Dion Graham has narrated 146 audiobooks on Listento.it by 149 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 2,171 ratings. The most-rated is Washington Black.
Box
Summary
What have I to fear? My master broke every promise to me. I lost my beloved wife and our dear children. All, sold South. Neither my time nor my body is mine. The breath of life is all I have to lose. And bondage is suffocating me.
Henry Brown wrote that long before he came to be known as Box; he "entered the world a slave". He was put to work as a child and passed down from one generation to the next - as property. When he was an adult, his wife and children were sold away from him out of spite. Henry Brown watched as his family left bound in chains, headed to the deeper South. What more could be taken from him? But then hope - and help - came in the form of the Underground Railroad. Escape!
In stanzas of six lines each, each line representing one side of a box, celebrated poet Carole Boston Weatherford powerfully narrates Henry Brown's story of how he came to send himself in a box from slavery to freedom.
©2020 Carole Boston Weatherford (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
American Histories
Summary
In this singular collection, John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life, blends the personal, historical, and political to invent complex, charged stories about love, death, struggle, and what we owe each other. With characters ranging from everyday Americans to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Nat Turner, American Histories is a journey through time, experience, and the soul of our country. "JB & FD" reimagines conversations between John Brown, the antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator, conversations that belie the myth of race and produce a fantastical, ethically rich correspondence that spans years and ideologies. "Maps and Ledgers" eavesdrops on a brother and sister today as they ponder their father's killing of another man. "Williamsburg Bridge" sits inside a man sitting on a bridge who contemplates his life before he decides to jump. "My Dead" is a story about how the already-departed demand more time, more space in the lives of those who survive them. Navigating an extraordinary range of subject and tone, Wideman challenges the boundaries of traditional forms, and delivers unforgettable, immersive narratives that touch the very core of what it means to be alive. An extended meditation on family, history, and loss, American Histories weaves together historical fact, philosophical wisdom, and deeply personal vignettes. More than the sum of its parts, this is Wideman at his best - emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating - an extraordinary collection by a master.
©2018 John Edgar Wideman (P)2018 Novel Audio Inc.
Her Right Foot
Summary
If you had to name a statue, any statue, odds are good you'd mention the Statue of Liberty. Have you seen her? She's in New York. She's holding a torch. And she's in mid-stride, moving forward. But why? In this fascinating and fun take on nonfiction, Dave Eggers investigates a seemingly small trait of America's most emblematic statue. What he finds is about more than history, more than art. What he finds in the Statue of Liberty's right foot is the powerful message of acceptance that is essential of an entire country's creation.
©2017 Dave Eggers (P)2018 Recorded Books
Fanon
Summary
Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961) fought to free Algeria from French rule and rallied against the oppressive grip of colonialism. In this fictionalized view of the revolutionary's life, an African-American writer travels the world to do research for a biography of Fanon. In a tale that is part love story, mystery, and biography, Fanon examines how a political radical's views apply in a post-9/11 world.
©2008 John Edgar Wideman (P)2008 Recorded Books, LLC
The Real Cool Killers
Summary
To detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, it looked like an open and shut case. After all, Sonny Pickens was still standing over the body of Ulysses Galen, smoking gun hanging from his hand. Only one problem: Sonny's gun was loaded with blanks. There were plenty of people who wanted Galen dead, but who was responsible? Sonny? A jealous husband? Or one of the street toughs from a gang calling themselves the Real Cool Moslems? Coffin Ed and Grave Digger pound the mean streets of 1950s Harlem in search of the Real Cool Killer.
©1959 Chester Himes, copyright renewed 1987 by Lesley Himes (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
METAtropolis: Green Space
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Original Work, 2014 Audible’s Audie Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated vision of the not-too-distant future returns! As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the "Internet of things", a virtual environment mapped across all aspects of the natural experience. At the same time, the serious back-to-the-land types have embraced a full-on paleo lifestyle, including genetically engineering themselves and their offspring. At the same time, a back-to-space movement is seeking the moon, a green Mars, and even the stars, with the eventual goal of leaving a pristine and undisturbed Earth behind. METAtropolis: Green Space is the creation of Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Jay Lake; Hugo Award winning writers Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Elizabeth Bear; New York Times best-selling author Tobias S. Buckell; Aurora Award winner Karl Schroeder; and critically-acclaimed author Ken Scholes.
