Access Unmissable Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It by Lester Fabian Brathwaite

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/568844 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/568844] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It Author: Lester Fabian Brathwaite Narrator: Lester Fabian Brathwaite Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 34 minutes Release date: September 10, 2024 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality. One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live? Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone. Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566783 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566783] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life Author: Anna Funder Narrator: Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, Jane Slavin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 39 minutes Release date: August 17, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.33 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A blazing, genre-bending masterpiece from one of the most inventive writers of our time Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own . . . When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer - and what it is to be a wife. Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. PRAISE FOR ANNA FUNDER 'Funder skilfully deploys fictional techniques to make the material jump off the page: crafted scenes with their own story-arcs, naturalistic dialogue, fully-realised characters with their own plotlines' Independent on Sunday 'Meticulous and compassionate' London Review of Books 'Rigorously researched, tenderly told' Independent ©2023 Anna Funder (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael by Robert L. Harris

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569677 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/569677] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael Author: Robert L. Harris Narrator: Robert L. Harris Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 30 minutes Release date: July 18, 2023 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The Acclaimed International Bestseller “It is impossible to do justice to the beauty of Returning Light. The whole book is a poem.” — New York Times Book Review By the lighthouse keeper on the remote, otherworldly Irish island of Skellig Michael, a ''profound memoir about the importance of place and what it really means to belong'' (Belfast Telegraph) “On Skellig Michael, thousands of birds appear and disappear, erecting towers, coming together in wings of movement which build and unravel over the empty sea. Often, no one else is there to stand beside me on the island. The mind wanders; links with the past are easily made; ancient ways of viewing things come alive.” In 1987, Robert Harris happened upon an unusual job posting in the local paper—a new warden service was being set up on the island of Skellig Michael, and the deadline was imminent. Just weeks later he was on his way to set up camp in one of Ireland’s most remote locations, unaware that he would be making that same journey every May for the next 30 years. Here he transports us to the otherworldly island, a place that is teeming with natural life, including curious puffins that like to visit his hut. From the precipice he has observed a coastline that is relatively unchanged for the last thousand years—a beacon of equilibrium in an ever-changing world. But the island can be fierce too. It’s inhabitable for only five months of the year, and solitude can quickly become isolation as bad weather rolls in to create a veil between Skellig Michael and the rest of the world, when the dizzying terrain can become a very real threat to life. A beautiful and evocative work of nature writing, Returning Light is an extraordinary memoir about the profound effect a place can have on us, and how a remote location can bring with it a great sense of belonging.

A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining by Rachel E. Cargle

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566826 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/566826] to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining Author: Rachel E. Cargle Narrator: Rachel E. Cargle Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 51 minutes Release date: May 16, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do. “Powerful . . . You will leave these pages changed for the better.”—Gabrielle Union, New York Times bestselling author of We’re Going to Need More Wine There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don’t work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining—the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should—has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle’s personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation. In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle’s life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination—the space that sees beyond limits—to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader.  A Renaissance of Our Own gives us the courage to look at the world and say “I want something different.” It serves as a reminder of the power and possibility of reimagining a life that feels right, all the way down to the marrow of your bones.

Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by Lee Durkee

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/559025 [https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/559025] to listen full audiobooks. Title: Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint Author: Lee Durkee Narrator: Matt Godfrey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 35 minutes Release date: April 18, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: *Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Life Writing* “A wickedly entertaining” (The New York Times) detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. “Intensely readable…with bust-out laughing moments” (Garden & Gun), Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee’s fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee’s own unrelenting search for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with X-ray and infrared technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries—and unsolved murders—surrounding the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee travels from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the Bard’s image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn’t know they had—a self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the “Dan Brown of Elizabethan portraiture.” A bizarre and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a “gripping, poignant, and enjoyable” (The Washington Post) journey that will forever change the way you look at one of history’s greatest cultural and literary icons.