Service Alert
CD service concludes July 31, 2025
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
Showing 1 - 5 of 5 items
By Michael Waters. 2024
"Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail…
the struggle for understanding and equality." —Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today's culture wars. In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes. In The Other Olympians , Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC's nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender. Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and GirouxBy CeCé Telfer. 2024
By turns harrowing and hopeful, MAKE IT COUNT is the inspiring story of the first openly transgender woman to win…
a NCAA title, following her traditional upbringing in Jamaica, her fight to become a US citizen, and her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams. CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she's never been good at taking no for an answer. MAKE IT COUNT is Telfer's raw and inspiring story. From coming of age in Jamaica, where she grew up hearing a constant barrage of slurs, to beginning her new life in Toronto and then New Hampshire, where she realized what running could offer her, to living in the backseat of her car while searching for a coach, to Mexico, where she trained for the US Trials, this book follows the arc of Telfer's Olympic dream. This is the story of running on what feels like the edge of a knife, of what it means to compete when you're not just an athlete but treated like a walking controversy. But it's also the story of resilience and athleticism, of a runner who found a clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her—a sense of being simply alive on this earth, a human moving through space. Finally, herselfBy Morgan Parker. 2024
In her “witty and searing” first essay collection, award-winning poet Morgan Parker examines “the cultural legacy of Black womanhood and…
the meaning of finding ‘well-being’ in a world that wasn’t built for you” ( Vogue ). Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious. With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman’s psyche—and of the writer’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct itBy Desiree Akhavan. 2024
Writer, actor, and director Desiree Akhavan shares the stories she was told to shut up about—hilarious, horny, heartbreaking tales of…
a life in pursuit of art, love, and a better haircut. “Hilariously raw, relatable, and—dare I even say—sexy.”—Jessi Klein When it comes to shame, Desiree Akhavan knows what she’s talking about—whether it’s winning the title of the Ugliest Girl at her high school, acquiescing to the nose job she was lovingly forced into by her Iranian parents, or losing her virginity to a cokehead she met in a support group for cutters. In You’re Embarrassing Yourself, Akhavan goes to the rawest places—the lifelong struggle to be at peace in one’s body, the search for home as the child of immigrants, the anxious underbelly of artistic ambition—in pursuit of wisdom, catharsis, and lolz. Equal parts funny and heartfelt, these seventeen essays chart an artist’s journey from outcast to overnight indie darling, to (somewhat) self-aware adult woman. The result is a collection that captures the pathetic lows and euphoric highs of our youth—and how to survive themBy Michael Waters. 2024
Finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize. Named one…
of the Best Books of 2024 by The New Yorker, NPR and BookPage."Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality." —Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, winner of the Pulitzer PrizeThe story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars. In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.