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

Everything Must Go

The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

By: Dorian Lynskey
Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey
Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.

As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for... Read more

Meet Me in the Margins

A Rom-Com for People Who Love Books

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

“Savannah is secretly writing a romance novel—something that the highly selective Nashville publishing house that employs her as an editor would never deign to pick up—but after a chance meeting with the editor-in-chief of her favorite romance imprint, Savannah thinks she might actually have a chance at getting published. In a cutthroat... 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

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

Trauma Plot

A Life

By: Jamie Hood
Narrated by: Jamie Hood
Length: 9 hours 34 minutes

From a rising literary star and the author of how to be a good girl comes a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

"Hood descends into the terrifying dark of the unsayable with the dimmest of flashlights and returns bearing verbal gems, treasures, and marvels. Trauma Plot is a glass case of such... Read more

Didion and Babitz

By: Lili Anolik
Narrated by: Lili Anolik
Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

“To get a more complete picture of LA in the 70s in general and Joan Didion in particular, you have to learn about Eve Babitz who was a foil for Didion. Fascinating read. Read more

The Great War and Modern Memory

By: Paul Fussell
Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
Length: 15 hours 44 minutes

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a... Read more

Jane Austen at Home

A Biography (250th Birthday Edition)

By: Lucy Worsley
Narrated by: Lucy Worsley
Length: 17 hours 17 minutes

THE REMARKABLE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE BBC'S MISS AUSTEN: THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANY JANE AUSTEN LOVER

Readers LOVE Jane Austen at Home:

'A "tour de force" which should be in the reading list of anyone who has either read the books or watched the film adaptations.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'This book is a delight . . . I will return to Austen's novels with a... 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

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

High Weirdness

Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

By: Erik Davis
Narrated by: Erik Davis
Length: 20 hours 57 minutes

An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.



A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from... Read more

Hollywood's Eve

Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

By: Lili Anolik
Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (1943-2021), the brilliant chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time.

“I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The... 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

The Anatomy of Genres

How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works

By: John Truby
Narrated by: Nick Mondelli
Length: 22 hours 16 minutes

A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story John Truby. Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the... Read more

One in a Millennial

On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

By: Kate Kennedy
Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

“Kate Kennedy’s One in a Millennial is the memoir you didn’t know you needed to understand the chaos of adulting in the digital age. She blends pop culture references with millennial struggles like navigating mental health, figuring out relationships, and making sense of a world that’s kinda falling apart. It’s raw, funny, and real—perfect for... Read more

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

A Memoir in Essays

By: Nicole Graev Lipson
Narrated by: Nicole Graev Lipson
Length: 8 hours 8 minutes

In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives. What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to... 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

The Spook who Sat by the Door

By: Sam Greenlee
Narrated by: Dion Graham & Natiki Hope Pressley
Length: 6 hours 6 minutes

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in the late 1960s. With its focus on the “militancy”... Read more

Jane Austen's Bookshelf

A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

By: Rebecca Romney
Narrated by: Rebecca Romney
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that... Read more

The Genius of Judy

How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

By: Rachelle Bergstein
Narrated by: Mia Barron
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An intimate and expansive look at Judy Blume’s life, work, and cultural impact, focusing on her most iconic—and controversial—young adult novels, from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. to Blubber.

Everyone knows Judy Blume.

Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But... Read more

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

By: Franz Kafka
Narrated by: Semih Owens
Length: 2 hours 14 minutes

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position... Read more

The Pillow Book

By: Sei Shōnagon
Narrated by: Georgina Sutton
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthrals with its lively gossip, witty observations and subtle impressions.

Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose... Read more

The Wife of Bath

A Biography

By: Marion Turner
Narrated by: Marion Turner
Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce,... Read more

The Brothers Grimm

A Biography

By: Ann Schmiesing
Narrated by: Eve Matheson
Length: 13 hours 8 minutes

The first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the full, vibrant story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known to history as the Brothers Grimm
More than two hundred years ago, the German brothers Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) published a collection of fairy tales that remains famous the world over. It has been... Read more

Furies

Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed - feminist tales from 16 bestselling, award-winning authors

By: Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Emma Donoghue, Kirsty Logan, Chibundu Onuzo, Caroline O'Donoghue, Linda Grant, Susie Boyt, Stella Duffy, Kamila Shamsie, Helen Oyeyemi, Rachel Seiffert, CN Lester, Claire Kohda, Eleanor Crewes & Annie Hodson
Narrated by: Anna Bentinck, Charles Armstrong, Gabrielle Glaister, Katie Leung, Laura Aikman & Shaheen Khan
Length: 8 hours

'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine
'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror
'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist
______________________________

A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:

Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue,... Read more

A Room of One's Own

By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Frances Butt
Length: 4 hours 25 minutes

A Le Monde 100 Books of the Century book Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. … [Woman] pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon... Read more

Letters to a Young Poet

Penguin Audio Classics

By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Narrated by: Dan Stevens & Max Deacon
Length: 1 hour 50 minutes

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin editionAt the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have... Read more

Dickens the Enchanter

Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

By: Peter Conrad
Narrated by: David Rintoul & Peter Conrad
Length: 12 hours 31 minutes

Bloomsbury presents Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad, read by David Rintoul and Peter Conrad

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.

