yes please: Essential Listening

The Fifth Season: Booktrack Edition

The Broken Earth: Book #1

By: N. K. Jemisin
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 15 hours 27 minutes

The Fifth Season: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! *
At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)
This is the way the... Read more

Wild Seed

Patternist: Book #1

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

DDoro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one—until he meets Anyanwu. ... Read more

Race for Profit

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

By: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 12 hours 29 minutes

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage... Read more

Sing, Unburied, Sing

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Chris Chalk & Rutina Wesley
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is a dark and gorgeous song of love and heartbreak, haunting and tragic and disorienting in its timelessness. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill anchors Ward's tale to Mississippi today, which is almost indistinguishable from its notorious yesterday, a present and past (ironically) made more alive in the novel by ghosts and... Read more

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou
Narrated by: Maya Angelou
Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

“A lot can be said about this autobiography - it is one of the best I have ever read. The stories are personal and well accounted for, and the reader has no choice but to regard her life and strength through hardship so inspiring. Before reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I had a good idea of Angelou through her poetry and lectures. Her... Read more

Mules and Men - Abridged

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 2 hours 57 minutes

""Simply the most exciting book on black folklore and culture I have ever read."" --Roger D. AbrahamsMules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her ""native village"" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of... Read more

Golden Gulag

Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

By: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Narrated by: Machelle Williams
Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for... Read more

Sula

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a... Read more

Parable of the Sower

Earthseed: Book #1

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

“Octavia E. Butler was a prolific sci-fi futuristic author, the Parable trilogy takes readers on a realistic view of 2024. Everything that you read is playing out in REAL LIFE. She was asked how she came to write this type of work and her response was if you look at history it will show you where we're going. Read more

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

“This book is life-changing and world-changing. It is the type of book you borrow from your neighbor, you loan to your friend, you share with a parent. This book is a grassroots movement of ecological empathy and imagination. Robin Wall Kimmerer dares us to reexamine our relationships to science, reconsider our ideals of community, and revisit... Read more

How We Get Free

Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

By: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization... Read more