
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $21.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Allyson Johnson
-
By:
-
Saidiya Hartman
About this listen
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives re-creates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them - domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty - and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology.
©2019 Saidiya Hartman (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
Lose Your Mother
- A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
-
-
Outstanding!!
- By eric lewis on 02-19-24
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
In the Wake
- On Blackness and Being
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
-
-
Necessary reading
- By Joe Wilson on 08-10-24
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Four Hundred Souls
- A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
- By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, Keisha N. Blain - editor
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
-
-
History never taught
- By Scott P ODonnell on 02-16-21
By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, and others
-
Black Marxism
- The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition
- By: Cedric J. Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley - foreword, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard - preface, and others
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
-
-
"Racial Capitalism"
- By Don Morris on 09-02-22
By: Cedric J. Robinson, and others
-
Black and Blur
- Consent Not to Be a Single Being, Book 1
- By: Fred Moten
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Black and Blur - the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of Blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms.
-
-
Fantastic
- By Chris Hall on 04-06-25
By: Fred Moten
-
Afropessimism
- By: Frank Wilderson III
- Narrated by: Frank Wilderson III
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery - in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms - continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.
-
-
Afropessimism goes beyond ESSENTIAL reading!!!
- By Martin James on 09-01-20
-
Lose Your Mother
- A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
-
-
Outstanding!!
- By eric lewis on 02-19-24
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
In the Wake
- On Blackness and Being
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
-
-
Necessary reading
- By Joe Wilson on 08-10-24
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Four Hundred Souls
- A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
- By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, Keisha N. Blain - editor
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
-
-
History never taught
- By Scott P ODonnell on 02-16-21
By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, and others
-
Black Marxism
- The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition
- By: Cedric J. Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley - foreword, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard - preface, and others
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
-
-
"Racial Capitalism"
- By Don Morris on 09-02-22
By: Cedric J. Robinson, and others
-
Black and Blur
- Consent Not to Be a Single Being, Book 1
- By: Fred Moten
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Black and Blur - the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of Blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms.
-
-
Fantastic
- By Chris Hall on 04-06-25
By: Fred Moten
-
Afropessimism
- By: Frank Wilderson III
- Narrated by: Frank Wilderson III
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery - in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms - continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.
-
-
Afropessimism goes beyond ESSENTIAL reading!!!
- By Martin James on 09-01-20
-
Freedom Dreams
- The Black Radical Imagination
- By: Robin D.G. Kelley, Aja Monet - foreword
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.
-
-
Full of past and future freedom dreams
- By Ambre Nulph on 02-12-23
By: Robin D.G. Kelley, and others
-
Assata
- By: Assata Shakur, Angela Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Sirena Riley
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted list. Assata Shakur's trial and conviction for the murder of a white State Trooper in the spring of 1973 divided America. Her case quickly became emblematic of race relations and police brutality in the USA. While Assata's detractors continue to label her a ruthless killer, her defenders cite her as the victim of a systematic, racist campaign.
-
-
Knowledge is power
- By Ashleigh Terry on 08-20-17
By: Assata Shakur, and others
-
Ordinary Notes
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Christina Sharpe
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we hear them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through this book always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
-
-
Very good…
- By lawrence fauntleroy on 10-01-23
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Sisters of the Yam (2nd Edition)
- Black Women and Self-Recovery
- By: Bell Hooks
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.
-
-
I Feel Seen
- By Fee on 06-30-23
By: Bell Hooks
-
Black Skin, White Masks
- By: Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox - translator
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.
-
-
It was ok
- By Anne on 05-10-25
By: Frantz Fanon, and others
-
Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
-
-
A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
-
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
- The Abolitionist Papers
- By: Gina Dent, Angela Y. Davis, Beth Richie, and others
- Narrated by: Gina Dent
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment - halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist - usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color - organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of a stark reality: Abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.
