Ralph Ellison has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 183 ratings. The most-rated is Invisible Man.
Invisible Man
Summary
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of 20th-century African-American life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching - yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience from the hero's high-school days; it then moves quickly to the campus of a "Southern Negro college" and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed - as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity and the blindness of others. Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the anomalous position of Blacks in American society.
©1952 Ralph Ellison (P)2010 Random House
Three Days Before the Shooting...
Summary
At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly 2000 pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic. Three Days Before the Shooting... gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting US senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly Back jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned Black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech. Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting... is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison’s achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death 40 years later. Three Days Before the Shooting... is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.
©2010 Ralph Ellison (P)2018 Random House Audio
Juneteenth
Summary
From Ralph Ellison - author of the classic novel of African-American experience, Invisible Man - the long-awaited second novel. Here is the master of American vernacular - the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech - at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. "Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals? Brilliantly crafted, moving, wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master.
©2011 Ralph Ellison (P)2011 Random House Audio
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison
Summary
A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that trace the life and mind of a giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades. A NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount. These letters are beautifully rendered first-person accounts of Ellison’s life and work and his observations of a changing world, showing his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed student into a towering public intellectual who confronted and articulated America’s complexities.
©2019 Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan, and Marc C. Conner (P)2019 Random House Audio
Flying Home and Other Stories
Summary
These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" (The Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of [Ellison's] lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan).
©1996 The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. Introduction ©1996 John F. Callahan. (P)2017 Random House Audio
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Summary
Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this classic collection includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as "a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race," and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. "Ralph Ellison", wrote Stanley Crouch, "reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans."
©2011 Ralph Ellison and John F. Callahan (P)2018 Random House Audio