
Some Strange Music Draws Me In
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Petey Gibson
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By:
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Griffin Hansbury
About this listen
From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.
It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive work about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.
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- By: Zachary Zane
- Narrated by: Zachary Zane
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays—part memoir, part manifesto—that explore the author’s coming of age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame.
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Great insight and information. Vain human.
- By Lauren B. on 07-27-23
By: Zachary Zane
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Automatic Noodle
- By: Annalee Newitz
- Narrated by: Em Grosland
- Length: 4 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food—the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around—for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis.
By: Annalee Newitz
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There Are Reasons for This
- A Novel
- By: Nini Berndt
- Narrated by: Krystal Hammond
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected.
By: Nini Berndt
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Looking for Group
- By: Alexis Hall
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Drew’s always prided himself on being the “right” kind of nerd. He plays sports, has a solid group of friends, and never had any problem talking to girls. Sure, he spends time playing Heroes of Legend, the biggest MMORPG on the planet, but it’s just a fun hobby, not his identity. Falling for someone in a video game? Not his style. Until it is. Enter Kit: witty, kind, razor-sharp, and a healer who’s saved Drew’s virtual skin more times than he can count. She’s also, turns out, a boy in real life.
By: Alexis Hall
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Big Gay Wedding
- A Novel
- By: Byron Lane
- Narrated by: Noah Galvin
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Barnett Durang has a secret. No, not THAT secret. His widowed mother has long known he’s gay. The secret is Barnett is getting married. At his mother’s farm. In their small Louisiana town. She just doesn’t know it yet. It’ll be an intimate affair. Just two hundred or so of the most fabulous folks Barnett is shipping in from the “heathen coasts,” as Mom likes to call them, turning her quiet rescue farm for misfit animals into a most unlikely wedding venue.
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Creative, simple, and sweet.
- By Jonathan Hurst on 08-01-23
By: Byron Lane
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Ten Bridges I've Burnt
- A Memoir in Verse
- By: Brontez Purnell
- Narrated by: Brontez Purnell
- Length: 1 hr and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I've Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best.
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This work, this project these poems this poet 🫶
- By Lydia Paddon on 04-07-24
By: Brontez Purnell
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The Definition of Beautiful
- A Memoir
- By: Charlotte Bellows
- Narrated by: Charlotte Bellows
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of 15 and 17, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society's constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.
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Honest, beautiful body of work
- By Andrea Harrington on 10-08-24
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A Cup of Water Under My Bed
- A Memoir
- By: Daisy Hernández
- Narrated by: Daisy Hernández
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa.
By: Daisy Hernández
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The Bump
- By: Sidney Karger
- Narrated by: Ryan Spahn, Michael Urie
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Wyatt Wallace is a practical, super organized director of TV commercials. Biz Petterelli is a child-actor-turned-magazine-writer who thrives on spontaneity. Though polar opposites, they are fully committed to their relationship and their life in Brooklyn with their dog, Matilda. They’re also about to have a baby together. And they’re freaking out. They’ve both dreamed of becoming parents, but now that it’s happening, they’re doubting everything. Their baby is due in a few weeks and instead of flying to California just before the birth as planned, Biz has a better idea.
By: Sidney Karger
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No Son of Mine
- A Memoir
- By: Jonathan Corcoran
- Narrated by: Christopher P. Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.
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A raw, painful, and real story about trauma and the pain of abandonment
- By Kaytee on 06-23-24
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We Were the Universe
- A Novel
- By: Kimberly King Parsons
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh, Justis Bolding
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.
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The author’s use of detail is exceptional
- By Jane Roth on 06-17-24
gorgeous, satisfying, heartfelt trans lineage
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And DAMN the actor reading this book absolutely killed it. I could not stop listening, totally obsessed. Endlessly delighted by the full on mass accents throughout the entire book. 10/10. Hope he keeps on doing audiobooks, he gave this one such life!!!
Fantastic story STELLAR performance
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I am an awe of this book. It is so incredibly poetic and beautiful. The story was heart wrenching, and the imagery was strong. I feel so much love and closeness to the characters. I feel like I was living in the story alongside them. As a younger generation queer/trans person, it was important and much needed insight into what my “elders” experienced when they were younger. “Elders” as in, just a generation ago.
This book took me a bit longer than my reads usually take me to finish, simply because it was much more real than my typical fantasy/romance books. But that doesn’t mean it was any less impactful. If anything, this book made much more of an impact on my memory and subconscious than most of the other books I have read this year. I enjoyed taking my time with it, and taking my time absorbing and processing it. I enjoyed when the book and characters would creep into my consciousness during quiet moments, and I was able to recall the story and watch the character characters play out the scenes in my head - giving me time to ponder what life must’ve been like, and how I would’ve fit into the world if I was born just a generation before.
I am grateful to Petey Gibson, the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, for making the personal recommendation. I enjoyed Peter in a different book I had heard, and decided to connect with him on Instagram. He immediately recommended this read (well, listen), and I can see why he did.
I fully believed this book was a form of non-fiction until just now lol.
Either way, to the author of this book, thank you. Throughout the read, I frequently found myself amazed at how much connection you made between different aspects of the book. It was almost like watching threads being interwoven and tied. Life often feels disconnected, but you found ways to connect even the smallest details, like the memory of a sunset. I am amazed and impressed by the poetry in this book, and am so grateful that it was completed and published in my lifetime. Thank you.
A must read
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Just love. Fantastic story with a unique perspective tied to gender, class, and sexuality
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Reads like a memoir
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This book was like therapy to me
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The toggling between pre- pandemic contemporary adult life and the author’s teen self- alternating 1984 to 2019 -was such a great strategy for connecting to the narrator’s young self and how they have become who they are now. As a fellow gen X queer person from the burbs growing up in a single mom household with an assortment of family dysfunctions and class stress, I found almost everything down to the smallest details so much like a mirror of my own experience.
It is such a beautiful and funny story and so well written. Also super funny to have the Massachusetts accents! It really adds to the story, giving it place and authenticity.
Couldn’t Stop Listening
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