You Are Free Stories, Danzy Senna
You Are Free Stories, Danzy Senna
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You Are Free: Stories

Author: Danzy Senna

Narrator: Adenrele Ojo, January LaVoy, Cassandra Campbell, Bahni Turpin

Unabridged: 6 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/06/2018


Synopsis

Danzy Senna's You Are Free is now available for the first time in audio!

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

Audiobook Table of Contents:
Admission, read by Adenrele Ojo
The Land of Beulah, read by January LaVoy
Replacement Theory, read by Cassandra Campbell
There, There, read by Bahni Turpin
The Care of the Self, read by January LaVoy
You Are Free, read by Cassandra Campbell
Triptych, read by Adenrele Ojo
What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?, read by Bahni Turpin

About The Author

Danzy Senna is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.


Reviews

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀ Danzy Senna has a knack for unsettling her readers. The stories collected in You Are Free are a testament to her ability to create and maintain an atmosphere of disquiet, one that adds to the ambiguous characters populating her stories. The peop......more

Goodreads review by Roxane on July 28, 2012

Oh this book is kind of a mess. The writing is competent and each story has a lot of unrealized potential but the stories are a bland blur of the same themes over and over. There are few remarkable moments that really make you want to keep reading. Also, all the men have dreadlocks and the women hav......more

Goodreads review by Jill on March 09, 2011

First, a big thank you to the Goodreads First-Reads program and Penguin books for an advanced copy of YOU ARE FREE. Below is my review... What does it mean to be biracial and free in postmillennial America? The writer James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “Freedom is something that people take and peopl......more

Goodreads review by Carolyn on August 01, 2011

Years ago I fell in love with Danzy Senna's first book, Caucasia. Her talent for storytelling continues in this new collection of short stories called, You are Free: Stories. This collection contains seven short stories, all centered around biracial characters who are trying to figure out what it me......more


Quotes

“Senna skillfully exposes the cracks in her characters’ domestic lives… Though [her] stories address race, class and gender, they never devolve into simple case studies. Rather, her collection offers nuanced portraits of characters confronting anxieties and prejudices that leave them not as free as they would like to be.” – The New York Times Book Review

“Shocking…Senna reveals things about people that we rarely see in day-to-day life…Severing readers from their entrenched moralities usually takes a lot longer (at least a novel), but Senna does it in a few carefully chosen details.” -- The Los Angeles Times

“Unsettling…[Senna] fearlessly but subtly dramatizes a very American discomfort with such issues as race, class, and gender."- Vogue

“Senna’s perceptive stories…show how nothing is black-and-white.”- Vanity Fair

“These…crisply written stories take place in a middle-class world we thought we knew, while revealing the strangeness, distress, and sorrow under its blank surfaces.” – The Village Voice

“Daring…and lyrical.” -- Essence

 “Deft, revealing stories [from] a writer for our time… …A fresh, insightful look into being young, smart and biracial in postmillennial America.” --- Kirkus (starred)

“Compelling…Senna’s fluid, assured tales address true-to-life questions and navigate universal conundrums.”- Booklist

 “Superb.” -- BookPage

 “Senna trains her gimlet eye on the intersection of race and family life, and the result is a richly nuanced, often funny, always provocative work of art."- Jennifer Egan

“Senna's probing and marvelous stories delve into the deepest layers of the human heart and psyche, all while showing us a multi-colored, multi-flavored, and most importantly multi-layered world to which we all--lovers, mothers, nomads, strangers--could easily belong.” - Edwidge Danticat

"Dispatches from a glorious and terrifying dimension: motherhood. Senna has written about shifting identities before, but this time it’s the divide between being childless and bearing children that makes her imagination crackle…It’s one hell of a book.”- Victor LaValle

"Danzy Senna's stories are beautiful examples of deceptive simplicity, which of course isn't simplicity at all. The tales are seductive, lucid dispatches from contemporary life, but the undercurrents are electric and strange, and go on working changes on you after the book is closed." - Jonathan Lethem

"Searingly smart and profoundly satisfying ... These women and men are palpable and so well wrought that one loses the sense that one is reading a book." - Richard Bausch