
Sex and Lies
True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World
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Narrated by:
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Sarah Agha
About this listen
"Jaw-dropping.... Inspiring.... A haunting and beautifully composed book.... It blew my mind." (Lisa Taddeo, number one New York Times best-selling author of Three Women)
A fearless exposé of the secrets and lies of women's intimate lives, by the best-selling author of The Perfect Nanny, Adèle, and In the Country of Others
"All those in positions of authority—politicians, parents, teachers—maintain the same line: 'Do what you like, but do it in private.'"
Leila Slimani was in her native Morocco promoting her novel Adèle, about a woman addicted to sex, when she began meeting women who confided the dark secrets of their sexual lives. In Morocco, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, and sex outside of marriage are all punishable by law, and women have only two choices: They can be wives or virgins. Sex and Lies combines vivid, often harrowing testimonies with Slimani's passionate and intelligent commentary to make a galvanizing case for a sexual revolution in the Arab world.
©2020 Leila Slimani (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Sometimes we feel a bit like "I'm a feminist, but...." As in, "I'm a feminist, but I skipped the Women's March to buy face cream." As in, "I'm a feminist, but I've never found time to read Sylvia Plath (but I have watched 15 seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians)." In The Guilty Feminist, Deborah Frances-White reassures us that we don't have to be perfect to be a force for meaningful change. Exploring big issues of identity, equality, intersectionality, and the current feminist agenda, she explodes the myth of the model activist and offers a realistic path....
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Critic reviews
"As revealing as Lisa Taddeo’s bestseller Three Women, but it has a more urgent political mission. . . . Like Adèle did before it, this slim book of impassioned pleas, and of human impulses that resonate, is one step to more women breaking free.”—Evening Standard
“Slimani’s searing nonfiction debut unearths the deepest and most intimate secrets of a group of women in a culture where sexual autonomy is punished by law.”―Newsweek
“Impassioned . . . a call-to-arms.”―Elle
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Story
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
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A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
- By redhidari on 10-01-15
By: Maggie Nelson
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
- A Memoir in Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
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A literary critique of Russian lit.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-15-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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A Woman Is No Man
- A Novel
- By: Etaf Rum
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari, Dahlia Salem, Susan Nezami
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of Arab culture in this powerful debut - a heart-wrenching story of love, intrigue, courage, and betrayal that will resonate with women from all backgrounds, giving voice to the silenced and agency to the oppressed.
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Powerful and Terrifying
- By Emmst51 on 05-04-19
By: Etaf Rum
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Enter Ghost
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Nadia Albina
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage.
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Outstanding
- By Elizabeth on 02-07-25
By: Isabella Hammad
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In the Dream House
- A Memoir
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope - the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman....
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Devastatingly Beautiful
- By SeattleBookLover on 02-04-20
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Assembly
- By: Natasha Brown
- Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: Is it time to take it all apart?
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HATED IT
- By valerie on 09-24-21
By: Natasha Brown
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Still Born
- By: Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey - translator
- Narrated by: Rachel Schwab
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own.
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The title
- By valeria on 10-17-24
By: Guadalupe Nettel, and others
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Biography of X
- A Novel
- By: Catherine Lacey
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X's biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM's quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
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Worst book I’ve ever read
- By Rebecca on 11-09-23
By: Catherine Lacey
What listeners say about Sex and Lies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sydney
- 05-22-23
slay
I also read the French version and I feel like the translator took some liberties, but nonetheless a very moving collection of stories.
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- Alexandru
- 05-26-21
Necessary book
While there are many feminist books in the West, outside this cultural area there is complete emptiness. I am from Romania and many of the things the author describes are true for Eastern Europe as well. Otherwise, indeed, the book could have been better, especially in the research area. But it is difficult to find fault with Ms. Slimani - she made a generous effort.
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Overall
- Tareq
- 05-07-22
Insightful
Realistic and enjoyable describing personal lives, social and political challenges in Morocco. Also somewhat characteristic of the Arab world.
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