Notes of a Crocodile
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Narrated by:
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Jo Mei
About this listen
A New York Times Editors' Choice
The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.
An NYRB Classics Original
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
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Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Your Voice in My Head
- A Memoir
- By: Emma Forrest
- Narrated by: Emma Forrest
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just 22 and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist--a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life.
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Great, quick read
- By Amazon Customer on 02-12-21
By: Emma Forrest
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Nearly Normal
- Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
- By: Cea Sunrise Person
- Narrated by: Cea Sunrise Person
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
- By Pamela Plimpton on 03-15-19
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Great & Secret Show
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Chet Williamson
- Length: 22 hrs and 24 mins
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In the little town of Palomo Grove, two great armies are amassing; forces shaped from the hearts and souls of America. In this New York Times best-seller, Barker unveils one of the most ambitious imaginative landscapes in modern fiction, creating a new vocabulary for the age-old battle between good and evil. Carrying its readers from the first stirring of consciousness to a vision of the end of the world, The Great and Secret Show is a breathtaking journey in the company of a master storyteller.
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Horrific Dark Fantasy
- By Michael on 09-05-16
By: Clive Barker
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The Keep
- The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
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"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
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At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
- By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Unwind
- Unwind Dystology, Book 1
- By: Neal Shusterman
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
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After America’s Second Civil War, the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life armies came to an agreement. According to their Bill of Life, human life may not be terminated from the moment of conception until the age of thirteen. But between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, the child may be gotten rid of by their parent through a process called “unwinding.”
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Chilling, Scary, Difficult to Read
- By Joe on 11-11-20
By: Neal Shusterman
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Dreams Underfoot
- The Newford Collection
- By: Charles de Lint
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
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Welcome to Newford: to the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the gray harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost.
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Too Much Urban Fantasy Wears Thin
- By Jefferson on 06-15-13
By: Charles de Lint
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Beautiful Addictions
- By: Season Vining
- Narrated by: Susannah Jones
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
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Josie Banks is a girl without a past. After being found unconscious with no memory, she was shuffled in and out of foster homes where she suffered years of abuse - an experience that left her broken, damaged, and clinging to drugs and meaningless hook-ups to numb her pain. When Josie disappeared years ago, she took a piece of Tristan with her. She’s the girl he thought he lost forever - the one he’s never been able to forget. Now a twist of fate has brought them back together, and he never wants to let her out of his inked arms again.
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you will feel so many emotions threw out this book
- By sydney on 06-12-14
By: Season Vining
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We Are All Made of Stars
- A Novel
- By: Rowan Coleman
- Narrated by: Ben Allen, Avita Jay
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
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We Are All Made of Stars is an unforgettable story about second chances, the power of words, and the resilience of the heart.
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An All-Around 5 Stars!!
- By Trosado on 02-28-20
By: Rowan Coleman
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Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
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Overall
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In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
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This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
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read by a robot
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Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men.
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Must listen.
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Lacey Bond is a 13-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center. Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey ’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.
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how could anyone's life be this bad?
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What listeners say about Notes of a Crocodile
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lisa Ann Robertson
- 07-04-20
Better with context
I wasn't enjoying the story much until I did a bit of research on the author and the context in which this book was written. I didn't love the narrator, but it's an interesting (if depressing) book.
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- another know it all
- 06-17-20
metaphorical
the best I expected was interesting and it barely met that mark. way too metaphorical for me and chock full of teenage and young adult angst. I'm not sure how much is culture not translating, I don't think much but who knows.
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- TiffanyD
- 07-06-20
Pleasant Surprise
Because this is a book about LGBTQ college students in late '80s Taiwan, a world I know literally nothing about, I did struggle to understand some of the nuances, but overall I enjoyed this peek into a different world.
It's not very long but it's easy to pick up and put down due to the format of lots of short chapters, in the form of letters and vignettes. I might have enjoyed it more if I'd made time to do longer stretches of listening. But the translation and the narrator make it very easy to get through. While in some ways the shame most of the characters express about their sexuality feels a bit dated to a 21st century urban dwelling American, on the other hand, the conversations characters have abut gender fluidity or refusal to be defined by one specific gender/sexuality, feel really modern. I think a lot of people will relate to the characters' struggle and their frequent sense of despair. That despair is all the more poignant when you realize that the author killed herself at age 26.
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Overall
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Performance
- Barry V Bowen Jr
- 06-14-20
my opinion
this is actually a pretty good book. it does start out slowly, but if you hang in there it will pick up. I enjoyed the way the author grew the characters from the beginning to almost mature adults with what they had learned by the time the book was done
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- Susie Bright
- 04-18-18
Heartbreak Like a Thousand Cuts
Author Xiu Miaojin was the butch lesbian Sylvia Plath of Taiwan. By that, I mean both a martyred poet by her own hand— and someone that readers saw their own life reflected by, a million times.
The heroine of Qiu's roman a clef is “Lazi," which has become the slang-nickname for “gay girl” all over China and Southeast Asia.
The book was translated to English by Bonnie Huie. Jo Mei is a terrific newer VO— she has that 21st century sound, and a deviation from everything people think they know about Chinese heroines. Playful, devastating, and a heartbreak like a thousand cuts.
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41 people found this helpful
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- James W
- 05-06-19
Beautiful homosexual exposé set in Taiwan
The narrator's mellifluous voice carries you through the trial and tribulations of perusing homosexual relationships in Taiwan in the late 1980s, early 1990s. A magnificent work in translation that articulates the emotional rollercoaster of the various characters. A insightful reminder that love, pain and compassion transcend culture, language and sexual orientation uniting people in shared humanity.
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33 people found this helpful
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- Reuven Sandwich
- 08-14-24
Characters were underdeveloped and 2 dimensional
The characters were defined by being crocodiles, which I guess is the point, but if I'm going to listen to a full audiobook I expect to feel more for the characters at the end than the beginning and with this book I just couldn't. The middle is the best part but the beginning and end are dry and unimaginative.
I appreciate that this book is very progressive in Taiwan but I don't find it compelling as a Westerner.
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- Marjorie Vickers
- 03-04-23
This won Chinese literary awards?
i read many, many books and tried HARD on 3 separate occasions to finish this one The plot(was there really a plot?) was meandering.
I disliked the characters, not because of their sexuality, but they were boring, unhappy, depressed and depressing.. Admittedly l, i didn’t read it to the end, but did you find anything in the 2nd half to redeem it?
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