See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and... Read more

Discourses and Selected Writings

By: Epictetus
Narrated by: Richard Goulding
Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Richard Goulding, best known for Me Before You, The Iron Lady and The Windsors.

Epictetus, a Greek stoic and freed slave, ran a thriving philosophy school in Nicropolis in the early second century AD. His animated discussions were celebrated for their rhetorical wizardry and were... Read more

Three Simple Lines

A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku

By: Natalie Goldberg
Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
Length: 4 hours 23 minutes

One of the world’s foremost writing teachers invites readers on a joyful journey into the reading and origins of haiku

A haiku is three simple lines. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg put it, three lines that “make the mind leap.” A good one, he said, lets the mind experience “a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God.” As many... Read more

The Occult Sylvia Plath

The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet

By: Julia Gordon-Bramer
Narrated by: Julia Gordon-Bramer
Length: 15 hours 29 minutes

• Decodes the alchemical, Qabalistic, hermetic, spiritual, and Tarot-related references in many of Plath’s poems

• Based on more than 15 years of research, including analysis of Plath’s unpublished personal writings from the Plath archives at Indiana University

• Examines the influences of Plath’s parents, her early interests in Hermeticism, and... Read more

On the Shoulders of Giants

By: Umberto Eco & Alastair McEwen
Narrated by: Pete Cross
Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

In Umberto Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose, Nicholas of Morimondo laments, “We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!” To which the protagonist, William of Baskerville, replies: “We are dwarfs, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see... Read more

The Modern Myths

Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination

By: Philip Ball
Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
Length: 14 hours 36 minutes

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern myths." But... Read more

Wild for Austen

A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

By: Devoney Looser
Length: TBA

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and... Read more

Michael Lewis: The Big Short

By: PBS NewsHour
Narrated by: PBS NewsHour
Length: 7 minutes

Jeffrey Brown takes a look inside the doomsday machine of the subprime lending crisis with author Michael Lewis in a conversation about his new book, The Big Short. Read more

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Essays

Picador Modern Classics

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Maya Hawke
Length: 6 hours 23 minutes

“In this snapshot of mid-century American culture, Didion, deliberate and unabashed, takes the reader on journeys across the United States - from Newport, to Sacramento, to Hollywood, to Hawaii, and back to San Francisco - digesting political unrest, youthful buoyancy, and fundamental questions of morality and human responsibility. Her essays... 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

Divine Might

Goddesses in Greek Myth

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

“Natalie Haynes writes as if she knows these goddesses personally, and this audiobook is her telling us all their secrets. I found myself falling back in love with greek mythology, and looking at it's female deities in new lights, for better and for worse. 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

How to Write Like a Writer

A Sharp and Subversive Guide to Ignoring Inhibitions, Inviting Inspiration, and Finding Your True Voice

By: Thomas C. Foster
Narrated by: David de Vries
Length: 8 hours 12 minutes

The New York Times bestselling author of the beloved classic How to Read Literature Like a Professor teaches you how to write everything from a report for your community association to a meaningful memoir in this masterful and engaging guide.Combing anecdotes and hard-won lessons from decades of teaching and writing—and invoking everyone from... Read more

Words Are My Matter

Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writer’s Week

By: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

“The legendary Ursula K. Le Guin grants us a little further insight into a mind that has shaped worlds and readers for decades. Le Guin’s language is remarkable, poetic, and precise, whether venerating another artist or gently mocking literary critics. This collection of essays, speeches, and short nonfiction runs a gamut of subjects and topics,... 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

Splinters

Another Kind of Love Story

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

“Leslie Jamison is a truth-teller and this memoir about splitting with her husband and raising her infant daughter in her first year of life was absolutely gripping. Read it for the specificity of detail, the masterful descriptions of emotional and psychological shifts, and for her powerful prose. A knock-out! Read more

Bibliophobia

A Memoir

By: Sarah Chihaya
Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“[A] stirring and sparkling new memoir.”—The Washington Post

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH: Time, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes,... 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

Signs and Wonders

Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

By: Delia Falconer
Narrated by: Delia Falconer
Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review.

The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our... Read more

Taylor Swift by the Book

The Literature behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets

By: Rachel Feder & Tiffany Tatreau
Narrated by: Tiffany Tatreau
Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

From the childhood nostalgia of Peter Pan in Speak Now to the haunted halls of Rebecca in Evermore, Taylor Swift’s lyrics are packed with literary connections. Make sure you’re catching them all with this expert guide to the novels, poems, and plays that influenced her songwriting.Let a literature professor and a musical theater artist guide you... Read more

The Real Lolita

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

By: Sarah Weinman
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

“Any fan of Nabokov’s Lolita will be enthralled by Sarah Weinman’s investigation of the real-life kidnapping and sexual assault that became the basis for the 20th-century masterpiece. Weinman dives deep into the archives to piece together the ties between fact and fiction, even when the author or the victim’s family refused to discuss history.... 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