Literary Criticism bestsellers

Monsters

A Fan's Dilemma

By: Claire Dederer
Narrated by: Claire Dederer
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

“In this personal critique of creative genius Dederer examines the phenomena of cancel culture. Exploring relationships between artist and audience/fan and whether it's possible to have the proverbial "cake and eat it" too. Lots of food for thought. Read more

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

By: George Saunders
Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, Glenn Close, Keith David, Rainn Wilson, BD Wong & Renée Elise Goldsberry
Length: 14 hours 43 minutes

“This masterclass for writers is also a masterclass for readers, and you don't have to be a writer to enjoy it. Through his wise insights on storytelling, Saunders sent me away with an understanding of why I enjoy reading what I do, how stories work, and how to be a better storyteller (and human) in all rights. Read more

One in a Millennial

On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

By: Kate Kennedy
Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

This program is read by the author.

From pop culture podcaster and a voice of a generation, Kate Kennedy, a celebration of the millennial zeitgeist

One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned... Read more

Meet Me in the Margins

By: Melissa Ferguson
Narrated by: Talon David
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

“I've LOLed many times while listening to this enemies-to-lovers romance about books. I almost predicted the twist but was thrown off by a character I never suspected. This book would be great for readers who would prefer a non-steamy read. I felt for Savannah as I learned more about her family's dynamic and how she has tried to navigate it.... Read more

Minor Feelings

An Asian American Reckoning

By: Cathy Park Hong
Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER• ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE• A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In... Read more

Pandora's Jar

Women in the Greek Myths

By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

“Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!”—Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's TaleThe national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships returns with a fascinating, eye-opening take on the remarkable women at the heart of classical stories Greek... Read more

An Odyssey

A Father, a Son, and an Epic

By: Daniel Mendelsohn
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday
A Kirkus Best Memoir of 2017
Shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize

From award-winning memoirist and critic, and bestselling author of The Lost: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading--and reliving--Homer's... Read more

El olor de la guayaba

By: Gabriel García Márquez & Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza
Narrated by: Diego Trujillo & Carlos Manuel Vesga
Length: 4 hours 26 minutes

En El olor de la guayaba pueden encontrarse las claves de un proceso creador y creativo de singular riqueza. Si formalmente El olor de la guayaba es una prolongada conversación del escritor y periodista Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza con su viejo amigo Gabriel García Márquez -lo que da ocasión a éste para desgranar convivacidad sus remembranzas,... Read more

There Plant Eyes

A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

By: M. Leona Godin
Narrated by: M. Leona Godin
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes

From Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight.
 
There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture,... Read more

The Dark Fantastic

Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

By: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 7 hours 13 minutes

Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked... Read more

Brown Album

Essays on Exile and Identity

By: Porochista Khakpour
Narrated by: Porochista Khakpour
Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a beautifully rendered, poignant collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment.

Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating... Read more

Proust's Duchess

How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris

By: Caroline Weber
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 29 hours 52 minutes

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A brilliant look at turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes. “Weber has done a remarkable job of bringing to life…a world of culture, glamour and privilege.” —The Wall Street Journal  

Geneviève Halévy... Read more

A is for Arsenic

The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By: Kathryn Harkup
Narrated by: Nicky Diss
Length: 10 hours 55 minutes

Shortlisted for the BMA Book Awards and Macavity Awards 2016

Fourteen novels. Fourteen poisons. Just because it's fiction doesn’t mean it's all made-up ...

Agatha Christie revelled in the use of poison to kill off unfortunate victims in her books; indeed, she employed it more than any other murder method, with the poison itself often being a... Read more

The World Broke in Two

Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature

By: Bill Goldstein
Narrated by: Bill Goldstein
Length: 12 hours 5 minutes

This program is read by the author.

