Recitatif
A Story
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Narrated by:
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Zadie Smith
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Bahni Turpin
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner—for the first time in a beautifully produced stand-alone edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith
“A puzzle of a story, then—a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an ‘experiment’ she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.” —Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth
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.
Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?
A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.
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Critic reviews
An NPR Best Book of the Year
“‘Recitatif’ . . . is ambitious, pointed, and surprisingly playful when it comes to race. Morrison described it as ‘an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial’. . . . So shrewd and economical is Morrison’s storytelling, so tightly controlled is her experiment. ‘Recitatif’ is brilliant and worthy of space in your brain and bookshelf.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Nobel laureate Morrison’s only short story, originally published in 1983 and now as a slender, elegant volume enhanced by Smith’s insightful introduction, is a knockout. . . . In her captivating story, Morrison ingeniously leads readers to challenge racial stereotypes and consider nuanced power dynamics with questions that linger beyond the last page.” —The National Book Review
“When I return to ‘Recitatif,’ it is with a renewed understanding that, along with a handful of other African Americans, Morrison was among the first to depict Black culture while also considering politics, while also considering United States history, while also considering white supremacy, while also considering economic class, while also considering gender, while also considering intergenerational trauma. As the kids might say, Toni Morrison did that.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times Book Review
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Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.
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Really disappointing narrator!
- By Jessica Williams on 01-21-12
By: Wally Lamb
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
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The Golden State
- A Novel
- By: Lydia Kiesling
- Narrated by: Amanda Dolan
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent - her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error" - Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity.
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Tedious read but delightful reader Amanda Dolan
- By Eric on 02-14-19
By: Lydia Kiesling
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Feathers
- By: Jacqueline Woodson
- Narrated by: Sisi Aisha Johnson
- Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Frannie doesn't know what to make of the poem she's reading in school. She hasn't thought much about hope. There are so many other things to think about. Each day, her friend Samantha seems a bit more "holy". And there is a new boy in class everyone is calling the Jesus Boy.
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National Treasure
- By Austin Jayhawk on 03-19-17
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The Sweet By and By
- A Novel
- By: Todd Johnson
- Narrated by: Becky Ann Baker, Adriane Lenox, Robin Miles, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Among the longleaf pines and family farms of eastern North Carolina, days seem to pass without incident for Margaret Clayton and Bernice Stokes until they discover each other in a friendship that will take them on the most important journey of their lives. Margaret, droll and whip smart, has a will of iron that never fails her even when her body does, while Bernice, an avid country-music fan, is rarely lucid.
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Great 2/3 of a book.
- By Tracy on 07-09-12
By: Todd Johnson
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Just Fly Away
- By: Andrew McCarthy
- Narrated by: Suzy Jackson
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A debut novel about one girl's discovery of family secrets, first love, the limits of forgiveness, and finding one's way in the world, written with wisdom and sympathy by the best-selling memoirist, actor, and director. When 15-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a child from a brief affair, an eight-year-old boy named Thomas who lives in her own suburban New Jersey town, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family and her life.
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none
- By Rick on 04-06-17
By: Andrew McCarthy
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Pull of the Moon
- By: Elizabeth Berg
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Berg
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness - and the allure - of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters.
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For women over 50
- By Laura on 07-07-15
By: Elizabeth Berg
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Bullet in the Brain
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....
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The Perfect Example
- By Sarah on 08-01-17
By: Tobias Wolff
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Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
- By: Rebecca Wells
- Narrated by: Judith Ivey
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a "tap-dancing child abuser", the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi's intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.
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As usual the book is better than the movie
- By Denzil and Judy's Account on 03-25-10
By: Rebecca Wells
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Liberating Paris
- A Novel
- By: Linda Bloodworth Thomason
- Narrated by: Cynthia Darlow
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned.
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Deeply moving, a great listen
- By Cynthia on 11-27-05
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The audio is not the same as the book
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Playing in the Dark
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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
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Home
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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
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God Help the Child
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At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger.
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God Help Us All
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Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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Great book
- By Pablo Tebas on 01-18-09
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Jazz
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In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).
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The audio is not the same as the book
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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
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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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Love
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From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: All women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
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Wonderful
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Tar Baby
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Paradise
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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.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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The Street
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- Unabridged
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The classic urban tale of a young Black woman's struggle to raise her son alone amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of 1940s Harlem.
