
The Topeka School
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Linari
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Peter Berkrot
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Tristan Wright
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By:
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Ben Lerner
About this listen
2019 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
2019 NPR Best Book of the Year
2019 National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
2019 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year
2019 Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year
2019 NYT Outstanding Books of the Year
2019 The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
2020 Folio Prize Shortlist
2019 Washington Post Best Books of the Year
2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year
2019 New York Magazine Best Books of the Year
2020 Pulitzer Prize - Finalist
2019 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
2019 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year
2019 NYPL Book for Reading and Sharing
Named one of the most anticipated fall books by Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Vogue, Vulture, The Observer, Kirkus, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Week, Oprah Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Nylon, Pacific Standard, Publishers Weekly, Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Guardian
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: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right.
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.
Cover photograph from The Wichita Eagle. © 1990 McClatchy. All rights reserved. Used under license. Kansas.com
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Cora, seize ans, est esclave sur une plantation de coton dans la Géorgie d'avant la guerre de Sécession. Abandonnée par sa mère lorsqu'elle était enfant, elle survit tant bien que mal à la violence de sa condition. Lorsque Caesar, un esclave récemment arrivé de Virginie, lui propose de s'enfuir, elle accepte et tente, au péril de sa vie, de gagner avec lui les États libres du Nord. De la Caroline du Sud à l'Indiana en passant par le Tennessee, Cora va vivre une incroyable odyssée.
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Wrong language.
- By Anonymous User on 11-24-22
By: Colson Whitehead
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Our Evenings
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
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Sublime Collaboration
- By Phip Herrick on 11-20-24
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The Great Believers
- By: Rebecca Makkai
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.
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A story for all time
- By Carla jo Thompson on 08-06-18
By: Rebecca Makkai
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Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
- By: Hernan Diaz
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathan Davis, Mozhan Marnò, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
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Before Purchasing
- By JLDLOfficial on 08-13-22
By: Hernan Diaz
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Night Watch
- A Novel
- By: Jayne Anne Phillips
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker, Theo Stockman, Maggi-Meg Reed
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
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Beautifully written historical novel
- By shastamax on 01-14-24
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Pachinko
- By: Min Jin Lee
- Narrated by: Sandra Oh, Min Jin Lee
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.
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Interesting history but no connection
- By Julia McBride on 11-30-24
By: Min Jin Lee
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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The Goldfinch
- By: Donna Tartt
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 32 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
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Boy, am I in the minority on this one.
- By Bon Ami on 11-04-13
By: Donna Tartt
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The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
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The Dutch House
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Tom Hanks
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother.
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Not my favorite Patchett
- By Regina on 12-07-19
By: Ann Patchett
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
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Say Nothing
- A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Matthew Blaney
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.
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On a par with I'll Be Gone in the Dark, plus...
- By Grace O'Malley on 03-01-19
What listeners say about The Topeka School
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Housepants97
- 02-14-20
Great novel, narration flawed...
A beautiful novel, a beautiful writer. The story was graceful and quiet but moved swiftly, I couldn’t put it down. I felt like it was moving towards something major with the Darren character but it kind of didn’t— regardless of that I still thought it was great. One note is that one of the narrators should know how to pronounce popular musicians names/musical acts, such as Brian Eno (it’s pronounced “eee-no”) and for crying out loud, The Fugees are world famous and pronounced like slang for word “refugee” and not like “FOO-GEES.” How did no one notice this during editing? Embarrassing. It’s 2020 come on.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Gretchen
- 01-10-20
interesting, unique and compelling
A strong investigation of language, meaning and noise. Not as political as other reviewers complain.
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- Joanna
- 05-24-21
Droll
I listened to this book and still have no idea what it what’s about. There were several points of view...and I have no idea why. The ending was a bit baffling, seeming to come from nowhere, and the main point of the story is completely lost on me.
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- sean
- 01-07-20
Fugue Ease
One of the narrators pronounced the name of the Fugees incorrectly as "Fugue Ease" and I think the author would be ashamed, considering it is a coming of age tale set in the late nineties.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Gordy
- 01-22-20
Another amazing Lerner
Really loved it. Great narrators. Wildly complex and beautiful story. I say listen to it right now.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. Sachs
- 11-25-20
The best book I’ve listened to in years.
This has been the most enjoyable book to listen to that I’ve heard in years.
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 01-23-20
BULLY FOR YOU
Ben Lerner is a writer with academic and literary awards that attest to his intelligence and accomplishment.
“The Topeka School” makes one wonder what makes a child become a bully. Does affluence have anything to do with it? Is it because of superior intelligence? Is it because of genetic pre-disposition? Lerner creates a boy’s childhood that suggests some bullies do come from the aforementioned.
The structure of “The Topeka School” is disconcerting and may make some reader/listeners put the book down. The book will lose some who cannot identify with Lerner’s characters because of their social status and accomplishment in life. The struggles of the Gordon family seem distant from the lives of many people who do not come from families as smart or financially accomplished as those in Lerner's story.
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- Kathryn G
- 05-31-20
challenging
it took a long time (I was almost done) for this book to teach me how to read it. I found the application of multiple literary gimmicks disorienting, but by the time I got to the end, I suspected the author intended exactly that effect. When I got it, I was impressed by the depth and richness with which the story explores its themes.It is probably worth a second read,, but i doubt I will.. I felt like it was an overwhelming indictment of our expectations of modern masculinity with no glimmer of hope or path foward, which made me sad.
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- Golanka
- 08-05-20
Great Family Drama--And More!
A really fantastic story dealing with life in the latter part of the 20th century. I really liked the multiple perspectives (different characters POV and at different times). The "whole" story slowly comes into focus.
Lerner creates characters and settings that feel "real" to me.
I thought the narration was good albeit with a few pronunciation bloopers.
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- V.R.
- 08-09-20
Sooo gooooood
I loved this book. Almost everything about it except when the narrator said fuGees with a hard g- duuuude
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