Yelena Shmulenson has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 11 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 89 ratings. The most-rated is The Unwomanly Face of War.
The Unwomanly Face of War
Summary
A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature “A landmark.” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century) For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions...a history of the soul.” In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten. Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war - the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the 20th century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. “But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown...I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.” (Svetlana Alexievich) Read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, and Alan Winter THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[F]or her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” “A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist... Her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies.” (The New Yorker)
©2017 Svetlana Alexievich (P)2017 Random House Audio
Chutzpah
Summary
Discover the secret behind how Israel, a tiny country with the highest concentration of start-ups per capita worldwide, is raising generations of entrepreneurs who are disrupting markets around the globe and bringing change to the world. Dubbed “Silicon Wadi”, Israel ranks third in the World Economic Forum Innovation Rating. Despite its small size, it attracts more venture capital per capita than any other country on the planet. What factors have led to these remarkable achievements, and what secrets do Israeli tech entrepreneurs know that others can learn? Tech insider Inbal Arieli goes against the common belief that Israel’s outstanding economic accomplishments are the byproduct of its technologically advanced military or the result of long-standing Jewish traditions of study and questioning. Rather, Arieli gives credit to the unique way Israelis are raised in a culture that supports creative thinking and risk taking. Growing up within a tribal-like community, Israelis experience childhoods purposely shaped by challenges and risks - in a culture that encourages and rewards chutzpah. This has helped Israelis develop the courage to pursue unorthodox, and often revolutionary, approaches to change and innovation and is the secret behind the country’s economic success. While chutzpah has given generations of Israelis the courage to break away from conventional thinking, the Israeli concept balagan - messiness in Hebrew - is at the root of how Israelis are taught to interact with the world. Instead of following strict rules, balagan fosters ambiguity, encouraging the development of the skills necessary for dealing with the unpredictability of life and business. Living with balagan provides Israelis with the opportunity to constantly practice the soft skills defined by the World Economic Forum as the Skills for the Future, as balagan promotes creativity, problem-solving, and independence - key characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. By revealing the unique ways in which Israelis parent, educate and acculturate, Chutzpah offers invaluable insights and proven strategies for success to aspiring entrepreneurs, parents, executives, innovators, and policymakers.
©2019 Inbal Arieli (P)2019 HarperAudio
Chimes of a Lost Cathedral
Summary
The story of The Revolution of Marina M. continues in best-selling author Janet Fitch's sweeping epic about a young woman's coming into her own against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. After the events of The Revolution of Marina M., the young Marina Makarova finds herself on her own amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War - pregnant and adrift in the Russian countryside, forced onto her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come. When she finally returns to Petrograd, the city almost unrecognizable after two years of revolution, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, she finds the streets teeming with homeless children, victims of war. Now fully a woman, she takes on the challenge of caring for these civil war orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction. But despite the ordeal of war and revolution, betrayal and privation and unimaginable loss, Marina at last emerges as the poet she was always meant to be. Chimes of a Lost Cathedral finishes the epic story of Marina's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century - as a woman and an artist, entering her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.
©2019 Janet Fitch (P)2019 Hachette Audio
Good Citizens Need Not Fear
Summary
"Bright, funny, satirical and relevant.... A new talent to watch" (Margaret Atwood) "These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy.... Reva's characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess - hope." (O, The Oprah Magazine) A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single crumbling apartment building in Ukraine. A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's "darkly hilarious" (Anthony Doerr) intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In "Bone Music", an agoraphobic recluse survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen X-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, just as his parents, not seen since he was a small child, supposedly were. Weaving the narratives together is the unforgettable, chameleon-like Zaya: a cleft-lipped orphan in "Little Rabbit", a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR", a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern Bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming". Good Citizens Need Not Fear tacks from moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's Tsar of Love and Techno to a "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews) collection that is "fearless and thrilling" (Bret Anthony Johnston), and as clever as it is heartfelt. "You've never read anything like them" (Elizabeth McCracken)
©2020 Maria Reva (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Shawl
Summary
At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories. In “The Shawl,” a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In “Rosa,” that same woman appears 30 years later, “a madwoman and a scavenger” in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawl—a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life.
©1980, 1983 Original material by Cynthia Ozick (P)2008 HighBridge Company
You Again
Summary
A New York Times Best Thriller of 2020 From Edgar Award nominee Debra Jo Immergut, a taut, twisting work of suspense about a woman haunted by her younger self. Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age 22 - right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now 46 and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more explosive and life-altering? As weeks go by, Abby continues to spot her double around her old New York haunts - and soon, despite her better instincts, Abby finds herself tailing her look-alike. She is dogged by a nagging suspicion that there is a deeper mystery to figure out, one rooted far in her past. All the while, Abby's life starts to slip from her control: Her marriage hits major turbulence, her teenage son drifts into a radical movement that portends a dark coming era. When her elusive double presents her with a dangerous proposition, Abby must decide how much she values the life she's built and how deeply she knows herself. You Again is an audaciously constructed novel, an unboxing of memory, desire, and regret - and an electrifying portrait of a woman hurtling toward a key crossroads in her life, where a secret lies buried like an undetonated bomb.
©2020 Debra Jo Immergut (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers