Literary Criticism bestsellers

Monsters

A Fan's Dilemma

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

“Woody Allen, Picasso, even Michael Jackson? What do you do when the artists you love turn out to be terrible people? Claire Dederer confronts her own conflicted emotions with wit and deep insight. There are no easy answers here. 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

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

“In this literal master class on literature and writing, Saunders earnestly yet playfully dissects 19th-century Russian short stories to discover how they exude life to this very day, while highlighting methods any aspiring writer can employ. The huge bonus: reading the wondrous stories themselves, and experiencing Tolstoy’s authority, Chekhov’s... 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

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

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

Wonderworks

The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

By: Angus Fletcher
Narrated by: Jacques Roy
Length: 15 hours 11 minutes

“What if we imagined the history of literature not as a long line of various texts, but rather as a series of brilliant inventions each designed to address a critical human dilemma? How do you heal a broken heart, face death with courage, or live a life of purpose? Science struggles to help us address these issues, but we also turn time and again... Read more

The Maximum Security Book Club

Reading Literature in a Men's Prison

By: Mikita Brottman
Narrated by: Beverley A. Crick
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes

A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men’s prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them—Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran.On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind... Read more

The Art of Memoir

By: Mary Karr
Narrated by: Mary Karr
Length: 7 hours 20 minutes

Bestselling author and renowned professor Mary Karr offers a master class in the essential elements of great memoir—delivered with her signature wit, insight, and candor.Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash... 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

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

Writers on Walks: A BBC Radio 3 Collection

30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

By: Robert Macfarlane, Deborah Levy, Jenn Ashworth, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Donkor, Michèle Roberts, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Ross Raisin, Owen Sheers, Nicholas Shakespeare, Nat Segnit, Sophie Coulombeau, Christopher Hope, Scarlett Thomas, Erica Wagner, Nicola Barker, Ian Samson, Kirsty Gunn & Philip Hoare
Narrated by: Various
Length: 6 hours 48 minutes

22 writers talk about their memorable excursions and the act of walking, and share their creative observations

In these six series, taken from BBC Radio 3's The Essay, an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere. Here are treks taken at daybreak and... Read more

The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth

The Stories of the Mischievous Kappa, Trickster Kitsune, Horrendous Oni, and More

World Mythology and Folklore Series

By: Thersa Matsuura
Narrated by: Thersa Matsuura
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Discover everything you’ve ever wondered about the legendary spirits, creatures, and figures of Japanese folklore including how they have found their way into every corner of our pop culture from the creator of the podcast Uncanny Japan.

Welcome to The Book of Japanese Folklore: a fascinating journey through Japan’s folklore through profiles of... Read more

Mythologies

The Complete Edition, in a New Translation

By: Roland Barthes
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these "mythologies" appear for what they are: the ideology of mass... Read more

The Situation and the Story

The Art of Personal Narrative

By: Vivian Gornick
Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull... Read more

The Book of Virtues: 30th Anniversary Edition

By: William J. Bennett & Elayne Glover Bennett
Narrated by: Ed Asner, Elayne Glover Bennett, Jenn Bennett, William J. Bennett, Claire Bloom, Barbara Bush, Janina Edwards, Dorian Hairwood, Charlton Heston, Kirby Heyborne, Dana Ivey, David Mccallum, Andrea Martin, Joe Morton, Leon Nixon, Kate Nelligan, Timothy Andrés Pabon, Robert Petkoff, Tonya Pinkins, Faith Prince, Tom Selleck, Matt Stango, Richard Thomas, Harriet Walter, Fritz Weaver, Eunice Wong & Michael York
Length: 22 hours 8 minutes

Help your children develop moral character with this updated, 30th anniversary edition of the perennial classic The Book of Virtues.

Almost 3 million copies of the Book of Virtues have been sold since it was published in 1993. It is one of the most popular moral primers ever written, an inspiring anthology that helps children understand and... Read more

How Dead Languages Work

By: Coulter H. George
Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
Length: 13 hours 1 minute

This volume celebrates six such languages—Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew—by first introducing listeners to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral... Read more

The Book of Mothers

How Literature Can Help Us Reinvent Modern Motherhood

By: Carrie Mullins
Narrated by: Sarab Kamoo
Length: 8 hours 15 minutes

Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from—and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that... Read more

The Book-Makers

A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

By: Adam Smyth
Narrated by: Adam Smyth
Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

The five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them

Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the... Read more

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

By: Paula Byrne
Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
Length: 17 hours 5 minutes

‘Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously’ JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021 Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of... 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

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

The Literature Book

Big Ideas Simply Explained

DK Big Ideas

By: DK
Narrated by: Katherine Press
Length: 15 hours 20 minutes

Exploring more than 100 of the world's most important literary works and the literary geniuses that created them, this book is the perfect introduction to the subject of literature and writing.

The Literature Book features some of the world's most celebrated books, plays, and poetry, including Latin American and African fiction, and best-selling... 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

Poetry Unbound

50 Poems to Open Your World

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

“Not only has he selected interesting poems, his down-to-earth essays describing why he loves them are excellent! Nothing uber-academic. Makes one wish this was the approach of poetry teachers everywhere. 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

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

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

The History and Future of Reading

By: Leah Price
Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
Length: 5 hours 35 minutes

“ What We Talk About When We Talk About Books healed some real cracks in my relationship with reading, and reinforced my love and optimism for the written word. Book historian Leah Price guides you through all the myths, melodrama, and baggage modern culture is carrying around about books. Through a humorous and curiosity-filled tour of book... Read more

Reading Genesis

By: Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 12 hours 41 minutes

One of our greatest novelists and thinkers presents a radiant, thrilling interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative.... Read more

Ulysses by James Joyce

By: James Joyce
Narrated by: Sam Blair , Pietro Kelley, Teo Harding, Sefa Chandler, Clarissa Meyer Samuel Welch, Arina Sharp, Joshua Riley
Length: 31 hours 28 minutes

Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. It is considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature.
Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main... Read more

Committed

On Meaning and Madwomen

By: Suzanne Scanlon
Narrated by: Suzanne Scanlon
Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once.
 
When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
 
After nearly three... 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

The Hidden Story of Narnia

A Book-By-Book Guide to C. S. Lewis' Spiritual Themes

By: Will Vaus
Narrated by: Will Vaus
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

When ten-year-old Anne Waller from Suffolk England wrote to C. S. Lewis in 1961 with a question about The Chronicles of Narnia she never expected to receive a reply. However, not only did Lewis answer her letter, he also outlined the spiritual themes in each of the Narnia books. That letter served as inspiration for Will Vaus to write The Hidden... 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

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

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

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

Year of the Monkey

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

“A poetic, ruminative dream of a book, Year of the Monkey chronicles a difficult year in a mesmerizing and unpredictable way. Everything Smith writes feels like a gift, and this is no exception. Read more

Everything Inside

Stories

By: Edwidge Danticat
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 6 hours 4 minutes

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and... Read more

Cold Warriors

Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War

By: Duncan White
Narrated by: Fred Sanders
Length: 24 hours 47 minutes

A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War.During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the... Read more

Once Upon a Prime

The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature

By: Sarah Hart
Narrated by: Sarah Hart
Length: 8 hours 51 minutes

This program is read by the author.

"An exuberant enthusiasm for mathematics (and life in general) shines through Dr. Hart." —The New York Times

“An absolute joy to read!" —Steven Levitt, New York Times bestselling author of Freakonomics

"Listeners, however well versed in literature and mathematics, or not, will relish author/narrator Sarah Hart's... Read more

Notes of a Native Son

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin's most influential work!Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained... Read more

The Wave in the Mind

Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

By: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: Christina Moore
Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary... 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

Girlhood

By: Melissa Febos
Narrated by: Melissa Febos
Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
National Bestseller
Lambda Literary Award Finalist

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy Magazine * Largehearted Boy * Passerbuys

“Irreverent and... Read more

Young Bloomsbury

The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England

By: Nino Strachey
Narrated by: Nino Strachey
Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

An “illuminating” (Daily Mail, London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while also pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and gender norms in 1920s England.

In the years before the First World War, a collection of writers and artists—Virginia... Read more

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

By: Helena Kelly
Narrated by: Emma Bering
Length: 14 hours 39 minutes

A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was.

In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena Kelly--dazzling... Read more

Shakespeare

By: Bill Bryson
Narrated by: Bill Bryson
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

Shakespeare: The Illustrated Edition is an exquisitely illustrated, updated edition of Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare that takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship. With more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, and... Read more