Essays audiobooks

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

By: Tom Wolfe

Narrated by: Harold N. Cropp

Length: 4 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world.In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen... Read more

Hey Rube

By: Hunter S. Thompson

Narrated by: Scott Sowers

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Sports, politics, and sex collide in Hunter S. Thompson’s wildly popular ESPN.com columns. From the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and father of “Gonzo” journalism comes Hey Rube.Insightful, incendiary, outrageously brilliant, such was the man who galvanized American journalism with his radical ideas and gonzo tactics. For over half a... Read more

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

By: Jesse Bering

Narrated by: Jesse Bering

Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does "free will" really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway?

In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than... Read more

Dan Gets a Minivan

By: Dan Zevin

Narrated by: Dan Zevin

Length: 5 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

In the bestselling and beloved tradition of Dave Barry, a coming-of-middle-age tale by Thurber finalist Dan Zevin, master of "Seinfeld-ian nothingness" (Time) about a man's inevitable transition into midlife and fatherhood. The least hip citizen of Brooklyn, Dan Zevin has a working wife, two small children, a mother who visits each week to... Read more

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance®

By: Robert M. Pirsig & Peter Flannery

Narrated by: James Purefoy & Full Cast

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

An odyssey into life’s challenging questions during an unforgettable summer motorcycle trip

Acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1974. A powerful examination of how we live, as well as a... Read more

The Sweet Life in Paris

By: David Lebovitz

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 6 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in... Read more

Not Taco Bell Material - Abridged

By: Adam Carolla

Narrated by: Adam Carolla

Length: 7 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In his second book, Adam Carolla—author of New York Times bestseller In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks and chart-topping podcaster—reveals all the stories behind how he came to be the angry middle-aged man he is today.

Funnyman Adam Carolla is known for two things: hilarious rants about things that drive him crazy and personal stories about... Read more

I Hate Everyone...Starting with Me

By: Joan Rivers

Narrated by: Joan Rivers

Length: 4 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850“How do I hate thee? How much time do you have?”—Joan Rivers, today, about two-ish
Joan Rivers is a groundbreaking, award-winning, internationally renowned entertainment goddess. She’s also opinionated—especially when it comes to people she hates. Like people who think... Read more

The Log from the Sea of Cortez

By: John Steinbeck

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure. Read more

Steven Raichlen’s Martha’s Vineyard

By: Steven Raichlen

Narrated by: Steven Raichlen

Length: 1 hour 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Join celebrated PBS TV host and New York Times bestselling author, Steven Raichlen, for a personal guided tour of Martha's Vineyard, including his favorite places to shop for the freshest seafood and best local produce. This original companion audio to Raichlen's debut novel, Island Apart, takes us right into Steven's kitchen as he brings the... Read more

Bern Sagen und Legenden

By: Christine Giersberg

Narrated by: Uve Teschner

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Die Geschichte der Stadt Bern im Kanton Bern beginnt vermutlich bereits in der zweiten Hälfte des zweiten Jahrhunderts v. Chr. Damals lag auf der Engehalbinsel eine keltische Siedlung der Helvetier. Münzfunde und Ausgrabungen aus der römischen Zeit belegen, dass auf der Halbinsel eine gallo-römische Siedlung bestand, die jedoch zwischen 165 und... Read more

Turn Right at Machu Picchu

By: Mark Adams

Narrated by: Andrew Garman

Length: 10 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

What happens when an unadventurous adventure writer tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu? In 1911, Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and "discovered" Machu Picchu. While history has recast Bingham as a villain who stole both priceless artifacts and credit for finding the great archeological site,... Read more

I Suck at Girls

By: Justin Halpern

Narrated by: Sean Schemmel

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

From the #1 New York Times bestseller author of Sh*t My Dad Says, Justin Halpern, comes a laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching collection of personal stories about relationships with the opposite sex, from a first kiss to getting engaged and all the awkward moments in between. With Sh*t My Dad Says, Halpern brought his brand of talented... Read more

A Sense of Direction

By: Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Narrated by: Erik Singer

Length: 11 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to... Read more

Lizz Free or Die

By: Lizz Winstead

Narrated by: Lizz Winstead

Length: 8 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and one of today's most hilarious comedians and insightful social critics, pens a brilliant account of how she discovered her comedic voice.

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Winstead vividly recounts how she fought to find her own voice, both as a comedian and as a woman, and how humor... Read more

Fibber in the Heat

By: Miles Jupp

Narrated by: Miles Jupp

Length: 8 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Fanatical about cricket since he was a boy, MILES JUPP would do anything to see his heroes play. But perhaps deciding to bluff his way into the press corps during England's Test series in India wasn't his best idea.

By claiming to be the cricket correspondent for BBC Scotland and getting a job with the (Welsh) Western Mail, Miles lands the press... Read more

The Juice

By: Jay McInerney

Narrated by: Jay McInerney

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This new collection by the acclaimed novelist—and, according to Salon, “the best wine writer in America”—is generous and far-reaching, deeply knowledgeable and often hilarious. 
            For more than a decade, Jay McInerney’s vinous essays, now featured in The Wall Street Journal, have been praised by restaurateurs (“Filled with small... Read more

Jeneration X

By: Jen Lancaster

Narrated by: Jen Lancaster

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

In Such a Pretty Fat, Jen Lancaster learned how to come to terms with her body. In My Fair Lazy, she expanded her mind. Now the New York Times bestselling author gives herself—and her generation—a kick in the X, by facing her greatest challenge to date: acting her age.

Jen is finally ready to put away childish things (except her Barbie Styling... Read more

Farther Away

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: Jonathan Franzen

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound... Read more

An Economist Gets Lunch

By: Tyler Cowen

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you've heard about food is wrong.

Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen.... Read more

The Earth Moved

By: Amy Stewart

Narrated by: Heather Henderson

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

They destroy plant diseases. They break down toxins. They plough the earth. They transform forests. They’ve survived two mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaur. Not bad for a creature that’s deaf, blind, and spineless. Who knew that earthworms were one of our planet’s most important caretakers? Or that Charles Darwin... Read more

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

By: Jenny Lawson

Narrated by: Jenny Lawson

Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Furiously Happy.

When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and... Read more

Travels in Alaska

By: John Muir

Narrated by: Noah Waterman

Length: 7 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In the late 1800s, John Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska, irresistibly drawn to its awe-inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves, and whales. Half poet and half geologist, he recorded his experiences and reflections in Travels in Alaska, a work he was in the process... Read more

The Oregon Trail

By: Francis Parkman

Narrated by: Robert Morris

Length: 12 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the classic account of Francis Parkman’s rugged trip over the eastern part of the Oregon Trail with his cousin Quincy Adams Shaw in the spring and summer of 1846. They left St. Louis by steamboat and traveled on horseback, in company with guides and occasionally other travelers. They encountered storms and buffalo hunts, meeting Indians,... Read more