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The Perseverance
- Narrated by: Raymond Antrobus
- Length: 49 mins
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The Perseverance
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Publisher's summary
Winner of the Ted Hughes Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award.
Shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and a Poetry Book Society Choice.
A Guardian, Sunday Times, and Poetry School Book of the Year.
The Perseverance is the remarkable debut book by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
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- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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5 out of 5 stars
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 43
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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2 out of 5 stars
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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Bone
- By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon - foreword
- Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward, Kiese Laymon
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Visceral,blood hot, thrilling poetry-prose
- By Pam on 12-28-22
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward, and others
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Mother Tongue
- By: Demetria Martinez
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States - his only hope for asylum. The American woman who has volunteered to help him is searching for something to add meaning to her life. When these two lonely people meet, their haunting relationship fulfills their hearts' desires, but it also gives life to their darkest dreams.
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Open Water
- By: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Narrated by: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 209
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 188
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Second person POV releases poignant perspective
- By Storytellersrus on 09-25-21
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Wild Mind
- Living the Writer's Life
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 82
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4 out of 5 stars 55
Writer, poet, and teacher Natalie Goldberg shows you how to unleash your "wild mind" - the true source of your creative power. In this crisp mix of memoir, teaching guide, nonfiction and poetry, Goldberg strips creativity to the essential mind that is "raw, full of energy, alive, and hungry." Natalie is compassionate, practical, and humorous. "Even if it's just a leg hanging out the window, she says, "write it down." Highlights include: provocative "try this" exercises to compel you into action, advice on how to find time to write, how to discover your personal style, how to make sentences come alive, and how to overcome procrastination and writer's block. She'll also explore the larger vision of the writer's task: knowing when to take risks as a writer and a person, learning self-acceptance in life and art.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Get to know Natalie Goldberg
- By Sven Severin on 04-21-15
By: Natalie Goldberg
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Bad Indians
- A Tribal Memoir
- By: Deborah A. Miranda
- Narrated by: Deborah Miranda
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story5 out of 5 stars 40
This beautiful and devastating book - part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir - should be required for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Bad recording
- By Aspyn Maes on 09-18-21
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My Name Is Why
- By: Lemn Sissay
- Narrated by: Lemn Sissay, Richard Burnip, Zoe Mills
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 92
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 84
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Story5 out of 5 stars 83
At the age of 17, after a childhood in an fostered family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And he learned that his mother had been pleading for his safe return to her since his birth. Here Sissay recounts his life story. It is a story of neglect and determination. Misfortune and hope. Cruelty and triumph.
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4 out of 5 stars
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My immediate thoughts after reading My Name is Why
- By Pamela Horitani on 10-09-20
By: Lemn Sissay
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The Mathematician's Shiva
- By: Stuart Rojstaczer
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 98
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 87
When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. A ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read
- By Lee Crowe on 07-27-15
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New American Best Friend
- By: Olivia Gatwood
- Narrated by: Olivia Gatwood
- Length: 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story5 out of 5 stars 13
One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Amazing poetry, but the music
- By Keaira on 07-29-19
By: Olivia Gatwood
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Who Killed My Father
- By: Édouard Louis
- Narrated by: Edouard Louis
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story5 out of 5 stars 31
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French - at the minimum - of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely 50 years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful. Poetic. Sparse. Piercing.
- By Theophile Jones on 06-01-23
By: Édouard Louis
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The Grammar of God
- A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
- By: Aviya Kushner
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
In this eye-opening chronicle, Kushner tells the story of her vibrant relationship to the Bible and along the way illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture's most important written work.
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4 out of 5 stars
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a sobering read
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-17
By: Aviya Kushner
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We Want Our Bodies Back
- Poems
- By: Jessica Care Moore
- Narrated by: Jessica Care Moore
- Length: 2 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 17
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Story5 out of 5 stars 17
Over the past two decades, Jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Just beautiful.
- By @oil_house_ (IG) on 02-25-21