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Felon
- Poems
- Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts
- Length: 1 hr and 22 mins
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Felon
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Publisher's summary
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (New York Times).
Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems - canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace - and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon”.
From “Night”
What she tells me: prison killed you
my love, killed you so dead that you’re not
here now, you’re never here, you’re always.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
An enthralling double feature!
- By Kaui on 06-28-16
By: Kamel Daoud, and others
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No Name in the Street
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 398
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 341
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Story5 out of 5 stars 337
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.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A strange and terrible vehicle
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-20
By: James Baldwin
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 148
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 85
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Story4 out of 5 stars 90
The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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5 out of 5 stars
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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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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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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A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing
- The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland
- By: DaMaris B. Hill
- Narrated by: Mia Ellis
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 23
From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honours their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant
- By Andrea Reynolds on 09-19-19
By: DaMaris B. Hill
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Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 31,092
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 27,452
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Story5 out of 5 stars 27,266
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Magical Negro
- Poems
- By: Morgan Parker
- Narrated by: Morgan Parker
- Length: 1 hr and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics - of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Waste of time
- By Lida on 07-19-20
By: Morgan Parker
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Murder City
- Ciudad Juarez and The Global Economy's New Killing Fields
- By: Charles Bowden
- Narrated by: Charles Bowden
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 168
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 122
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Story4 out of 5 stars 120
Charles Bowden writes, “this book is not about how the world ends but how a new world is being born.” Murder City explores this new world, focusing on the idea that Mexico is collapsing into a permanent culture of violence. Bowden focuses on Ciudad Juarez, which lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, last year alone 1,607 people were murdered, a number that is set to accelerate in 2009.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Listen Up!
- By Roy on 04-04-10
By: Charles Bowden
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Carthage
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen, David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 145
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 129
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Story4 out of 5 stars 125
Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects…a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever. Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A Major Disappointment!!
- By Anne on 01-23-14
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The Devil Finds Work
- An Essay
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 141
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 116
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Story5 out of 5 stars 113
Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Critical Masterpiece.
- By Ramon McGee on 05-10-18
By: James Baldwin
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The Quiet Game
- By: Greg Iles
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,107
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7,410
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7,384
When former prosecutor Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, he doesn't find the peace he desperately craves. He finds that his own father is being blackmailed by a corrupt ex-cop. And when Penn investigates, he uncovers a murderous secret - and the small town's violent past.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Complex and Good Courtroom Drama!
- By R. Pontiflet on 02-09-15
By: Greg Iles
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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 26
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 18
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing Story
- By Alexa :3 on 09-26-24
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 245
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 206
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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Death Is Hard Work
- A Novel
- By: Khaled Khalifa, Leri Price - translator
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is - after all - only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The bleakness of living in a war-torn country!
- By Susan on 03-20-19
By: Khaled Khalifa, and others
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Utopia 58
- By: Daniel Arenson
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 81
Imagine a perfect society. A world with no racism, sexism, or ageism. A utopia. In Utopia 58, everyone is equal. Everyone must be equal. Too beautiful? A mask will hide that pretty face. Too tall? We'll saw your legs down to size. Too male or female? The surgeon's knife will fix that. Too smart? A buzzer in your skull will drown out all that pesky thinking. You will be equal. Like it or not. Utopia 58, built atop the ruins of North America, created perfect harmony. A society with no race, gender, or age. Pure equality. KB209 was born into this utopia.
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5 out of 5 stars
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totally spellbinding
- By Southern girl on 08-27-19
By: Daniel Arenson
What listeners say about Felon
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
- Lynique Johnson
- 12-19-23
Touching
I enjoyed the flow and the blunt honesty. It was relatable and taught a lesson that many need to not follow this path good story.
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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
- Eugene Haynes IV
- 08-02-20
Free Verse for the Free Mind
An exceptional literary achievement born of actual life experiences. You will find these stories impactful.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Jessie
- 08-10-22
powerful
the exposure gained by this book is worthy of a second read. the poems are strong and yet so fragile.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Tom
- 09-28-21
Painful verses by a hurting man.
These are the words of a man writing as if under water or drowning under the weight of memories. Beautiful yet painful to listen to. Four Stars ****
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1 person found this helpful
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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
- S in Seattle
- 06-28-20
Wonderful
This book really makes you feel the experience of the writer as if talking to your best friend. I am neither black nor male. Highly recommend this book.
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7 people found this helpful
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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
- Angel Sanchez
- 11-04-19
Resonates
I served 12 yrs in prison, entering a teenager and released a man. These poems and essays spoke feelings and that I have felt but have been unable to articulate. Powerful. Moving.
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16 people found this helpful
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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
- Naomi C.
- 06-08-21
Enlightening & Real
This provided both familiarity and insight to me. He articulated his personal plight while also being a voice for so many others affected by mass incarceration. Hearing the writer read his own words was powerful.
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2 people found this helpful