Edwidge Danticat has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors. The most-rated is Haiti After the Earthquake.
The Art of Death
Summary
A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the best-selling author of Claire of the Sea Light. Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The audiobook moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is an audiobook that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
©2017 Edwidge Danticat (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Decameron Project
Summary
A stunning collection of short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from 29 authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, this year's National Book Award winner Charles Yu, and more. When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it. In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron: 100 nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction? These 29 new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, Charles Yu, Rachel Kusher, Colm Toibin, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and will offer perspective and solace to the listener now and in a future where COVID-19 is, hopefully, just a memory. Table of Contents: “Preface” by Caitlin Roper “Introduction” by Rivka Galchen “Recognition” by Victor LaValle “A Blue Sky Like This” by Mona Awad “The Walk” by Kamila Shamsie “Tales from the LA River” by Colm Tóibín “Clinical Notes” by Liz Moore “The Team” by Tommy Orange “The Rock” by Leila Slimani “Impatient Griselda” by Margaret Atwood “Under the Magnolia” by Yiyun Li “Outside” by Etgar Keret “Keepsakes” by Andrew O’Hagan “The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase” by Rachel Kushner “The Morningside” by Téa Obreht “Screen Time” by Alejandro Zambra “How We Used to Play” by Dinaw Mengestu “Line 19 Woodstock/Glisan” by Karen Russell “If Wishes was Horses” by David Mitchell “Systems” by Charles Yu “The Perfect Travel Buddy” by Paolo Giordano “An Obliging Robber” by Mia Cuoto “Sleep” by Uzodinma Iweala “Prudent Girls” by Rivers Solomon “That Time at My Brother’s Wedding” by Laila Lalami “A Time of Death, the Death of Time” by Julián Fuks “The Cellar” by Dina Nayeli “Origin Story” by Matthew Baker “To the Wall” by Esi Edugyan “Barcelona: Open City” by John Wray “One Thing” by Edwidge Danticat
©2020 The New York Times. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Haiti After the Earthquake
Summary
On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti. Now their project was transformed into a massive international rescue and relief effort. In his own words, Farmer documents this effort, including the harrowing obstacles and the small triumphs. Despite an outpouring of aid, the challenges were astronomical. U.N. plans were crippled by Haiti's fragile infrastructure and the death of U.N. staff members who had been based in Port-au-Prince. In chronicling the relief effort, Farmer draws attention to the social issues that made Haiti so vulnerable to this natural disaster. Yet Farmer's account is not a gloomy catalog of impenetrable problems. As devastating as Haiti's circumstances are, its population manages to keep going. Farmer shows how, even in the barest camps, Haitians organize themselves, creating small businesses such as beauty parlors. His narrative is interwoven with stories from Haitians themselves and from doctors and others working on the ground. Ultimately this is a story of human endurance and humility in difficult circumstances and seemingly overwhelming odds.
©2011 Paul Farmer. Recorded by arrangement with PublicAffairs TM, a member of the Perseus Books Group. (P)2011 (p) 2011 HighBridge Company