
How to Tell When We Will Die
On Pain, Disability, and Doom
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 $27.29
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Johanna Hedva
-
By:
-
Johanna Hedva
About this listen
The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.
In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.
How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.
With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.
©2024 Johanna Hedva (P)2024 Hillman Grad BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
-
-
Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
-
Who's Afraid of Gender?
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Judith Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. In this book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction.
-
-
Butler’s reading of Butler was stunning
- By Joseph Schneider on 07-19-24
By: Judith Butler
-
Thick
- And Other Essays
- By: Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Narrated by: Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Smart, humorous, and strikingly original essays by one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time.” (Rebecca Traister) In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.
-
-
A different perspective
- By ANNE on 08-13-19
-
Palestine 1936
- The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict
- By: Oren Kessler
- Narrated by: Shawn K. Jain
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives, and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict. The revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting all in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself. British forces' aggressive counterinsurgency took care of the rest, finally quashing the uprising on the eve of World War II.
-
-
Who is this narrator?
- By Rachel S. on 09-23-24
By: Oren Kessler
-
Health Communism
- A Surplus Manifesto
- By: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant
- Narrated by: Sarah Welborn
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written by cohosts of the hit Death Panel podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population.
-
-
incisive, foundational ideas for understanding capitalism and fighting back
- By AJ on 01-15-25
By: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and others
-
Paper Doll
- Notes from a Late Bloomer
- By: Dylan Mulvaney
- Narrated by: Dylan Mulvaney
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan’s personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. Through her “Days of Girlhood” series, she connected with followers by exploring what it means to be a girl, from experimenting with makeup to story times to spilling the tea about laser hair removal, while never shying away from discussing the transphobia she faced online.
-
-
Love at first listen
- By ekell on 03-24-25
By: Dylan Mulvaney
-
Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
-
-
Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
-
Who's Afraid of Gender?
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Judith Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. In this book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction.
-
-
Butler’s reading of Butler was stunning
- By Joseph Schneider on 07-19-24
By: Judith Butler
-
Thick
- And Other Essays
- By: Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Narrated by: Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Smart, humorous, and strikingly original essays by one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time.” (Rebecca Traister) In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.
-
-
A different perspective
- By ANNE on 08-13-19
-
Palestine 1936
- The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict
- By: Oren Kessler
- Narrated by: Shawn K. Jain
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives, and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict. The revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting all in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself. British forces' aggressive counterinsurgency took care of the rest, finally quashing the uprising on the eve of World War II.
-
-
Who is this narrator?
- By Rachel S. on 09-23-24
By: Oren Kessler
-
Health Communism
- A Surplus Manifesto
- By: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant
- Narrated by: Sarah Welborn
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written by cohosts of the hit Death Panel podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population.
-
-
incisive, foundational ideas for understanding capitalism and fighting back
- By AJ on 01-15-25
By: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and others
-
Paper Doll
- Notes from a Late Bloomer
- By: Dylan Mulvaney
- Narrated by: Dylan Mulvaney
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan’s personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. Through her “Days of Girlhood” series, she connected with followers by exploring what it means to be a girl, from experimenting with makeup to story times to spilling the tea about laser hair removal, while never shying away from discussing the transphobia she faced online.
-
-
Love at first listen
- By ekell on 03-24-25
By: Dylan Mulvaney
-
Girl, Woman, Other
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of black British women. Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
-
-
smart, compassionate, confronting and enjoyable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
-
Females
- By: Andrea Long Chu
- Narrated by: Andrea Long Chu
- Length: 2 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Everyone is female, and everyone hates it." So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas - the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol - Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn, and even feminists like herself.
-
-
Bad Reviews are by TERFS
- By Siena Sherer on 05-17-22
By: Andrea Long Chu
-
Elena Knows
- By: Claudia Piñeiro, Frances Riddle - translator
- Narrated by: Sally Masterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.
-
-
Super depressing but extremely well written and narrated
- By Lenny C. Husen on 03-07-24
By: Claudia Piñeiro, and others
-
The Future Is Disabled
- Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
- By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
-
-
Amazing!!!
- By Anonymous User on 01-10-25
-
No Visible Bruises
- What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
- By: Rachel Louise Snyder
- Narrated by: Rachel Louise Snyder
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic'. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths....
-
-
Not yet ready
- By Alyssa E. on 05-17-19
-
Disability Intimacy
- Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
- By: Alice Wong
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others—a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm.
-
-
Great mix of perspectives
- By Alyssum M. Pohl on 08-13-24
By: Alice Wong
-
The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir
- A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human
- By: Sophie Strand
- Narrated by: Sophie Strand
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body.
-
-
Deeply human
- By Anonymous User on 06-11-25
By: Sophie Strand
-
The Shock Doctrine
- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Jennifer Wiltsie
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution.
-
-
If It's Bad for Humanity, It's Good for Business
- By Nelson Alexander on 09-29-07
By: Naomi Klein
-
Feminism Is for Everybody
- Passionate Politics
- By: bell hooks
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, Bell Hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, Hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives - to see that feminism is for everybody.
