Julie Otsuka has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 952 ratings. The most-rated is Alanis Morissette: Words + Music.
Alanis Morissette: Words + Music
Summary
"I'm the consistent person throughout all of this, whether I'm wearing sweatpants or whether I'm on stage in front of thousands of people with glitter on - same person, just tapping in to different aspects.” (Alanis Morissette) A down-to-earth global pop star. A deeply spiritual, cerebral powerhouse. A famously outspoken introvert. For her millions of fans, and the few unacquainted, defining rock luminary Alanis Morissette is an exercise in dichotomies and nuance. And though her most formidable traits are seemingly at odds with one another, they are, oddly enough, completely emblematic of all of us: complex, conflicting, and, most importantly, ever evolving. But here’s the rub: We don’t like our pop stars that way! Especially when they’re 21, and female, and it’s still the mid-'90s. In her courageously raw and musically rich Words + Music, the inimitable Alanis Morissette draws us right into that central supposed paradox as she opens up about the lifelong process of discovering that her voice is, in fact, composed of a multitude of voices. And despite external forces teaching her to sublimate certain ones as a child (anger, sadness, fear) and later, cultural forces demanding she oughta stick to one as a persona, Alanis has come out on the other side with a sense of peace and gratitude for her - only human - chorus of coexisting internal voices. With her striking command of language and profound emotional fluency, the now 46-year-old covers an enormous amount of personal ground with listeners, unpacking a lifetime of conscious self-discovery in an evocative rumination on her journey as an artist, celebrity, and woman. Listen closely as Alanis weaves her fascinating, funny, at times painful autobiographical story between eight of her most anthemic/kick-ass tracks. If you’re looking for Alanis to perform enthralling new versions of songs like “You Oughta Know”, “Ironic”, “Thank U”, or “Hand in My Pocket”, matched with compelling detail about the tunes and her creative process - well, you’re in the right place. And if you’re looking for Alanis to delve even deeper: to mine, examine, and ultimately make sense of seminal moments in her life as a means to inspire and enlighten your own? Grab your earbuds - you’ll be vastly rewarded! By the end of her captivating session an impressive truth emerges: While most of us do soul search, only the rarest among us have the courage and discipline to actually cultivate what we discover. Alanis Morissette is such an example, willing to constantly listen to herself and respond in kind. After shaking up the world 25 years ago with Jagged Little Pill, hear her today as she continues to reach new heights - this time by revealing the range of her own humanity to help connect us with ours.
©2020 Alanis Morissette (P)2020 Audible Originals LLC
The Buddha in the Attic
Summary
Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” - The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago. In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war. In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream. From the Hardcover edition
©2011 Julie Otsuka (P)2011 Random House Audio
Certaines n'avaient jamais vu la mer
Summary
Les voix et les vies que Julie Otsuka décrit ici sont celles de ces Japonaises venues, au début du XXe siècle, épouser, aux Etats-Unis, un de ces hommes qui font arriver par paquebots entiers ces femmes choisies "sur catalogue". D'eux, elles ne connaissent que des photos et des C.V. truqués, et se retrouvent souvent face à des maris brutaux qui les traitent en esclaves. Plutôt que de s'attacher à un destin unique emblématique des autres, Julie Otsuka opte pour de multiples voix qui racontent, tel un chœur antique, la tragédie de toutes et de chacune : leur misérable vie d'exilées, leur combat pour apprivoiser une langue inconnue, le racisme des Blancs, le rejet par leur progéniture de leur patrimoine... Puis le grand choc de la guerre. Et l'oubli. Lectrice pour Audiolib du Journal d'Anne Frank, Irène Jacob a le goût des textes porteurs de sens, et de mémoire. Elle donne aujourd'hui une voix d'une rare densité à ces femmes qui évoquent dans le beau roman de Julie Otsuka leurs vies confisquées par l'Histoire.
©2012 Libella. Traduit de l'anglais (Etats-Unis) par Carine Chichereau (P)2013 Audiolib
Als der Kaiser ein Gott war
Summary
Ein sonniger Frühlingstag im Jahr 1942, Berkeley, Kalifornien. Am Postamt liest die Mutter den Evakuierungsbefehl, geht nach Hause und beginnt die wichtigsten Habseligkeiten der Familie zusammenzupacken. Wie Zehntausende weitere japanischstämmige Amerikaner in den Westküstenstaaten betrachtet man sie als Sicherheitsrisiko, seit die USA mit Japan im Krieg stehen. Schnörkellos, präzise und aufwühlend erzählt Julie Otsuka in ihrem Roman von der wachsenden antijapanischen Stimmung unter den bislang so freundlichen Nachbarn, der Deportation in ein Internierungslager im Wüstenhochland von Utah, den prekären Verhältnissen in den Baracken hinter Stacheldraht, von Angst und Einsamkeit - und schließlich von der Rückkehr der Familie, für die nichts mehr so sein wird wie zuvor. Indem die Autorin ein beschämendes Kapitel US-amerikanischer Geschichte ausleuchtet, greift sie zugleich eine universelle Thematik auf: rassistische Vorurteile und gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit, heute so aktuell wie vor 75 Jahren. Julie Otsukas Debütroman wurde in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt und mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Nach Wovon wir träumten (mareverlag) ist er der zweite Roman der amerikanischen Erfolgsautorin, der auf Deutsch erscheint. Übersetzt von Irma Wehrli. Hörbuch der Woche: BR 2 Hörbuch der Woche: WDR Hörbuchtipp: WDR, HR und SWR
©2020 Lenos Verlag (P)2020 derDiwan Hörbuchverlag
When the Emperor Was Divine
Summary
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans, they have been reclassified virtually overnight as enemy aliens, and they are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.
©2003 Julie Otsuka (P)2003 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, A Division of Random House, Inc.