A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism


The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf,... Read more

The Hedgehog and the Fox

An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History - Second Edition

By: Isaiah Berlin
Narrated by: Peter Kenny
Length: 2 hours 36 minutes

This compelling audiobook narrated by Peter Kenny presents Isaiah Berlin's acclaimed essay on Tolstoy and historical understanding

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo... Read more

Any Person is the Only Self

Essays

By: Elisa Gabbert
Narrated by: Elisa Gabbert
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind, from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory.
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?
In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and... Read more

Big Fiction

How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

By: Dan Sinykin
Narrated by: Mike Lenz
Length: 11 hours 42 minutes

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent... Read more

The Master Builder

World Classics

By: Henrik Ibsen
Narrated by: Expatriate
Length: 2 hours 56 minutes

Master Builder Halvard Solness is an ageing architect who has not achieved what he wanted, neither in art nor in love. He fears and bullies his juniors, and thinks he is going mad. His wife and mistress try to care for him as best they can, without themselves getting hurt in return. The situation is further fraught by the arrival of young and... Read more

Don't Panic

Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

By: Neil Gaiman
Narrated by: Simon Jones & Neil Gaiman
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Now in audiobook for the first time ever! Read by Simon Jones, the original “Arthur Dent,” and written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, Don’t Panic is the definitive chronicle of all things Hitchhiker!First published in 1986 and updated several times since, Don’t Panic is in an in-depth exploration of Douglas Adams’s cultural... Read more

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

By: Jia Tolentino
Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire
 
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia... Read more

Shelf Life

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller

By: Nadia Wassef
Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian
Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

The streets of Cairo make strange music: the echoing calls to prayer, the raging insults hurled between drivers, the steady crescendo of horns honking, the shouts of street vendors, the television sets and radios blaring from every sidewalk. Nadia Wassef knows this song by heart. In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, she... Read more

Mythology

By: Edith Hamilton
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 14 hours 34 minutes

Dive into the timeless tales of gods and heroes in this bestselling A-to-Z encyclopedia detailing classic myths and legends—perfect for curious readers and academics alike. Edith Hamilton's mythology succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture-the... Read more

Divine Might

Goddesses in Greek Myth

By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

New York Times bestselling author Natalie Haynes returns to the world of ancient Greek myth in this scintillating follow-up to Pandora’s Jar.Few writers today have reshaped our view of the ancient Greek myths more than revered bestselling author Natalie Haynes. Divine Might is a female-centered look at Olympus and the Furies, focusing on the... Read more

Splinters

Another Kind of Love Story

By: Leslie Jamison
Narrated by: Leslie Jamison
Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.
 
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared... Read more

Bad Feminist

Essays

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?A New York Times BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •... Read more

Red Comet

The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

By: Heather Clark
Narrated by: Laura Jennings
Length: 45 hours 26 minutes

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.

“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed

With a... Read more

The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

By: William Anderson & Laura Ingalls Wilder
Narrated by: John Morgan & Tish Hicks
Length: 12 hours 47 minutes

Available for the first time and collected in one volume, the letters of one of America’s most beloved authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder—a treasure trove that offers new and unexpected understanding of her life and work.The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a vibrant, deeply personal portrait of this revered American author, illuminating... Read more

Poetry Unbound

50 Poems to Open Your World

By: Pádraig Ó Tuama
Narrated by: Pádraig Ó Tuama
Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

“This collection could easily be subtitled How to Read Poetry Like a Poetry Lover. The collection could also easily double as a memoir, as Ó Tuama not only analyzes the 50 poems within, but shares anecdotes and memories that illuminate why each particular poem resonates with him. Listening to him is like having a passionate conversation about... Read more

Orwell's Roses

By: Rebecca Solnit
Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood

“A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire... Read more

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

By: C. S. Lewis
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 25 hours 16 minutes

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr. Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne,... Read more

The Curtain

An Essay in Seven Parts

By: Milan Kundera
Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
Length: 4 hours 40 minutes

“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.”In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera... Read more

Madame Bovary

By: Gustave Flaubert
Narrated by: Jorge Ramírez
Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

Madame Bovary es una novela clásica escrita por Gustave Flaubert y publicada por primera vez en 1856. La historia sigue la vida de Emma Bovary, una joven mujer casada con un médico de provincia en Francia. Insatisfecha con su vida monótona y aburrida, Emma se embarca en una serie de aventuras amorosas y busca escapar de su realidad a través de... Read more