©2013 Joseph E. Lake, Jr., Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder, Seanan McGuire, Tobias S. Buckell, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ken Scholes (P)2013 Audible Inc.
The Future Is Yours
Summary
Two best friends create a computer that can predict the future. But what they can’t predict is how it will tear their friendship - and society - apart. “An impossibly addictive brainteaser wrapped in a buttery popcorn kernel.” (Aneesh Chaganty, director and co-writer of Searching and Run) In development as an HBO Max Original Series If you had the chance to look one year into the future, would you? For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a start-up to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity. The device can predict everything perfectly - from stock-market spikes and sports scores to political scandals and corporate takeovers - allowing them to chase down success and fame while staying one step ahead of the competition. But the future their device foretells is not the bright one they imagined. Ambition. Greed. Jealousy. And, perhaps, an apocalypse. The question is...can they stop it? Told through emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, this bleeding-edge tech thriller chronicles the costs of innovation and asks how far you’d go to protect the ones you love - even from themselves.
©2021 Dan Frey (P)2021 Random House Audio
The Cool Cottontail
Summary
The Cool Cottontail is the second in the Virgil Tibbs mystery series. In this mystery, Tibbs finds himself at a nudist colony in Los Angeles where the victim (who was not one of the guests) is found floating dead in the pool. Set against this unusual backdrop, the guests of the resort prefer guarding their secrets to solving the murder mystery, particularly when the investigating detective is black. Author John Ball often used social issues of the day to feature as issues in his work, making his work controversial but at the same time, some of the best and most relevant fiction of his time. Along with racism other social taboos, Ball had no problem with nudism; naked people are the least of the problems these characters face.
©1996 John Ball (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved
The Way Home
Summary
Hidden beneath the floorboards in a house he's remodelling, Christopher Flynn discovers something very tempting - and troubling. Summoning every bit of maturity and every lesson he's learned the hard way, Chris leaves what he found where he found it and tells his job partner to forget it, too. Knowing trouble when he sees it-and walking the other way - is a habit Chris is still learning. Chris's father, Thomas Flynn, runs the family business where Chris and his friends have found work. Thomas is just getting comfortable with the idea that his son is grown, working, and on the right path at last. Then one day Chris doesn't show up for work-and his father knows deep in his bones that danger has found him. Although he wishes it weren't so, he also knows that no parent can protect a child from all the world's evils. Sometimes you have to let them find their own way home.
©2009 George Pelecanos (P)2010 Orion Publishing Group
Avengers: Infinity
Summary
The Avengers journey into deep space, where they unite the intergalactic races against the Builders - deadly aliens who seek to destroy the known galaxy. While the heroes are gone, Thanos sets his sights on Earth, sending the Black Order to launch the assault. It falls to the other heroes of Earth - the Inhumans, the Black Panther, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, the X-Men, and more - to defend Attilan, Wakanda, Atlantis, and the rest of the planet. To defeat Thanos, the defending forces will need to deploy a new weapon - one that may be as deadly as the invading force.
©2020 Marvel (P)2020 Marvel
Tempted by Trouble
Summary
Dmytryk Knight was a respectable man who had followed the blueprints for the American Dream: go to college, find the girl of your dreams, get married, buy a house on the affluent side of Detroit. He’d done it all by the book. But when a crippling recession annihilates the auto industry, Dmytryk and his wife, Cora, suddenly find themselves without jobs and in foreclosure. And after two years of taking any job they can find and trying to live honestly, they realize that integrity just doesn’t pay the bills.