-
-
Direct
- By P. Donaldson on 12-30-24
By: Gina Dent, and others
-
Necropolitics
- By: Achille Mbembe, Steven Corcoran - translator
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side - what he calls its "nocturnal body" - which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism.
-
-
Forget critical race theory
- By Ian on 01-08-23
By: Achille Mbembe, and others
-
The Salt Eaters
- By: Toni Cade Bambara
- Narrated by: Mia Ellis
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this novel set in a fictional city in the American South. Though they all united in their search for the healing properties of salt, some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring. From the men who live off welfare women to the mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, the novel brilliantly explores the narcissistic aspect of despair and the tremendous responsibility that comes with physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.
-
-
Healing from Trauma
- By Andre on 11-27-22
-
The Burning
- Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
- By: Tim Madigan
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. The Burning will recreate the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explore the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its black residents and neighboring Tulsa's white population, narrate events leading up to and including Greenwood's annihilation, and document the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy.
-
-
Hard to listen to, but a must read.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-17-20
By: Tim Madigan
-
The Personal Librarian
- By: Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.
-
-
A Treat For This Academic Librarian!
- By AlTonya on 07-14-21
By: Marie Benedict, and others
-
No Name in the Street
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
-
-
A strange and terrible vehicle
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-20
By: James Baldwin
Featured Article: The Best Sociology Audiobooks to Better Understand Human Nature and Behavior, Past and Present
Sociology audiobooks provide an easily accessible and convenient way to connect to a variety of topics and perspectives around the sweeping study of human nature and behavior. To get you started on your journey of discovery, we’ve gathered a sampling of the best sociology audiobooks available, from classics to biographies to contemporary releases.
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
-
-
Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
-
Scenes of Subjection, Revised and Updated
- Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Saidiya Hartman has been praised as "one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers" (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman's first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the "terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement.
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
-
-
Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth
-
Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
-
-
Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
-
Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
-
-
Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
-
Scenes of Subjection, Revised and Updated
- Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Saidiya Hartman has been praised as "one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers" (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman's first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the "terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement.
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
-
-
Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth
-
Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
-
-
Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
-
All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
-
-
I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
-
The Days of Abandonment
- By: Elena Ferrante
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
-
-
D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
- By Margaret M. Cranston on 01-18-16
By: Elena Ferrante
-
On Beauty
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
-
-
Somewhat Disappointed
- By Cherokee on 11-15-05
By: Zadie Smith
-
Lose Your Mother
- A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
-
-
Outstanding!!
- By eric lewis on 02-19-24
By: Saidiya Hartman
-
We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
-
-
I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
-
Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
-
-
Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
-
Wolf Hall
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Simon Slater
- Length: 24 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political powerEngland in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn.
-
-
Divorced, beheaded, died...
- By Tim on 09-30-11
By: Hilary Mantel
-
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
-
-
Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
-
The Copenhagen Trilogy
- Childhood; Youth; Dependency
- By: Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally - translator, Michael Favala Goldman - translator
- Narrated by: Stine Wintlev
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
-
-
Masterpiece
- By David Batcher on 03-21-21
By: Tove Ditlevsen, and others
-
The Other Name
- Septology I-II
- By: Jon Fosse, Damion Searls - translator
- Narrated by: Kyle Snyder
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.
-
-
Ear worms galore
- By ET on 10-10-23
By: Jon Fosse, and others
-
The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
-
-
Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
The Plot Against America
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ron Silver
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
-
-
Life is imitating Roth's art
- By Matthew on 08-04-16
By: Philip Roth
Didn’t expect to love as much as I did!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
what a wonderful book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
On black women: love drained and emptied her
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Crucial but glorious read
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A Great Book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wayward Lives challenges everyone to take up the work of waywardness, committing to freedom.
Utterly beautiful!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Unique and brilliant.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Everything
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Humanizing the archives
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It is so raw but the writing is so well done that it mitigates the anxiety, sadness, and anger of realizing that nothing has changed and that all that we are blamed for was engineered!
I saw and heard myself and others like me in this work.
Beautifully raw
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.