Audiobooks narrated by Angelique Lazarus

The City of Our Dreaming: The Alchemy Lecture 2024

"Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in October 2024 at York University to a sold-out in-person audience and online viewers from multiple continents. Four Alchemists-thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies-shared their ideas of cities and how to shape them according to community needs. Their urgent, poignant and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages. Princeton professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy, inviting us to consider floating "as something other than displacement." Iranian-American writer Laleh Khalili dreams of radical kinship, where even strangers have the means and desire to share a table, "creating [bonds] through the rituals of reciprocal giving." In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins, leading to "projects paved by the audacity to inhabit." And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things, when one "chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed . . . over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly." These lectures are clarion calls for new conceptions of city life. Here, our Alchemists imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread, together."

Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Laleh Khalili, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, V. Mitch McEwen (Author), Angelique Lazarus (Narrator)

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The City of Lost Cats

"A stubborn young girl named Fiona stumbles upon an abandoned house full of stray cats, just as it is threatened by a demolition team, a leadership crisis, and two potentially malicious parakeets. Can Fiona save the house and all its inhabitants? A new middle-grade novel by critically acclaimed author Tanya Lloyd Kyi. When Fiona wanders into an abandoned mansion down by the harbor, she discovers the house is full of stray cats (and two chaotic parakeets). Fiona feels a great deal of sympathy for the animals; she understands what it's like to need a safe home. Ever since her parents died, she's been struggling to adjust to the tiny apartment where she and her Aunt Tanis now live. And Aunt Tanis has little time to spare for Fiona, between her job at The Municipal Hall and her horrible, hair-gelled boyfriend. When the mansion is threatened by a demolition team, Fiona is determined to save 'The City' and its residents. But the cats have their own priorities. Cot (short for Cottonball Fluffikins Magnificent III, a name he refuses to acknowledge) has lived in the mansion for two years and is the self-proclaimed king. He's convinced the demolition effort has been organized by the recently arrived parakeets. Those birds have got to go! Cot's feline rival, Piper, is sure she can intimidate the demolition team and force them to leave, if Fiona will simply stay out of her way. And the parakeets . . . well, the parakeets just want to go home. As the demolition team begins tearing down the house next door, Fiona looks for any help she can find - at the library, the butcher shop, and even at The Municipal Hall. Can the efforts of one small girl and an assortment of animals stop a luxury condo development? Can they create something better in its place? It's going to take some quick thinking on the part of Fiona, not to mention the cooperation of all the cats, to give The City a future."

Tanya Lloyd Kyi (Author), Angelique Lazarus (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation: 2022

"Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. In November 2022, the first annual Alchemy Lecture took place at York University in Toronto, bringing four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Now, in these pages, that conversation is captured and expanded in insightful, passionate ways. Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) calls attention to the complexity of Black infrastructures, questioning how "the environments that surround us condition the possibility of our being." Poet Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O'otham) writes: "Like story, migration is the sensual movement of knowledge," and asks, "What is the language we need to live right now?" Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) suggests there is no diasporic life "without the dynamics of fabulation, where we pass down, from generation to generation, the stories of our ancestors who walked barefoot for many months." And cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) asks us to consider inheritances beyond white supremacist logics: "What might it mean to live a life, if we can't risk desiring and working towards utopia?" As each Alchemist considers the legacies of anti-colonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life, their essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something startling and revelatory: a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be."

Dele Adeyemo, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Natalie Diaz, Rinaldo Walcott (Author), Angelique Lazarus, Christina Sharpe (Narrator)

Audiobook

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

"Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists-agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies-convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that "[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations." Informed by her practice of "curation as care," Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: "it's almost by falling that you live. . . . The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing." Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, "If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?" and gestures toward the possibility of this "as yet unlived, unexperienced thing." Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that "[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable." And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which "lays the groundwork for the irruption. . . . The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo." Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world."

Cristina Rivera Garza, Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, Phoebe Boswell, Saidiya Hartman (Author), Angelique Lazarus, Christina Sharpe (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Angelique Lazarus

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