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From the Midway
- Unfolding Stories of Redemption and Belonging
- Narrated by: Leaf Seligman
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
How do we know ourselves? How can we be seen for who we truly are? How do we find redemption in a world that conspires to separate us?
Leaf Seligman explores these and other questions in a collection of linked stories from the midway of a carnival traveling through the Jim Crow South. To learn about these characters in this Midway Tabernacle is enlightening and rewarding, but to hear those characters come to life as Leaf Seligman - herself an itinerant preacher - reads her stories, is heaven.
At once, tender, gritty, angry, and empathetic, Leaf’s narration pulls you in at the outset and leaves you feeling redeemed at the end. From the Midway traces the journeys of people who travel with a carnival, including the owners, the oddities, and the African American laborers charged with tending them.
You will meet Lizard Man, who spends his childhood prophesying at the behest of his mother and his adulthood bitterly chasing off what he wants most: human connection; Tiny Laveaux, the “world’s smallest woman” with a larger-than-life personality; Stony, the fossilized boy; and Lisabelle, the dancing girl who tries to offer him joy; eight-foot-tall Leroy Haines who thinks of trees as his brothers; and Cheever whose endless toil threatens to drown him in the Midway mud.
Lyrical descriptions of the physical environs and the emotional landscape of each character function like a funhouse mirror, providing just enough distance and distortion to see ourselves more clearly. The sharply striated world from long ago aptly reflects the tensions, divisions, and perennial shared yearning for redemption and belonging that mark us as human.
Leaf Seligman began writing during her Tennessee childhood where she encountered the midway, tent revivals, and the Civil Rights movement. She has taught writing in colleges, jails, prisons, and community settings and worked as a minister, a jail chaplain, a youth services caseworker, and a restorative justice practitioner.
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Touching
- By Christina on 11-11-04
By: Patricia Hickman
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Ironweed
- By: William Kennedy
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally – and fatally – dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
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Darkly Lovely
- By Michael on 07-22-17
By: William Kennedy
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The Gospel Singer
- By: Harry Crews, Kevin Wilson - foreword
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A gifted, idolized singer returns to his poor hometown and a life and family he is so far removed from he now holds them in contempt. The Gospel Singer reveals the absurdity of blind religious faith and idol worship and the hypocrisy that results with the offering of money or sex. Crews grapples with race, gender, religion, and place and steps back to divulge the secrets of his characters - including a dead girl awaiting the gospel singer’s melodious eulogy, his dysfunctional family, a murderer, the zealous town residents, and a traveling freak show.
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The gospel singer
- By L. Welsh on 07-13-22
By: Harry Crews, and others
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
- By: Allan Gurganus
- Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh
- Length: 49 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
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Dated.
- By edie butler on 04-06-21
By: Allan Gurganus
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I Will Send Rain
- A Novel
- By: Rae Meadows
- Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934, and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, is struggling as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend. The wheat harvests are drying out, and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains.
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We've seen pictures of the Dust Bowl
- By Henwhisperer on 10-12-16
By: Rae Meadows
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Angel of Harlem
- By: Kuwanna Haulsey
- Narrated by: Brenda Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Inspired by the extraordinary events of Dr. May Chinn’s life, Angel of Harlem is a deeply affecting story of love and transcendence. Weaving seamlessly scenes from the battlefields of the Civil War, during which her father escaped from slavery, to the Harlem living rooms and kitchen tables where May is sometimes forced to operate on her patients, this fascinating novel lays bare the heart of a woman who changed the face of medicine.
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Really Enjoyed!
- By Amazon Customer on 08-08-19
By: Kuwanna Haulsey
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The Third Mrs. Galway
- By: Deirdre Sinnott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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It’s 1835 in Utica, New York, and newlywed Helen Galway discovers a secret: Two runaway slaves are hiding in the shack behind her husband’s house. Suddenly, she is at the center of not only the era’s greatest moral dilemma, but her own, as well. Should she be a “good wife” and report the fugitives to her husband? Or will she defy convention and come to their aid? Within her home, Helen is haunted by the previous Mrs. Galway, recently deceased but still an oppressive presence.
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Never thought I'd enjoy a novel so much.
- By HBvideo on 12-01-21
By: Deirdre Sinnott
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Running on Red Dog Road
- And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood
- By: Drema Hall Berkheimer
- Narrated by: Bailey Carr
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.
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Narrator’s attempt at a southern accent distracting to story
- By Ryan C. Bango on 01-05-22
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The Last Ballad
- A Novel
- By: Wiley Cash
- Narrated by: Karen White, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve times a week, 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. Two in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill's owners - the newly arrived Goldberg brothers - white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May's best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for 72 hours of work each week, it's the only opportunity she has.
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Dryer than a popcorn fart
- By Scott Wilson on 02-11-18
By: Wiley Cash
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey