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Her First American
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Narrated by:
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Casey Holloway
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By:
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Lore Segal
About this listen
Hailed by the New York Times as coming "closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel", Lore Segal stuns with this passionate love story of a refugee from Hitler's Europe and a witty, hard-drinking black intellectual.
For Ilka Weissnix, everything is new. Having recently arrived in the United States, she is determined to escape the immigrant communities of New York and boards a train headed west to discover "the real America". She finds Carter Bayoux "sitting on a stool in a bar in the desert, across from the railroad."
Older, portly, experienced, and black, Carter is magnetic. To Ilka, he exemplifies the values and cultures of a changing America. In order to understand her new country and her new love, Ilka throws herself into Carter's dizzying world, nurses him through his bouts of depression and his alcoholism, and becomes fascinated by stories of his amorous past. But Carter's ghosts are ever present, and soon Ilka finds herself torn between saving him and saving her own future.
With a foreword by Stanley Crouch, Her First American is the poignant story of an immigrant experience in a country of endless possibilities and of a rich and breathtaking love that is doomed from the start.
©1985 Lore Groszmann Segal, This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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A must-read for every woman
- By Julie W. Capell on 05-06-16
By: Sylvia Plath
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Trading Dreams at Midnight
- By: Diane McKinney-Whetstone
- Narrated by: Shari Peele
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Diane McKinney-Whetstone, the award-winning and best-selling author of Tumbling, presents Trading Dreams at Midnight - - an Essence Book Club Recommended Read. Back in 1984, 15-year-old Neena's mother left and never came back. And now Neena is following in her footsteps.
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Hard to follow
- By Nevada on 08-13-10
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Strong Motion
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: Scott Aiello
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Desiree Coleman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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The 42nd Parallel
- By: John Dos Passos
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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Powerful document of an all-too-familiar past
- By Ryan on 06-01-13
By: John Dos Passos
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Go Set a Watchman
- A Novel
- By: Harper Lee
- Narrated by: Reese Witherspoon
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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An historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, best-selling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014.
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To Kill A Mockingbird vs Go Set A Watchman
- By Sara on 07-15-15
By: Harper Lee
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One True Thing
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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Plantation
- A Lowcountry Tale
- By: Dorothea Benton Frank
- Narrated by: Susie Breck
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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When Caroline Wimbley Levine learns that her mother, Miss Lavinia, has supposedly gone mad, she leaves the big city bustle of Manhattan and returns to Tall Pines Plantation. Caroline originally left Tall Pines to escape her feisty, eccentric mother and her drunken brother, Trip. When Miss Lavinia dies, Caroline is forced to come to terms with her family's troubled history as well as her failing relationship with her husband.
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Abridged!!
- By Teresa on 04-18-16
What listeners say about Her First American
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- S. Griffin
- 02-01-25
Excellent writing. Weak reading.
Love the writing style which leaves the reader with the obligation to puzzle out the characters from their actions and words. Smart, spare, concise, undecorated; it’s not for everyone, but I thought it was amazing: insightful and deftly confident.
The reading, however, seemed to be detached from the intentions of the writing, and other than a good German/American accent, completely out of harmony with the content.
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- Forrest P.
- 11-30-23
Amazing writing, awful reading
The narrator did some great accents but the exposition was so stilted it almost ruined the book for me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- P. Peters
- 06-23-24
Uninspiring
This story seems to portray the protagonist as a naive, immigrant victim of an alcoholic spirialing down to an inevitable tragic end. Even at the end of the story one does not feel that they know her. I was disappointed and bored listening to this book.
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- Bee
- 10-17-24
A story that never goes anywhere.
The narration was annoyingly cloy and didn’t suit the man’s voice. There is no sense of how much time passes, it’s just one long repetitive drone.
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- Carrie Castleman
- 12-06-23
Boring!
I struggled to get through this story - when the reader said, “Part 2,” I audibly moaned. The writing is flat and the characters are just so unappealing. One of the worst books I’ve ever read.
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- NK Turoff
- 08-31-22
Fundamentally flawed narration
The narrator for this book does not know how to speak German, Hebrew or Yiddish. This leads to some amusing mis-pronunciations--a character spends time on a "Kibbitz" rather than a "kih-BUTZ"--but the amusement fades and it becomes distracting and offensive. Are there no editors at Audible??
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3 people found this helpful