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DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Anthologies, Essays, Journals and memoirs, Death and bereavement
Human-narrated audio
Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. "There is no…
good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook. "There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is an audiobook for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Essays, Criticism, Journals and memoirs, Anthologies
Human-narrated audio
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.In the past two decades, few…
writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.With an eye towards the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.