The Topeka School
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Narrated by:
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Peter Berkrot
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Nancy Linari
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Tristan Wright
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By:
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Ben Lerner
About this listen
A New York Times, Time, GQ, Vulture, and Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year
One of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of the Year
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century, hailed by Maggie Nelson as Ben Lerner's "most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely novel to date."
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of 97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart - who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient - into the social scene, to disastrous effect.
Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
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Critic reviews
“The Topeka School is [Lerner’s] most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely novel to date. It’s a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it’s written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired.” (Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts)
“The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight, and deep psychological sensitivity. At every turn, its beautifully realized characters are shaped, even in the privacy of their inner lives, by the pressures of history and culture - this is a book not only about how things really feel, but what things really mean. To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here.” (Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People)
"Ben Lerner has redefined what it means for a writer to inhabit an American present by showing how a family reckons with its past. Here the personal and political are masterfully interwoven. The Topeka School is brave, furious, and, finally, a work of love." (Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
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Fact or Fiction
- By Penda K on 06-09-20
By: Megan Giddings
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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Growing Things and Other Stories
- By: Paul Tremblay
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Graham Halstead, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national best seller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring 19 pieces of short fiction, Growing Things and Other Stories is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination.
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Paul Tremblay is totally nuts.
- By Gary & Jay on 07-07-19
By: Paul Tremblay
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As I Knew Him
- My Dad, Rod Serling
- By: Anne Serling
- Narrated by: Anne Serling
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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To Anne Serling, the imposing figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week, intoning cautionary observations about fate, chance, and humanity, was not the father she knew. Her fun-loving dad would play on the floor with the dogs, had nicknames for everyone in the family, and was apt to put a lampshade on his head and break out in song. He was her best friend, her playmate, and her confidant. After his unexpected death at 50, Anne, just 20, was left stunned.
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A Beautiful Tribute to a Wonderful Man
- By Becky on 04-12-20
By: Anne Serling
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With or Without You
- By: Caroline Leavitt
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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After almost 20 years together, Stella and Simon are starting to run into problems. An up-and-coming rock musician when they first met, Simon has been clinging to dreams of fame even as the possibility of it has grown dimmer, and now that his band might finally be on the brink again, he wants to go on the road, leaving Stella behind.
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not my cup of tea
- By Grekis on 12-23-20
By: Caroline Leavitt
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If You See Her
- By: Ania Ahlborn
- Narrated by: Brian Holden
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The house on Old Mill Road has stood in an open field for longer than Jesse Wells has been alive, its crooked windows and jutting turret tormenting the kids of Warsaw, Michigan the way only a haunted house knows how. Everyone imagines that something terrible lurks within the house’s abandoned rooms - especially Jesse and his two closest friends, Casey and Reed. But when Reed chooses the house as a backdrop for his own suicide, childhood ghost stories are transformed into a nightmare that sends Jesse into a downward spiral of grief.
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DNF. Quit halfway through. A slog.
- By Smart, AZ on 07-10-22
By: Ania Ahlborn
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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The Creepypasta Collection
- Modern Urban Legends You Can’t Unread
- By: MrCreepyPasta - editor
- Narrated by: Heather Costa, Jeffrey Kafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A terrifying, thrilling collection of must-listen horror stories chock-full of nightmarish supernatural beings and the murderously disturbed that are sure to keep you up all night long.
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creepy definitely
- By Danh on 01-16-22