Phylicia Rashad has narrated 10 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.9★ across 31 ratings. The most-rated is The Wizenard Series: Training Camp.
The Wizenard Series: Training Camp
Summary
From the mind of basketball legend and Academy Award-winning storyteller Kobe Bryant comes this radically original portrait of five young basketball players, one enlightening coach, and the awesome transformative power of the game. Filled with insights about the mental stamina and emotional clarity that peak performance requires, this is an indispensable story for young athletes, coaches, educators, and anyone interested in the astonishing potential of team sports to unlock individual growth. The game will never be the same Magic doesn’t seem possible for the West Bottom Badgers. They’re the lowest-ranked basketball team in their league, and they live in the poorest neighborhood in Dren. Nobody expects them to succeed at anything. Plus, every kid on the team has secret struggles of his own. When a new coach named Professor Wizenard arrives on the first day of training camp, the Badgers can’t explain the magical-seeming things they see and hear. Every player experiences unique and strange visions - visions that challenge everything they thought they knew about basketball, and about their lives and their secrets off the court. To survive the increasingly intense ordeals of training, the Badgers will need to take unimaginable risks, learn to trust their teammates, and confront the darkness within themselves.
©2019 Granity Studios, LLC (P)2019 Granity Studios, LLC
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling, Booker Prize - winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves — and our world today. For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art — namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible. This audiobook includes a PDF of the tables, outlines, figures, and appendices from the book.
©2021 George Saunders (P)2021 Random House Audio
Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof
Summary
From the mind of basketball legend, Academy Award-winning, and New York Times best-selling storyteller Kobe Bryant comes a new tale of finding your strength against all odds. Set in an alternate classical world dominated by sports and a magical power called grana, Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof is the story of two children: the lowly born Rovi and the crown princess Pretia who uncover and battle terrible evil and discover their inner strength along the way. Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof takes place at the most elite sports academy in the land, where the best child-athletes are sent to hone their skills. When Rovi and Pretia arrive, each harboring a secret about themselves, they begin to suspect that something evil is at play at the school. In the course of their first year, they must learn to master their grana in order to save the world from dark forces that are rising.
©2019 Granity Studios, LLC (P)2019 Granity Studios, LLC
Legacy and the Queen
Summary
From the mind of basketball legend and Academy Award-winning storyteller Kobe Bryant comes a new tale of finding your inner magic against all odds. Game. Set. Magic. Game - Tennis means life and death for the residents of the magical kingdom of Nova, and for 12-year-old Legacy, it’s the only thing getting her through the long days taking care of the other kids at the orphanage. That’s all about to change when she hears about Silla’s tournament. Set - Silla, the ruler of Nova, hosts an annual tournament for the less fortunate of her citizens to come and prove themselves and win entrance to the Academy, where they can train to compete at nationals. The prize is Silla’s favor and enough cash to keep open the orphanage, and Legacy has her heart set on both. Magic - What Legacy has yet to know is that the other players have something besides better skills and more money than she does. In Nova, tennis can unlock magic. Magic that Silla used to save the kingdom long ago and magic that her competitors have been training in for months already. Now, with the world turned against her and the orphanage at stake, Legacy has to learn to use her passion for the game to rise above those around her and shine.
©2019 Granity Studios, LLC (P)2019 Granity Studios, LLC
Who Asked You?
Summary
Family ties are tested and transformed in the new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. With her wise, wry, and poignant novels of families and friendships - Waiting to Exhale, Getting to Happy, and A Day Late and a Dollar Shortamong them - Terry McMillan has touched millions of listeners. Now, in her eighth novel, McMillan gives exuberant voice to characters who reveal how we live now - at least as lived in a racially diverse Los Angeles neighborhood. Kaleidoscopic, fast-paced, and filled with McMillan's inimitable humor, Who Asked You? opens as Trinetta leaves her two young sons with her mother, Betty Jean, and promptly disappears. BJ, a trademark McMillan heroine, already has her hands full dealing with her other adult children, two opinionated sisters, an ill husband, and her own postponed dreams - all while holding down a job as a hotel maid. Her son Dexter is about to be paroled from prison; Quentin, the family success, can't be bothered to lend a hand; and taking care of two lively grandsons is the last thing BJ thinks she needs. The drama unfolds through the perspectives of a rotating cast of characters, pitch-perfect, each playing a part, and full of surprises. Who Asked You? casts an intimate look at the burdens and blessings of family and speaks to trusting your own judgment even when others don't agree. McMillan's signature voice and unforgettable characters bring universal issues to brilliant, vivid life.
