Feel Free
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Nikki Amuka-Bird
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By:
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Zadie Smith
About this listen
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into four sections - In the World, In the Audience, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network - and Facebook itself - really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes - and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive - and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
©2018 Zadie Smith (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she’s headed…At times she reminds me of a musician jamming, or one of those enviable cooks who can take five random ingredients lying around the kitchen and whip up a meal. Her loose, roving essays cohere because they are rooted in her sensibility, in what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text.’” (The New York Times Book Review)
“What binds the collection is Smith’s voice: frank, urgent, self-ironic. Dipping into these pieces (in any order) is like setting out on a walk with a vibrant, curious, gracefully articulate friend.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
"[Narrator Nikki] Amuka-Bird's mellow British voice is a marvel. Smith's breadth of subject matter can seem overwhelming, so the listener can appreciate the evenness of the narration and better absorb the substance of each topic. Music, art, dance, technology, British and American politics, and love are all treated dispassionately, and Amuka-Bird's self-assured tone is a perfect match for Smith's musings." (AudioFile)
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Known and Strange Things
- Essays
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. Minute after minute, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.
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A Book that Teaches and Shares
- By Carolyn J. on 10-08-17
By: Teju Cole
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.
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Beautiful memoir
- By Gabriel Smith on 07-25-22
By: Jan Morris
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Manifesto
- On Never Giving Up
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Bernardine Evaristo
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
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Glorious performance and inspiring story
- By Maggi Morehouse on 01-25-22
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Big Magic
- Creative Living Beyond Fear
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
People of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration and empowerment from Elizabeth Gilbert’s books for years. Now this beloved author digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity. With profound empathy and radiant generosity, she offers potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear.
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Biggest Inspiration In a Long Time
- By Gillian on 09-23-15
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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Empire of Self
- A Life of Gore Vidal
- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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Somewhere in Northwest London stands Caldwell housing estate, relic of 70s urban planning. Five identical blocks, deliberately named: Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke, and Russell. If you grew up there, the plan was to get out and get on, to something bigger, better. Thirty years later ex-Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan have all made it out, with varying degrees of succes - whatever that means....
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Grand Union
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Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.
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In Defense of Zadie Smith
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By: Zadie Smith
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The Autograph Man
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- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Ben Barnes
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Overall
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Story
Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them - all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of '40s movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.
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Maybe it's ...me? (But I don't think it's me.)
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By: Zadie Smith
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Pulphead
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Overall
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In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Overall
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In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television.
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Excellent Content Read at Warp Speed
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By: Neil Postman
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American Prison
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for nine dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough and wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War.
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Disgusting
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Recitatif
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In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
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Read the introduction last
- By Robert C Purnell on 02-01-22
By: Toni Morrison, and others
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Crossroads
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- By: Jonathan Franzen
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.
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How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Trick Mirror
- Reflections on Self-Delusion
- By: Jia Tolentino
- Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
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Couldn’t stop listening
- By Alice on 08-25-19
By: Jia Tolentino
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Factfulness
- Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
- By: Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling
- Narrated by: Richard Harries
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of carrying only opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school - we systematically get the answers wrong. In Factfulness, professor of international health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two longtime collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens.
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Great Read not for Listening
- By carlos gomez on 06-01-18
By: Hans Rosling, and others
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The Ministry for the Future
- A Novel
- By: Kim Stanley Robinson
- Narrated by: Jennifer Fitzgerald, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Ramon de Ocampo, and others
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.
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Great ideas, uneven narration
- By depthpsychologist on 12-09-20
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Lincoln in the Bardo
- A Novel
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, and others
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Overall
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February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”
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"Where might God stand?"
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By: George Saunders
What listeners say about Feel Free
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Matthew
- 08-15-23
Sometimes Mostly On Point
While some of the pieces (especially the ones regarding brexit and the "attunement" to beautiful works of art) offer interesting and unique perspectives, I had some problems with other pieces. The critiques of facebook and social media in general feel a bit dated and broad and the piece on the film Anomalisa jumped straight into laying out and spoiling intricate little details and easter eggs in the story and set design (so much so that I had to quickly pause the book, fearing that there wouldn't be anything left to discover.)
