Heads of the Colored People
Stories
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Narrated by:
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Adenrele Ojo
About this listen
A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes.
Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous - from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide - while others are devastatingly poignant - a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper-middle-class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.
Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an original and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
©2018 Nafissa Thompson-Spires (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Perfect in every way!
- By Anonymous User on 10-19-22
By: Lincee Ray
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One Amazing Thing
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi, Soneela Nankani, Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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Breaking Night
- A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
- By: Liz Murray
- Narrated by: Liz Murray
- Length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age 15, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. Then, when Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny.
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unbelievably inspiring
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-12
By: Liz Murray
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The Admissions
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mitchell Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school....
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Anything for success
- By JillHen on 09-13-15
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Orange Mint and Honey
- By: Carleen Brice
- Narrated by: Cherise Booth
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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After grad school, Shay Dixon feels like she's had enough for awhile. Inspired by her spiritual adviser - a soul-soothing blues player named Nina Simon - Shay calls her estranged mother Nona for the first time in years, and shocks herself by asking if it would be okay to come home for a while.
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One For The Money
- By DiaRose on 09-25-17
By: Carleen Brice
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Lifted by the Great Nothing
- By: Karim Dimechkie
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Max doesn't remember his mother, who was murdered by burglars before they emigrated from Beirut to New Jersey. He lives with his father, Rasheed, who is enamored of his concept of American culture - baseball and barbeques - and tries to shed his Lebanese heritage completely.
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Excellent
- By Cheyenne on 06-13-15
By: Karim Dimechkie
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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Language Arts
- By: Stephanie Kallos
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space.
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The beauty of the broken
- By SJ Evans on 04-27-18
By: Stephanie Kallos
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Everything You Ever Wanted
- A Memoir
- By: Jillian Lauren
- Narrated by: Jillian Lauren
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.
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Great for adoptive families
- By berry bomb on 07-06-22
By: Jillian Lauren
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Magnolia Wednesdays
- By: Wendy Wax
- Narrated by: Käthe Mazur
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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At 41, Vivian Armstrong Gray's life as an investigative journalist is crumbling. Humiliated after taking a bullet in her backside during an exposé, Vivi learns that she's pregnant, jobless, and very hormonal. This explains why she says "yes" to a dreadful job covering suburban living back home in Georgia, a column she must write incognito. Down South, it's her sister's ballroom dance studio that becomes her undercover spot where she learns about the local life - and where unexpected friendships develop.
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Painful. And not in a good way.
- By Kate on 01-24-13
By: Wendy Wax
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Instant Mom
- By: Nia Vardalos
- Narrated by: Nia Vardalos
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Some families are created in different ways but are still, in every way, a family. Writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos firmly believed she was supposed to be a mom, but Mother Nature and modern medicine had put her in a headlock. So she made a choice that shocked friends, family, and even herself: with only 14 hours' notice, she adopted a preschooler.
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Witty and Heartfelt
- By Beth M. Honeycutt on 07-03-24
By: Nia Vardalos
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Not sure of where the author was going with this
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Great Listen!
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A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.
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More than violent
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What listeners say about Heads of the Colored People
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sarah Sullivan
- 07-10-19
wonderfully written
every ending to the short surprised left my mouth gaping on my daily commute on the bus. not shocking endings just well written and gives an honest outlook on people
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4 people found this helpful
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- Baz Sundark
- 03-29-24
this was an incredible listen, the readers voice is beautiful and powerful and stories are so compelling you don't want to stop
I really loved everything about this. I can't wait to read more by this author
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- Pauline McKenzie
- 06-18-19
voices in our heads
Liked the stories, narrator was great, some stories ended too abruptly. More variation in voices.
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1 person found this helpful
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- m
- 10-01-20
Very enjoyable with humor twisted with reality.
Great read of short stories of the mosaic of African Americans. Humor, truth, and relatable.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-20-22
My thoughts
Thoughts on The Heads of the Colored People
Review by Marissa Boglin
“The Heads of the Colored People” is a necessary read for any person of color. Thompson-Spires explores a myriad of society’s blemishes in this short-story collection, including ableism, bullying, and social class. The individual stories are uniquely intertwined and collectively share the common theme of the American dream. The characters in this literary piece are on a mission to discover their contributions to the world. The most compelling element of the book is Thompson Spires’ dexterous ability to create a broad range of characters with attributes that make them distinctive and memorable. For instance, Fatima, a protagonist in the stories “Belles Lettres” and “The Subject of Consumption,” is the illegitimate daughter of a doctor that has hyperhidrosis at a young age. Another example, Raina, makes ASMR videos in the story “Whisper to a Scream.”
Nafissa Thompson-Spires was born in 1983 and has several accolades to her credit. “The Heads of the Colored People” was her debut offering to the literary world. “The Heads of the Colored People” won the Los Angeles Times Art Sidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Award for fiction. In 2018, she was long-listed for the National Book Award and later won the 2019 Whiting Award. She earned a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in writing from the University of Illinois.
The prose in “The Heads of the Colored People” is intoxicating as Thompson-Spires does a beauteous play with words. The writing is poetic, and there are no instances of purple prose. She creates characters that are three-dimensional and emotionally impact readers. Readers can learn so much from characters like the different Todds in “This Todd” who refuse to accept sympathy from Kim, the first-person narrator. The reader can also learn valuable lessons in how a pessimistic outlook on life can keep them in bondage, as in the story “Not Today, Marjorie.”
“The Heads of the Colored People” was published by Simon and Schuster in 2018. It is a must-have for anyone who loves engaging stories with unforgettable characters.
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2 people found this helpful
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- WA 17
- 08-03-20
Great short stories
Picked up this book as a recommendation to understand more about diversity. Found the book instead to be a book about people.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-22-19
Absolutely Petty...Loved It!
The story about the Mother's spoke to every petty bone in my body! I could definitely see myself saying those things (Oh the shame!) LOL!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Trenniece
- 08-01-18
What a great book
I absolutely love short stories and this book didn't disappoint. I really enjoyed how some of the stories were weaved into others yet were just as strong alone. A great book for any collection! I am now on the hunt for more books like this. Nafissa Thompson-Spires is now one of my new favorite authors!
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6 people found this helpful
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- Oscar
- 07-18-20
Sketches Well Drawn
The performance is well done so the audible version is worth the listen. The collection is filled with well drawn characters and with voices filled with spirit and life. The author captures the struggle of surviving under the gaze of whiteness with expert precision. Always centering black characters and an internal battle to be recognized. Although I’m not black, but Native American, I found all the stories very relatable to contemporary Native lives seeking upward mobility. I enjoyed the brutal honesty in the stories and the unique voice of the author. I highly recommend this book. Especially if you want a unique read to talk with friends and family.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jessica
- 12-17-22
Great stories
I love story collections and this one is excellent. No dubs. Enjoyed the different entry points the author took here, and the narrator nailed it with different characters.
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