
The Unicorn Woman
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Narrated by:
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Ruffin Prentiss III
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By:
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Gayl Jones
About this listen
"One of our greatest living authors."—Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe
Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the Post WWII South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal
Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.
A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.
As he moves around the south, from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, primarily, to his second home of Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters with a variety of colorful characters and mythical prototypes: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, and bigots. The lead among these characters is, of course, The Unicorn Woman, who exists, but mostly lives in Bud’s private mythology.
Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.
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Story
For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
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A disappointment
- By basil on 06-13-25
By: Lucy Sante
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Fi
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Alexandra Fuller
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the middle of the summer before her fiftieth birthday and Alexandra is just barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, chafing and straining against the stresses and strictures of midlife as a mother and ex-wife, and piecing her way through a disastrous relationship with a younger woman that lurches and buckles, but never quite breaks. And then—suddenly and incomprehensibly—her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. What happens next is what Alexandra details in this book.
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Lifting the fog
- By Nina J. on 04-20-24
By: Alexandra Fuller
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The Healing
- By: Gayl Jones
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing follows Harlan Jane Eagleton as she travels to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds, and healing bodies. But before she found her calling, Harlan had been a minor rock star’s manager and, before that, a beautician. Harlan retraces her story to the beginning, when she once had a fling with the rock star’s ex-husband and found herself infatuated with an Afro-German horse dealer.
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Strange but brilliant!
- By Africa on 11-18-18
By: Gayl Jones
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White Rat
- Short Stories
- By: Gayl Jones
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The collection contains 12 provocative tales that explore the emotional and mental terrain of a diverse cast of characters, from the innocent to the insane. In each, Jones displays her unflinching ability to dive into the most treacherous of psyches and circumstances: the title story examines the identity and relationship conundrums of a Black man who can pass for white, earning him the name “White Rat” as an infant; “The Women” follows a girl whose mother brings a line of female lovers to live in their home.
By: Gayl Jones
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I Am on the Hit List
- A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India
- By: Rollo Romig
- Narrated by: Rollo Romig
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist in the South Indian city of Bangalore, was assassinated in September 2017 outside her home, it wasn’t just a loss to her close-knit community of writers and activists—the shock reverberated nationwide, making headlines and sparking mass protests. Why was she targeted, and who was behind it? Following the case to its stunning, unsettling conclusion, Rollo Romig uncovers a world of political extremists, fearless writers, organized crime, and shadowy religious groups.
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Fantastic book
- By esther on 05-18-25
By: Rollo Romig
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Wednesday's Child
- Stories
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Yiyun Li
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details.
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Poignant.
- By Olujide Ige on 02-23-25
By: Yiyun Li
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Native Nations
- A Millennium in North America
- By: Kathleen DuVal
- Narrated by: Carolina Hoyos
- Length: 21 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
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An outstanding survey with many surprises
- By L Dickson on 06-05-24
By: Kathleen DuVal
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Combee
- Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
- By: Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 25 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats.
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Bringing the forgotten to life
- By GAT on 07-16-24
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The Axeman's Carnival
- By: Catherine Chidgey
- Narrated by: Nic Sampson
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, “I'll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.
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Something delightfully different
- By cvchaney on 12-21-24
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To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause
- The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
- By: Benjamin Nathans
- Narrated by: Rich Miller
- Length: 23 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.
By: Benjamin Nathans
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Same Bed Different Dreams
- A Novel
- By: Ed Park
- Narrated by: Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman, Shannon Tyo
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.
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Different
- By MOL on 12-10-24
By: Ed Park
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Every Living Thing
- The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
- By: Jason Roberts
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?
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Fascinating history of scientific thought
- By Candy Dan on 06-10-24
By: Jason Roberts
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How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
words,the thinking of urban blacks that migrated north
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