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Feel Free
- Essays
- Narrated by: Nikki Amuka-Bird
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into four sections - In the World, In the Audience, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network - and Facebook itself - really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes - and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive - and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
Critic reviews
“It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she’s headed…At times she reminds me of a musician jamming, or one of those enviable cooks who can take five random ingredients lying around the kitchen and whip up a meal. Her loose, roving essays cohere because they are rooted in her sensibility, in what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text.’” (The New York Times Book Review)
“What binds the collection is Smith’s voice: frank, urgent, self-ironic. Dipping into these pieces (in any order) is like setting out on a walk with a vibrant, curious, gracefully articulate friend.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
"[Narrator Nikki] Amuka-Bird's mellow British voice is a marvel. Smith's breadth of subject matter can seem overwhelming, so the listener can appreciate the evenness of the narration and better absorb the substance of each topic. Music, art, dance, technology, British and American politics, and love are all treated dispassionately, and Amuka-Bird's self-assured tone is a perfect match for Smith's musings." (AudioFile)
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Somewhat Disappointed
- By Cherokee on 11-15-05
By: Zadie Smith
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The Fraud
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
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Very disappointing
- By Happy purchaser on 09-10-23
By: Zadie Smith
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Changing My Mind
- Occasional Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.
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There may be truths on the side of life
- By Darwin8u on 02-18-20
By: Zadie Smith
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Swing Time
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: About rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
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Enthralling and instructive. A novel of the highest caliber
- By Richmond Surrey on 07-27-17
By: Zadie Smith
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Intimations
- Six Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality - or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?
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An eye-opener for me into our inequitable systems
- By Rashida L on 07-29-20
By: Zadie Smith
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NW
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Karen Bryson, Don Gilet
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Somewhere in Northwest London stands Caldwell housing estate, relic of 70s urban planning. Five identical blocks, deliberately named: Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke, and Russell. If you grew up there, the plan was to get out and get on, to something bigger, better. Thirty years later ex-Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan have all made it out, with varying degrees of succes - whatever that means....
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I believe this book is best listened to than read
- By BowedBookshelf on 09-28-12
By: Zadie Smith
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On Beauty
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Somewhat Disappointed
- By Cherokee on 11-15-05
By: Zadie Smith
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The Fraud
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
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Very disappointing
- By Happy purchaser on 09-10-23
By: Zadie Smith
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White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Autograph Man
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Ben Barnes
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them - all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of '40s movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.
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Maybe it's ...me? (But I don't think it's me.)
- By Ashley J. on 05-14-18
By: Zadie Smith
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Recitatif
- A Story
- By: Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith - Introduction
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
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Read the introduction last
- By Robert C Purnell on 02-01-22
By: Toni Morrison, and others
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We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
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Grand Union
- Stories
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Doc Brown
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.
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In Defense of Zadie Smith
- By Andre on 11-11-19
By: Zadie Smith
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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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".
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Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
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Meander, Spiral, Explode
- Design and Pattern in Narrative
- By: Jane Alison
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.
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Maybe changed my writing life
- By Daniel A. Boyd on 12-27-20
By: Jane Alison
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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
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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".
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Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
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The Friend
- A Novel
- By: Sigrid Nunez
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: Dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time.
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Dreadful and misleading...
- By Gail on 11-18-18
By: Sigrid Nunez
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Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
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tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
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Heavy
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.
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Be prepared
- By Amy Eberle on 10-30-18
By: Kiese Laymon
What listeners say about Feel Free
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Matthew
- 08-15-23
Sometimes Mostly On Point
While some of the pieces (especially the ones regarding brexit and the "attunement" to beautiful works of art) offer interesting and unique perspectives, I had some problems with other pieces. The critiques of facebook and social media in general feel a bit dated and broad and the piece on the film Anomalisa jumped straight into laying out and spoiling intricate little details and easter eggs in the story and set design (so much so that I had to quickly pause the book, fearing that there wouldn't be anything left to discover.)
I love Zadie Smith but this collection is not the strongest example of what she can do.
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- Georgine
- 06-17-18
Superb
Mind-opening collection of brilliant essays by one of the most thoughtful and gifted writers of her generation. Narrator is a gem who lends deep expression to the writing--almost as though she had written it herself. One of the best listening experiences yet.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mark David Goodson
- 05-08-19
Feeling Freer
Smith is one of my favorite authors, but she has become my favorite literary philosopher with this collection. Her and David Foster Wallace, that is. Smith hits you in a different way than Wallace does. Whereas he will never let forget the strange logic of TV--beaming one all-appealing message to the masses--Smith won’t let you feel the same way about particular experiences. Notably, in this collection, the weather, Get Out, Facebook, Key and Peele, Jay Z, parenting, advertising, Manhattan, 30 Rock, Justin Bieber, Kierkegaard, and, of course, a slew of books, both of public and personal note: Suburban Monk, Crash, I Melrose, The Dead Yard, You are Free, Portnoy’s Complaint.
If you are an auto-didact like me, or a self-made literary snob, like me, her essays are a seedbed, a true master’s course with the strongest voice on nuance, personality, and layering there is to guide you.
My personal hilights include her description of Facebook’s use. She came to review The Social Network, but she stayed to articulate the indescribable feel of being a Facebook user. Her beautiful essay on use of the first person via Keat’s negative capacity: denying one’s mastery to gain it. Is that humility or ego? The retrospective swirl. A feeling as tangible as deja vu. It is the realization that you now, as a parent yourself, discover why your parents acted so strangely all the time.
My personal favorite was using the existentialist Buber to describe the morose existance of icons like Justin Bieber—someone who never gets a true relationship with a person because he is made into a thing by so many and, in turn, makes so many into things.
I will be returning to these essays over the years. Not to remember why things are the way they are, as I do Wallace, but to recall exactly how certain things feel and why.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Andrea Jacobs
- 08-12-21
great collection
loved this collection of essays by Zadie Smith and getting to hear them in her voice.
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- Matt Miller
- 04-03-19
enjoyable but melancholy
as good as changing my mind but the optimism of the Obama era has left and has been replaced with dread of the Trump era. it is hard to listen because of this.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 04-11-23
favorite audiobook in a long time
everything about this read was phenomenal!! the voice is so soothing and the essays so beautiful
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- Mary E. Magin
- 03-09-18
great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
If you could sum up Feel Free in three words, what would they be?
thoughtful, open, charming
What about Nikki Amuka-Bird’s performance did you like?
Amuka-Bird's narration is genius! So much so it made me wonder at times whether she shares interest in some of topics Smith writes about, because she subtly nails certain details in vocal inflection for different people, and sometimes further nested people-performing-as-characters, Smith mentions. But not only that, the inflection and emphasis is all around brilliant, passionate in the right measure and context for maximum effect, and at turns so effective at conveying the level, open curiousness that makes Smith's inquiries so refreshing and bright. Perfect match and now I want to find and listen to everything Amuka-Bird's narrated!
Any additional comments?
Loved this audiobook to the point I wonder how anything can compare afterward--a good example of one where I'm so glad I listened to it instead of read it in print.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Charles
- 04-01-19
Understanding
Zadie has given us a look inside her world, inside the things that inspire her and her thoughts on contemporary culture with a philosophical undercurrent, delivered seamlessly by Nikki Amuka-Bird.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-20-18
Solid surveys of various social themes
Whether relatable or not there is an immersiveness to the narrative and accessibility to the observations. Narrators voice gives good anchor to the subject material.
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-12-23
Love Zadie
I honestly prefer her essays to her novels. There's something about them that's tossed out there, I think because she takes the novels more seriously, that let's her perspective leak out in greater proportion.
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