I love Zadie Smith but this collection is not the strongest example of what she can do.
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- Georgine
- 06-17-18
Superb
Mind-opening collection of brilliant essays by one of the most thoughtful and gifted writers of her generation. Narrator is a gem who lends deep expression to the writing--almost as though she had written it herself. One of the best listening experiences yet.
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- Mark David Goodson
- 05-08-19
Feeling Freer
Smith is one of my favorite authors, but she has become my favorite literary philosopher with this collection. Her and David Foster Wallace, that is. Smith hits you in a different way than Wallace does. Whereas he will never let forget the strange logic of TV--beaming one all-appealing message to the masses--Smith won’t let you feel the same way about particular experiences. Notably, in this collection, the weather, Get Out, Facebook, Key and Peele, Jay Z, parenting, advertising, Manhattan, 30 Rock, Justin Bieber, Kierkegaard, and, of course, a slew of books, both of public and personal note: Suburban Monk, Crash, I Melrose, The Dead Yard, You are Free, Portnoy’s Complaint.
If you are an auto-didact like me, or a self-made literary snob, like me, her essays are a seedbed, a true master’s course with the strongest voice on nuance, personality, and layering there is to guide you.
My personal hilights include her description of Facebook’s use. She came to review The Social Network, but she stayed to articulate the indescribable feel of being a Facebook user. Her beautiful essay on use of the first person via Keat’s negative capacity: denying one’s mastery to gain it. Is that humility or ego? The retrospective swirl. A feeling as tangible as deja vu. It is the realization that you now, as a parent yourself, discover why your parents acted so strangely all the time.
My personal favorite was using the existentialist Buber to describe the morose existance of icons like Justin Bieber—someone who never gets a true relationship with a person because he is made into a thing by so many and, in turn, makes so many into things.
I will be returning to these essays over the years. Not to remember why things are the way they are, as I do Wallace, but to recall exactly how certain things feel and why.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Andrea Jacobs
- 08-12-21
great collection
loved this collection of essays by Zadie Smith and getting to hear them in her voice.
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- Matt Miller
- 04-03-19
enjoyable but melancholy
as good as changing my mind but the optimism of the Obama era has left and has been replaced with dread of the Trump era. it is hard to listen because of this.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-11-23
favorite audiobook in a long time
everything about this read was phenomenal!! the voice is so soothing and the essays so beautiful
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- Mary E. Magin
- 03-09-18
great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
If you could sum up Feel Free in three words, what would they be?
thoughtful, open, charming
What about Nikki Amuka-Bird’s performance did you like?
Amuka-Bird's narration is genius! So much so it made me wonder at times whether she shares interest in some of topics Smith writes about, because she subtly nails certain details in vocal inflection for different people, and sometimes further nested people-performing-as-characters, Smith mentions. But not only that, the inflection and emphasis is all around brilliant, passionate in the right measure and context for maximum effect, and at turns so effective at conveying the level, open curiousness that makes Smith's inquiries so refreshing and bright. Perfect match and now I want to find and listen to everything Amuka-Bird's narrated!
Any additional comments?
Loved this audiobook to the point I wonder how anything can compare afterward--a good example of one where I'm so glad I listened to it instead of read it in print.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Charles
- 04-01-19
Understanding
Zadie has given us a look inside her world, inside the things that inspire her and her thoughts on contemporary culture with a philosophical undercurrent, delivered seamlessly by Nikki Amuka-Bird.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-20-18
Solid surveys of various social themes
Whether relatable or not there is an immersiveness to the narrative and accessibility to the observations. Narrators voice gives good anchor to the subject material.
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-12-23
Love Zadie
I honestly prefer her essays to her novels. There's something about them that's tossed out there, I think because she takes the novels more seriously, that let's her perspective leak out in greater proportion.
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