How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

Essays

By: Kiese Laymon

Narrated by: Kevin Free

Author and essayist Kiese Laymon is one of the most unique, stirring, and powerful new voices in American social and cultural commentary. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of Laymon's essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast. Laymon's writing is unflinchingly honest, while also being smart, lacerating, and unexpectedly funny.

In How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Laymon deals in depth with his own personal story, which is filled with trials that illuminate under-appreciated aspects of contemporary American life. As revealed in the audiobook's title essay, Laymon attended three colleges before earning his undergraduate degree. He was suspended from the first of these institutions, Millsaps College, following a probationary period resulting from a controversial essay he published on campus. As the school's president described it, the "Key Essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues."

Controversy seemed to follow this young writer, but as he himself puts it, "my job is to ask questions, to broaden the scope of American literature by broadening the scope of who is written to and imaginatively writes back." Laymon voice is something new and unexpected in contemporary American writing, mixing a colloquial voice with acerbic wit, sharp insights, and blast-furnace heat that calls to mind no one so much as a black 21st-century Mark Twain. Much like Twain, Laymon's writing is steeped in controversial issues both private and public. From his biting critiques of race politics to revelations of his own internal struggles with American "blackness", Laymon taps into an ongoing conversation that is played out consciously and subconsciously across all of our artistic, cultural, political, and economic realities.

©2013 Kiese Laymon (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Please pronounce Kiese correctly

I’m grateful for an audio version of Kiese’s book but can the performer please re-record and pronounce his name correctly? Ki-e-say

I laughed. I cried. I amen’d.

Read this if you’re Black to wax nostalgic. Read this if you’re not to get a dose of humanity.

truly amazing

I have nothing but good things to say about this collection of essays, everything was so moving. I do find it offensive that the narrator didn't bother pronouncing Kiese correctly the whole book... can't they re-record this? at least the moments when he says the author's name?

Elevated Consciousness

Layman’s ability to convey externally an insightfully internal authenticity has inspired me. I experienced a sense of elevated consciousness after reading/ listening to this book. It challenged to continue to honestly conceptualize and grapple with my own life experiences and different life roles (mother, wife, doctoral student, counselor, teacher, daughter, sister, friend, minister). I am gratefully intrigued

Brilliant body of work. Masterful, even!

I just wish Kiese would have narrated. This narrator didn't do our southern, colloquial language justice.