Passing, Nella Larsen
Passing, Nella Larsen
List: $13.99 | Sale: $9.80
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Passing

Author: Nella Larsen

Narrator: Bahni Turpin

Unabridged: 4 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/04/2023

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

Nella Larsen's novella follows friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two Black women who can pass as white. Their anxieties about passing culminate in tragedy, revealing the powerful repercussions of hiding one’s identity, including the risks associated with it, and its implications for intimacy in romantic and familial relationships. Larsen uses the act of passing to refer to elements of subterfuge outside of the implied racial context, invoking the kinds of masquerade involved in assuming a class, ethnicity, or sexuality different than one’s own. Nearly a century later, Larsen's novella remains as urgent and relevant as ever.
Cover illustrated by: Laylie FrazierLaylie is a digital illustrator from Houston, Texas. She combines texture, color, and pattern to create warm and expressive portraits. She often pulls inspiration from nature, utilizing abstract plant, mountain, and sun motifs in her backgrounds. She is currently illustrating middle grade and YA covers for publishing as well as working in advertising.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lisa of Troy on January 19, 2024

Checking out the Netflix Book Club (Which is confusing because it is actually on YouTube)! Irene "Rene" is out doing some shopping for a birthday present when she becomes faint and slips into a taxi. The driver takes her to The Drayton, a hotel with a rooftop restaurant, to cool down. The rooftop is......more

Goodreads review by emma on March 21, 2022

Short classics are my passion. I love getting smarter in under 2 hours. Now I'm more intelligent and more pretentious and I had a good time getting there. Living the dream. That's enough of a review. Bottom line: Sometimes short and impressive is all a book has to be!! ----------------- reading books by B......more

Goodreads review by Sean Barrs on April 23, 2017

I read this a few months ago now, and I drastically undervalued its brilliance. I’m writing an essay on racial encounter in the modernist movement for university, so I’ve been picking this book apart during my second and third readings of it. During the course of it, I’ve noticed something equally a......more

Goodreads review by Esta on August 26, 2024

An underrated, thought-provoking classic written in the 1920s, Passing is a story of two women navigating race and identity in a segregated society, and interestingly still reflective of today’s world, where privilege can hinge on melanin levels and Eurocentric beauty standards.......more