©2013 Terry McMillan (P)2013 Penguin Audio
My Life, My Love, My Legacy
Summary
"...this audiobook, which was dictated in the last year of King's life, puts both her and her husband's struggles in cultural and historical context. This is a must-listen." (The Berkshire Edge) The life story of Coretta Scott King - wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular 20th-century American civil rights activist - as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, she was an avowed feminist - a graduate student determined to pursue her own career - when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for 15 years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela's election. Coretta's is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in 20th-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life. This program includes archival recordings of Coretta Scott King and is read by Phylicia Rashad and January LaVoy. Phylicia Rashad is an actress, singer and stage director. She is known for roles in television shows such as Empire, Psych, and as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show. Her voice-over credits include spots in The Cleveland Show, Little Bill and Sofia the First. Rashad has also appeared in such films as For Colored Girls, Good Deeds, and Creed.
©2017 Estate of Coretta Scott King (P)2017 Macmillan Audio
Jam on the Vine
Summary
A new American classic: a dynamic tale of triumph against the odds and the compelling story of one woman's struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, first ignites her lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Living in the poor, segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings. She earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin only to return overqualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown's racially biased employers. Ivoe eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African-American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer, the 1919 outbreak of lynchings, and race riots across the Midwest, Ivoe risks her freedom and her life to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system. Skillfully interweaving Ivoe's story with the stories of her family members, LaShonda Katrice Barnett's Jam on the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era and a moving and compelling story of a complicated history we only thought we knew.
©2015 LaShonda Katrice Barnett. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2015 Audible Inc.
Ellington Was Not a Street
Summary
In a reflective tribute to the African-American community of old, noted poet Ntozake Shange recalls her childhood home and the close-knit group of innovators that often gathered there. These men of vision, brought to life in the majestic paintings of artist Kadir Nelson, lived at a time when the color of their skin dictated where they could live, what schools they could attend, and even where they could sit on a bus or in a movie theater. Yet in the face of this tremendous adversity, these dedicated souls and others like them not only demonstrated the importance of Black culture in America, but also helped issue in a movement that "changed the world." Their lives and their works inspire us to this day, and serve as a guide to how we approach the challenges of tomorrow.
©2004 Simon & Schuster (P)2005 Weston Woods
The Wizenard Series, Season One
Summary
The next book in the number-one New York Times best-selling Wizenard series Reggie has never felt destined for greatness. He dreams about basketball brilliance all day and night, but the hard truth is that he’s a benchwarmer for the West Bottom Badgers, the worst team in the league. Even their mysterious new coach, Rolabi Wizenard, can’t seem to help them end their losing streak. Reggie is willing to train tirelessly to improve his game, but the gym itself seems to be working against him in magical ways. Before Reggie can become the player he dreams of being, he must survive the extraordinary ordeals of practice. Basketball icon Kobe Bryant presents this illuminating follow-up to the number-one New York Times best seller The Wizenard Series: Training Camp - a story of strain and sacrifice, supernatural breakthroughs, and supreme dedication to the game.
©2020 Granity Studios, LLC (P)2020 Granity Studios, LLC
Coretta Scott
Summary
Walking many miles to school in the dusty road, young Coretta knew, too well, the unfairness of life in the segregated south. A yearning for equality began to grow. Together with Martin Luther King, Jr., she gave birth to a vision and a journey - with dreams of freedom for all. This extraordinary poetic text by Ntozake Shange captures the movement for civil rights in the United States and honors its most elegant inspiration, Coretta Scott.
©2011 HarperCollins (P)2013 Weston Woods