Given the right circumstances, even the best of us can turn bad.
When a powerful and ruthless criminal named Eddie Coyle arrives from Rome and gives Dmytryk an opportunity to make fast money, Cora urges him to man up. All he has to do is join Eddie Coyle’s crew and rob some banks: two minutes, in and out, nobody gets hurt. Torn between desperation and his values, but unable to resist the promise of instant cash, Dmytryk gives in - but no sooner does he enter a life of crime than Cora vanishes.
Now, more determined than ever to get his life back on track, Dmytryk is only one bank job away from having enough money to leave Eddie Coyle and find Cora. But when the job goes dangerously wrong, Dmytryk is forced to test his moral compass in ways he never imagined and realizes that we can plan all we want, but sometimes fate has a different agenda....
©2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.; 2010 Eric Jerome Dickey
Ball Don't Lie
Summary
Newbery Award-winning author Matt de la Pena's Ball Don't Lie, about basketball, "is a must-read" (The Bulletin). Sticky is a beat-around-the-head foster kid with nowhere to call home but the street and an outer shell so tough that no one will take him in. He started out life so far behind the pack that the finish line seems nearly unreachable. He's a white boy living and playing in a world where he doesn't seem to belong. But Sticky can ball. And basketball might just be his ticket out, if he can only realize that he doesn't have to be the person everyone else expects him to be. Matt de la Peña's breakout urban masterpiece, Ball Don't Lie takes place where the street and the court meet and where a boy can be anything if he puts his mind to it.
©2007 Matt de la Peña (P)2017 Listening Library
Muck City
Summary
In a town deep in the Florida Everglades, where high school football is the only escape, a haunted quarterback, a returning hero, and a scholar struggle against terrible odds. The loamy black "muck" that surrounds Belle Glade, Florida, once built an empire for Big Sugar and provided much of the nation's vegetables, often on the backs of roving, destitute migrants. Many of these were children who honed their skills along the field rows and started one of the most legendary football programs in America. Belle Glade's high school team, the Glades Central Raiders, has sent an extraordinary number of players to the National Football League - 27 since 1985, with five of those drafted in the first round. The industry that gave rise to the town and its team also spawned the chronic poverty, teeming migrant ghettos, and violence that cripples futures before they can ever begin. Muck City tells the story of quarterback Mario Rowley, whose dream is to win a championship for his deceased parents and quiet the ghosts that haunt him; head coach Jessie Hester, the town's first NFL star, who returns home to "win kids, not championships"; and Jonteria Willliams, who must build her dream of becoming a doctor in one of the poorest high schools in the nation. For boys like Mario, being a Raider is a one-shot window for escape and a college education. Without football, Jonteria and the rest must make it on brains and fortitude alone. For the coach, good intentions must battle a town's obsession to win above all else. Beyond the Friday night lights, this book is an engrossing portrait of a community mired in a shameful past and uncertain future but with the fierce will to survive, win, and escape to a better life.
©2017 Bryan Mealer (P)2017 Random House Audio
But Beautiful
Summary
In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, as is wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.
©1996 Geoff Dyer (P)2019 Tantor
Leaving Lymon
Summary
Behind every bad boy is a story worth hearing and at least one chance for redemption. It's 1946, and Lymon, uprooted from his life in the Deep South and moved up North, needs that chance. Lymon's father is, for the time being, at Parchman Farm - the Mississippi State Penitentiary - and his mother, whom he doesn't remember all that much, has moved North. Fortunately, Lymon is being raised by his loving grandparents. Together, Lymon and his grandpops share a love of music, spending late summer nights playing the guitar. But Lymon's world as he knows it is about to dissolve. He will be sent on a journey to two Northern cities far from the country life he loves - and the version of himself he knows. In this companion novel to the Coretta Scott King Honor-winning Finding Langston, listeners will see a new side of the bully Lymon in this story of an angry boy whose raw talent, resilience, and devotion to music help point him in a new direction.
