I Just Keep Talking
A Life in Essays
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Narrated by:
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Nell Irvin Painter
About this listen
From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it.
Throughout her prolific writing career, Nell Painter has published works on such luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Malcolm X. Her unique vantage on American history pushes the boundaries of personal narrative and academic authorship. Led by an unbridled curiosity for her subjects, Painter asks listeners to reconsider ideas of race, politics, and identity. I Just Keep Talking assembles her writing for the first time into a single volume, displaying the breadth and depth of Painter’s decades-long historical inquiry and the evolution of Black political thought—and includes a dazzling introduction and coda being published for the first time in this collection. From her mining of figures like Carrie Buck and Martin Delaney for their resonance today, to a deep dive into the history of exclusion through the work of Toni Morrison, to a discussion of the American political landscape after the 2016 election, Painter nimbly portrays the trials of a country frequently at war with itself.
Along with Painter’s writing, this collection offers her original artwork, threaded throughout the book as counterpoint and emphasis. Her visual art shows a deft mind turning toward the tragedy and humor of her subjects; pulling from newspapers, personal records, and original sketches, Painter’s artwork testifies to the dialectic of tremendous change and stasis that continues to shape American history.
These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.
This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF that contains artwork and other visuals from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Nell Irvin Painter (P)2024 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Nell Irvin Painter is one of the towering Black intellects of the last half century…[I Just Keep Talking] is more than an odyssey for the senses; it’s a revelation that will inspire courage in anyone seeking to express their truth.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“Painter puts muscle and heart into history so that her readers can easily, but thoughtfully, draw the lines between past and present. Her history is inclusive, not in a pandering or self-consciously correct way, but because her artful telling of it is full of complexity that’s both beautiful and bracing.” —Robin Givhan, The Washington Post
“The essays in I Just Keep Talking show [Painter] repeatedly drawing attention to a plurality of Black American experiences. . .incisive. . .candid. . .full of surprises.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
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Story
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.
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Heartache and heartbreak and the will to survive.
- By Polly B. on 07-05-24
By: Guy Trebay
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Soldiers and Kings
- Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
- By: Jason De León
- Narrated by: Jason De León
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords.
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Gritty and raw
- By Amazon Customer on 06-02-24
By: Jason De León
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No One Gets to Fall Apart
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah LaBrie
- Narrated by: Sarah LaBrie
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown.
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Really heart felt writing ✨
- By Giovanna Quinto on 11-30-24
By: Sarah LaBrie
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The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
- A Novel
- By: Janice Hallett
- Narrated by: Annie Aldington, Nneka Okoye, Gareth Armstrong, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared.
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Actor chewing noises disgusting. Did not finish.
- By Schwarzian on 03-12-24
By: Janice Hallett
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Old in Art School
- By: Nell Painter
- Narrated by: Nell Painter
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school - in her 60s - to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Jillian on 08-07-18
By: Nell Painter
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I Heard Her Call My Name
- A Memoir of Transition
- By: Lucy Sante
- Narrated by: Lucy Sante
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
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Beautiful and unique memoir
- By George Brown on 12-15-24
By: Lucy Sante
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Cold Crematorium
- Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
- By: József Debreczeni, Paul Olchváry - translator, Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Laurence Dobiesz
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go “left,” his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the “lucky” ones, he was sent to the “right,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution.
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Learned so much more about the Holocaust
- By Jerseygirl on 02-03-24
By: József Debreczeni, and others
What listeners say about I Just Keep Talking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- R. MacDonald
- 06-21-24
Rich Work, Must Relisten
Painter is an excellent researcher. These details she brings out just pop. The analysis is very convincing although her arguments hew towards conventional politics. I feel the young American socialist movement has arguments and points which could deepen and nuance some of these things but I also am sensitive to the possibility that she might lose chunks of her older audience. I do wonder though, what age group is her audience?
The History of White People was deeply influential to me so it's a pleasure to hear the personal details as she shaped much of my thinking.
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- K D S
- 07-11-24
Author reader
What an amazing opportunity to hear the Author read her essays which cover a lifetime of research and deep insights
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