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The ending
- By KASH on 11-04-24
By: Ann Petry, and others
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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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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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Song of Solomon
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
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- Unabridged
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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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Maybe a beautiful story, This author should never narrate
- By Student on 01-02-20
By: Toni Morrison
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Comfort Me with Apples
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Overall
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Story
Sophia was made for him, her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect; their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect; everything is perfect. It's just that he's away so much - so often. He works so hard. She misses him, and he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband, and everything is perfect.
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strange story
- By Barbara S on 11-03-21
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
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- Unabridged
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Fever Dream
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- By: Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell - translator
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- Unabridged
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Experience the blazing, surreal sensation of a fever dream...A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale.
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Ghastly tale, brilliantly told.
- By Kat - Audible on 03-22-18
By: Samanta Schweblin, and others
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Feel Free
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- Unabridged
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Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
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great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
- By Mary E. Magin on 03-09-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Best That You Can Do
- Stories
- By: Amina Gautier
- Narrated by: LaNecia Edmonds
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- Unabridged
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Primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico, these stories explore the confusion of being one person in two places—of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family. Loudly and joyfully filled with Cousins, Aunts, Grandparents, and budding romances, these stories are saturated in summer nostalgia, and place listeners at the center of the table to enjoy family traditions and holidays.
By: Amina Gautier
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Ring Shout
- By: P. Djèlí Clark
- Narrated by: Channie Waites
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1915, The Birth of a Nation casts a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
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The best story from a master mythmaker
- By Felicia J on 10-22-20
By: P. Djèlí Clark
What listeners say about Recitatif
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Story
- Jeff Koeppen
- 11-05-23
Thought Provoking Short Story
This is Toni Morrison's only short story and my first time reading her. This is a thought-provoking story about two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who meet at the age of eight at a shelter/orphanage and then run into each other regularly throughout their lives. All we know about the girls is that one is white and one is black but the way Morrison writes the story their race is indeterminable, at least to me.
The Audible book featured an introduction by Zadie Smith which thankfully didn't spoil the book like introductions can sometimes do. The introduction added some background and context to the story which primed me for the book but I thought it was way to long (as long as the story) and repetitive.
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- Ilena andrews
- 12-10-23
Undetermined
That you couldn’t distinguish whether Twyla was Black or Roberta was white or vice versa. I thought this was a great short story with great detail. When I thought the ending would give more depth it was still not determined.
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- Jennifer Baratta She/Her
- 02-23-22
Thank you Toni Morrison for writing this book.
Thank you Zadie Smith and Bahri Turpin for narrating this book and introduction. Please listen to this book.
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Story
- BridgitO
- 08-27-24
Powerful Statement on Equity and Class Structure
The narrator's voice was pleasant and suprisingly neutral in accent--which did well in achieving Morrison's whole goal of the original short story. I found this brings up a whole slew of questions about those who don't get out of an oppressive environment--of the non-neurotypical or the permentantly institualized and what is left for them after all the other smoke clears. The question of what the hell happened to Maggie will haunt me for years.
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So Glad I Found This!
This book was simply mind altering. From the phenomenal introduction that set us squarely in our racial bias to the book itself where I had to check that same racial bias at the door…I am a better person for it! I will take this to not my DEIA and Implicit Bias practice with glee!
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- Bianca Gaskins
- 07-19-23
Good story
I love this book! It amazing characters and story lines. It good to read. B
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- Trevin Harvey
- 02-22-22
Eyes opening
I read the short story 1st and then went back to the introduction, On the recommendation of my sister. I was completely blown away, as I read I was trying to relate to the characters.Race and our experiences is what connects us, this book shatters that prospective
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- ada
- 08-11-24
Still relevant
The narrative is one that I want to hear again and
Again. The opening read by the author was really illuminating.
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- Samantha Moullet
- 05-16-22
Excellent & Thought Provoking
As many others have mentioned, I’d highly recommend you listen to Zadie Smith’s introduction *after* listening to the short story, not before, to ensure you get the most out of it!
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- Robert C Purnell
- 02-01-22
Read the introduction last
This is a story about two young girls who who become friends while rooming together in an orphanage and their chance encounters over the years. I read the story after hearing about it on NPR, so I knew what Morrison intended when she wrote it. Still, I wish I read the introduction after the story so I could have read the story on its own terms. Both the introduction and the story are excellent. Both should be read, just in the opposite order.
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5 people found this helpful