©2020 Lesa Cline-Ransome (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Milo Imagines the World
Summary
The team behind the Newbery Medal winner and Caldecott Honor book Last Stop on Market Street and the award-winning New York Times best seller Carmela Full of Wishes once again delivers a poignant and timely children's book that's sure to become an instant classic. Milo is on a long subway ride with his older sister. To pass the time, he studies the faces around him and makes pictures of their lives. There's the whiskered man with the crossword puzzle; Milo imagines him playing solitaire in a cluttered apartment full of pets. There's the wedding-dressed woman with a little dog peeking out of her handbag; Milo imagines her in a grand cathedral ceremony. And then there's the boy in the suit with the bright white sneakers; Milo imagines him arriving home to a castle with a drawbridge and a butler. But when the boy in the suit gets off on the same stop as Milo - walking the same path, going to the exact same place - Milo realizes you can't really know anyone just by looking at them.
©2021 Matt de la Peña (P)2021 Listening Library
Shaker
Summary
Meet Roy Cooper, stoic, unassuming "errand runner" for various New York criminals. Roy arrives in Los Angeles to shoot a man named Martin Shine a week after a powerful earthquake has knocked out cell service, buckled the freeways, and thrown LA into chaos. Roy doesn't know who Shine is or why he has to die, but he does his job and does it well. Except for one thing: After the hit, Roy can't find where he parked his car. Wandering the streets of North Hollywood, he stumbles upon a jogger getting mugged and beaten by four young gangbangers. Despite his attempt to simply put his head down and walk away, Roy winds up in the middle of another killing. Things get more complicated when the murdered jogger turns out to be a controversial mayoral candidate. Roy himself is shot twice, hospitalized in critical condition, and mistaken for a hero when a local resident leaks a video that goes viral. Now meet the rest of the cast of characters, including Kelly Maguire, a disgraced LAPD detective with an anger management problem and strange feelings about LA's newest hero; Science, the teenage gangbanger/shooter who needs to keep Roy quiet about what he's seen; Mayor Miguel Santiago, who finds himself facing accusations that he's just had his opponent whacked; Albert Budin, Roy's onetime mentor and one of the scariest, creepiest characters in recent crime fiction; and myriad criminals, politicians, and cops who all need Roy to disappear - preferably forever. Finally, meet Scott Frank, who has created not just one of the most entertaining novels of the year but also one of the most surprising. This first novel is fun and funny as well as moving and textured, nuanced, and powerful. Shaker is the debut work of fiction by a major new storyteller.
©2016 Scott Frank (P)2016 Random House Audio
Little Family
Summary
From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of A Long Way Gone A powerful novel about young people living at the margins of society, struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together. Hidden away from a harsh outside world, five young people have improvised a home in an abandoned airplane, a relic of their country's tumultuous past. Elimane, the bookworm, is as street-smart as he is wise. Clever Khoudiemata maneuvers to keep the younger kids - athletic, pragmatic Ndevui, thoughtful Kpindi, and especially their newest member, Namsa - safe and fed. When Elimane makes himself of service to the shadowy William Handkerchief, it seems as if the little family may be able to keep the world at bay and their household intact. But when Khoudi comes under the spell of the "beautiful people" - the fortunate sons and daughters of the elite - the desire to resume an interrupted coming of age and follow her own destiny proves impossible to resist. A profound and tender portrayal of the connections we forge to survive the fate we're dealt, Little Family marks the further blossoming of a unique global voice.
©2020 Ishmael Beah (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Hamlet (No Fear Shakespeare)
Summary
Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable. Each No Fear guide contains: The complete text of the original play A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language A complete list of characters with descriptions Plenty of helpful commentary When Shakespeare’s words make your head spin, our audio translations will help you sort out what’s happening, who’s saying what, and why!
©2018 SparkNotes (P)2021 SparkNotes Audio/No Fear Shakespeare
Dancer
Summary
Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the '80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
©2003 Colum McCann (P)2021 Random House Audio