
Paradise
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Narrated by:
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Toni Morrison
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By:
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Toni Morrison
About this listen
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed.... The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women."
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There...where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose". Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.
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Story
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
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not a novel, but a collection of short stories
- By Melinda on 06-14-12
By: Toni Morrison
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The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
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Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
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Playing in the Dark
- Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
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My goodness..get ready to be challenged
- By keishie23 on 05-13-20
By: Toni Morrison
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Song of Solomon
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 2 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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Performance
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Story
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
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Poorly Edited
- By JACK on 09-03-10
By: Toni Morrison
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Another Country
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. Another Country is a work that is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago - and expertly narrated by Dion Graham.
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Powerful and sad
- By Kenneth on 04-10-09
By: James Baldwin
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The Source of Self-Regard
- Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
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Refreshing thoughts
- By Amazon Customer on 04-02-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
- A Novel (Vintage International)
- By: James Baldwin, Roxane Gay - introduction
- Narrated by: Roxane Gay, Joe Morton
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.
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Haunting
- By DAN on 08-22-24
By: James Baldwin, and others
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Recitatif
- A Story
- By: Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith - Introduction
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
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
Ms Toni
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It’s Toni. Nothing else you can say. So good.
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Outstanding.
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Listening
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
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Maybe more important than the story, is Toni Morrison’s writing. It reads like poetry with a rhythm and beautiful descriptions. No matter how confusing it was to read, the writing kept me engaged and invested.
Paradise, really!
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The power of paradise
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Beautiful
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Loved it
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Complex Story Requiring Close Reading
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