Year of the Monkey

By: Patti Smith
Narrated by: Patti Smith
Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

“I’m convinced that Patti Smith is the reincarnation of some spiritual mystic. Someone like Joan of Arc or Hildegard von Bingen. At this point I am committed to only listening to her audiobooks because her words are even more powerful in her own dreamy cadence. I sound like a school girl mooning over her first loved celebrity but, I can’t say... Read more

The Wordhord

Daily Life in Old English

By: Hana Videen
Narrated by: Sara Powell
Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

This audiobook narrated by Sara Powell takes listeners on an entertaining and illuminating tour of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of... Read more

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

A Journey Through the Deep State

By: Kerry Howley
Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
Length: 7 hours

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York Times

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data... Read more

Proust and the Squid

The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

By: Maryanne Wolf
Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

Reading is a miracle, because the brain was never wired for written language. This eloquent, accessible look at reading explores how it has transformed our brains, our lives, and the world.

It took 2,000 years for written language to develop, and it takes 2,000 days for a child's brain to learn to read. During that time, the brain must... Read more

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need

By: Jessica Brody
Narrated by: Jessica Brody
Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

The first novel-writing guide from the best-selling Save the Cat! story-structure series, which reveals the 15 essential plot points needed to make any novel a success.

Novelist Jessica Brody presents a comprehensive story-structure guide for novelists that applies the famed Save the Cat! screenwriting methodology to the world of novel writing.... Read more

The Uptown Local

Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir

By: Cory Leadbeater
Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
Length: 6 hours

A brilliant debut memoir about a young writer—struggling with depression, family issues, and addiction—and his life-changing decade working for Joan DidionAs an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days... Read more

A Life of One's Own

Nine Women Writers Begin Again

By: Joanna Biggs
Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by the New York Times, The Week, Vulture, Elle, and The MillionsA piercing blend of memoir, criticism, and biography examining how women writers across the centuries carved out intellectual freedom for themselves—and how others might do the sameI took off my wedding ring for the last time—a gold band with... Read more

How to Think Like a Woman

Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

By: Regan Penaluna
Narrated by: Angie Kane
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

As a young woman growing up in Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we, and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academic—the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What she didn’t... Read more

Burning Questions

Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021

By: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Margaret Atwood & Full Cast
Length: 18 hours 59 minutes

“Atwood is brilliant--obviously, yes, but wonderfully so, nonetheless. These pieces took me to somewhere I have never traveled on the wings of a goddess. She informs, scolds, gives warnings, and inspires action. She talks about books she's written and books others have written. She speaks with authority and humility. I listen with awe and gratitude. Read more

Cassandra Speaks

When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

By: Elizabeth Lesser
Narrated by: Xe Sands
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected... Read more

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
Length: 25 hours 56 minutes

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a... Read more

How to Read Now

Essays

By: Elaine Castillo
Narrated by: Elaine Castillo
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

“How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.”

“A book that doesn’t seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up.” (The New York Times Book... Read more

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 - Abridged

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Narrated by: Ignat Solzhenitsyn
Length: 21 hours 52 minutes

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New YorkerThe Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one... Read more

In Praise of Good Bookstores

By: Jeff Deutsch
Narrated by: Ako Mitchell
Length: 5 hours 1 minute

This audiobook narrated by Ako Mitchell provides an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of bookstores

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutsch—the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the... Read more

Why We Read

On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

By: Shannon Reed
Narrated by: Paige McKinney
Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

A hilarious and incisive exploration of the joys of reading from a teacher, bibliophile, and Thurber Prize Semifinalist

We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the... Read more

The Nutmeg's Curse

Parables for a Planet in Crisis

By: Amitav Ghosh
Narrated by: Sam Dastor
Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary... Read more

Meander, Spiral, Explode

Design and Pattern in Narrative

By: Jane Alison
Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
Length: 5 hours 50 minutes

“Doctors don’t imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle.” ―Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingAs Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one... Read more

Read Dangerously

The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

By: Azar Nafisi
Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
Length: 8 hours 28 minutes

The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood.""[A] stunning look at the power of reading. ... Provokes and inspires at every turn.""... Read more