-
-
Excellent Introduction to Feminism
- By Listens-a-lot on 03-29-18
By: bell hooks
-
Monstrilio
- By: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal, Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
-
-
Not exactly what I expected….
- By kisa on 10-06-23
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Powerful and Difficult Must Read
- By Brenda N. on 03-13-25
By: Omar El Akkad
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Medical Gaslighting
- How to Get the Care You Deserve in a System That Makes You Fight for Your Life
- By: Ilana Jacqueline
- Narrated by: Lori Prince
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For women, the possibility of experiencing medical gaslighting—having a healthcare provider dismiss or ignore their concerns without considering appropriate testing or creating a treatment plan—has always been a very real and present danger, with consequences ranging from self-doubt and emotional stress to delayed diagnosis and death. And being a woman of color, transgender, or disabled only compounds the risk. In Medical Gaslighting, you’ll equip yourself with the tools you need to be fully heard at every step of the process.
-
-
Absolutely nothing
- By Lynne Banks on 11-05-24
By: Ilana Jacqueline
-
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
- Unabridged Selections
- By: Alice Wong
- Narrated by: Alejandra Ospina, Alice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
-
-
Missing stories
- By Adrianna A. on 11-19-20
By: Alice Wong
-
Bibliophobia
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Chihaya
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”. Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland.
By: Sarah Chihaya
-
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto
- Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World
- By: Tiffany Yu
- Narrated by: Tiffany Yu
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto defines ableism as discrimination in favor of non-disabled people and helps listeners understand that ending discrimination begins with self-reflection. Tiffany Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been “othered” and rendered invisible.
-
-
Everyone Should Listen
- By Sue on 02-06-25
By: Tiffany Yu
-
Immaculate Conception
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ling Huang
- Narrated by: Carolyn Kang
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka—trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world—pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde’s fame and success cause her to begin drifting away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close.
-
-
To future listeners
- By Sofie on 06-18-25
By: Ling Ling Huang
-
The Dry Season
- A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster.
-
-
Excellent again!
- By scott bridger on 06-10-25
By: Melissa Febos
-
Medical Gaslighting
- How to Get the Care You Deserve in a System That Makes You Fight for Your Life
- By: Ilana Jacqueline
- Narrated by: Lori Prince
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For women, the possibility of experiencing medical gaslighting—having a healthcare provider dismiss or ignore their concerns without considering appropriate testing or creating a treatment plan—has always been a very real and present danger, with consequences ranging from self-doubt and emotional stress to delayed diagnosis and death. And being a woman of color, transgender, or disabled only compounds the risk. In Medical Gaslighting, you’ll equip yourself with the tools you need to be fully heard at every step of the process.
-
-
Absolutely nothing
- By Lynne Banks on 11-05-24
By: Ilana Jacqueline
-
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
- Unabridged Selections
- By: Alice Wong
- Narrated by: Alejandra Ospina, Alice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
-
-
Missing stories
- By Adrianna A. on 11-19-20
By: Alice Wong
-
Bibliophobia
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Chihaya
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”. Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland.
By: Sarah Chihaya
-
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto
- Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World
- By: Tiffany Yu
- Narrated by: Tiffany Yu
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto defines ableism as discrimination in favor of non-disabled people and helps listeners understand that ending discrimination begins with self-reflection. Tiffany Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been “othered” and rendered invisible.
-
-
Everyone Should Listen
- By Sue on 02-06-25
By: Tiffany Yu
-
Immaculate Conception
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ling Huang
- Narrated by: Carolyn Kang
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka—trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world—pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde’s fame and success cause her to begin drifting away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close.
-
-
To future listeners
- By Sofie on 06-18-25
By: Ling Ling Huang
-
The Dry Season
- A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster.
-
-
Excellent again!
- By scott bridger on 06-10-25
By: Melissa Febos
-
The Light Eaters
- How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
- By: Zoë Schlanger
- Narrated by: Zoë Schlanger
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system.
-
-
Entertaining perhaps but not science.
- By Jerry Miller on 07-31-24
By: Zoë Schlanger
-
Hungerstone
- By: Kat Dunn
- Narrated by: Perdita Weeks
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s the height of the industrial revolution and ten years into Lenore’s marriage to steel magnate Henry, their relationship has soured. When Henry’s ambitions take them from London to the remote British moorlands to host a hunting party, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night. Carmilla, who stirs up something deep within Lenore. And before long, girls from the local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger . . .
-
-
I love when women
- By Holly Cooper on 05-22-25
By: Kat Dunn
-
We Refuse
- A Forceful History of Black Resistance
- By: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Narrated by: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
-
-
Insightful
- By TRACEY D. SCOTT on 06-10-25
-
Erasing History
- By: Jason Stanley
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the world: the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history.
-
-
The bias attitude of the author
- By Elizabeth ohanna on 09-30-24
By: Jason Stanley
-
Raising Hare
- A Memoir
- By: Chloe Dalton
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.
-
-
A beautiful reading of a heartfelt story. I didn’t want it to end.
- By Sparrow on 04-02-25
By: Chloe Dalton
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Powerful and Difficult Must Read
- By Brenda N. on 03-13-25
By: Omar El Akkad
Queer Overload
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.