Slumberland
A Novel
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Slumberland
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Narrated by:
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Prentice Onayemi
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By:
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Paul Beatty
About this listen
Critical darling Paul Beatty's highly original, widely praised novel of race, identity, and underground music.
After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic - and spiritual - other.
Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.
©2008 Paul Beatty (P)2016 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 145
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 3,951
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2 out of 5 stars
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The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Kong Fu Guy
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What listeners say about Slumberland
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Xoterik
- 04-17-19
For audiophiliacs and xenos
It's often indescribable where and how Paul Beatty chooses to take you some place. You just have to go and look back from the other side. This is a raw and ragged journey through sound, music, identity, gifts, and acceptance.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Scott V. Young
- 11-16-20
Love Music? Humor? You’ll love Slumberland
I’m a big fan of Paul Beatty; his witty, bouncy narratives, teasing into strange parallel existences in which everyone possesses better than average intelligence, articulates ideas with brio, swoons for political philosophy, and easily master every task make for sweet reading, or listening. Slumberland makes music the central tool for change. I even looked up a song glowingly described in the novel a so as to experience the same wonder as the characters.
Onayemi’s narration is fantastic – I’ve heard him do three of Beatty’s books – but suffers one flaw: he mispronounces words from time to time. This is the fault of the editor/producer, and wouldn’t bother some, but it scrapes on my ears a bit.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jon D.
- 01-22-20
Laugh out loud funny!
Another great piece of writing. Makes me wish there was a soundtrack so I can hear that "chicken song!"
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 07-01-22
Gen Xr's Delight
Beatty is your lightning quick guide to a world you may not have known but whos language and references youll delight in. The naration by Prentice is flawless. I cant imagine anyone else bringing the work to life better. Five Stars -☆☆☆☆☆
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Stefanie
- 06-18-18
No plot
No plot. No point. A waste of my time that I completed for book club discussion.
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