains and Our Becoming by pointing out that Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record—to build upon the legacies of your ancestors?
-
Crux
- A Cross-Border Memoir
- By: Jean Guerrero
- Narrated by: Jean Guerrero
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter’s mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction. Marco Antonio was raised in Mexico, then migrated to California, where he met Jean’s mother, Jeannette, a Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco is a self-taught genius at building things—including mythologies about himself and the hidden forces that drive us. When he goes on the run, Jean follows and embarks on an investigative journey between cultures and languages, the earthly and the mystical, truth and fiction.
-
-
Acoustic Cinema
- By CS Products on 10-20-22
By: Jean Guerrero
-
South to America
- A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: Imani Perry
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.
-
-
An incredible achievement
- By Tom on 02-16-22
By: Imani Perry
-
Another Man in the Street
- By: Caryl Phillips
- Narrated by: Danny Sapani
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In London's swinging sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in Britain with dreams of becoming a journalist in the mother country. Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter’s lonely secretary Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England.
By: Caryl Phillips
-
The Palestine Laboratory
- How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
- By: Antony Loewenstein
- Narrated by: Finlay Robertson
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers a largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'.
-
-
Important but badly edited
- By Wouter on 05-17-25
-
Hello Stranger
- Musings on Modern Intimacies
- By: Manuel Betancourt
- Narrated by: Manuel Betancourt
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities. As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like.
-
-
Relatable and intimate
- By helviz javier vanegas on 05-30-25