
Long Division
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Ruffin Prentiss III
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Jaime Lincoln Smith
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By:
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Kiese Laymon
About this listen
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction
From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.
Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985 version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.
City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward) novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
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The Rediscovery of America
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-
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By: Ned Blackhawk
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The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
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By: Kiese Laymon
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How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
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- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
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By: Kiese Laymon
-
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
- Essays
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author and essayist Kiese Laymon is one of the most unique, stirring, and powerful new voices in American social and cultural commentary. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of Laymon's essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast. Laymon's writing is unflinchingly honest, while also being smart, lacerating, and unexpectedly funny.
-
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Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams.
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I never read this genre, but…
- By Clare Kelly on 09-21-24
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Heavy
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.
-
-
Be prepared
- By Amy Eberle on 10-30-18
By: Kiese Laymon
-
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
- Essays
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Brilliant and uncompromising, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential listening. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language.
-
-
Kiese Laymon is the GOAT.
- By Tia Briggs-Sawyer on 10-20-24
By: Kiese Laymon
-
City Summer, Country Summer
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Samuel Eubanks
- Length: 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love. Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass.
By: Kiese Laymon
-
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
- Essays
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author and essayist Kiese Laymon is one of the most unique, stirring, and powerful new voices in American social and cultural commentary. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of Laymon's essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast. Laymon's writing is unflinchingly honest, while also being smart, lacerating, and unexpectedly funny.
-
-
I'm Stunned By This Collection
- By Rachel on 10-17-17
By: Kiese Laymon
-
Rest Is Resistance
- A Manifesto
- By: Tricia Hersey
- Narrated by: Tricia Hersey
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace—feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit. In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted.
-
-
What an experience
- By makeba jones on 10-26-22
By: Tricia Hersey
-
Lovely One
- A Memoir
- By: Ketanji Brown Jackson
- Narrated by: Ketanji Brown Jackson
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams.
-
-
I never read this genre, but…
- By Clare Kelly on 09-21-24
What listeners say about Long Division
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Deborah M. Barrett
- 09-18-24
The good, the bad, the ugly and the hopefulness of the past, present and future.
I absolutely loved "Long Division"! The unique storytelling style kept me engaged from start to finish. The characters were so well-developed and the plot was both thought-provoking and entertaining. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a fresh and original read.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Chiti Kaunda
- 04-19-25
Reclaiming power and rewriting the story
I was so glad that they picked narrators with a similar lyrical cadence and poetry to Kiese Laymon, the author. He writes a powerful two-part story about how you find liberation in the face of deep, deep oppression. The book pushes the bounds of respectability, likeability, resilience, and integration, and I believe reveals what sits in the belly of many Blacj children. Kiese is one of the most underestimated authors of our time.
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