Essays audiobooks

It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway

By: Elizabeth Passarella

Narrated by: Elizabeth Passarellla

Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Read by the author.A collection of refreshingly honest and hilarious essays from Southern Living columnist Elizabeth Passarella about navigating change--whether emotional or logistical--and staying sane during life's unexpected twists and turns.After Elizabeth Passarella and her husband finally decided that it was time to sell their two-bedroom... Read more

A Guest at the Feast

By: Colm Toibin

Narrated by: Colm Toibin

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub and The Millions!

From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a “not to be missed” (LitHub) collection of eleven essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature.

“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins... Read more

I'm Wearing Tunics Now

By: Wendi Aarons

Narrated by: Wendi Aarons

Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

An honest and hilarious memoir about second acts, self-acceptance, and celebrating what happens when a woman gets older, wiser, and a lot more excited by sales at Eileen Fisher.
A late bloomer who came to her career later in life, humorist Wendi Aarons shares the joys, stumbles, and outfit mishaps she’s experienced on her road to no longer giving... Read more

Nerd

By: Maya Phillips

Narrated by: Maya Phillips

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In the vein of You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Black Nerd Problems, this witty, incisive essay collection from New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips explores race, religion, sexuality, and more through the lens of her favorite pop culture fandoms.

From the moment Maya Phillips saw the opening scroll of Star Wars, Episode V:... Read more

It Came from the Closet

By: Joe Vallese & various authors

Narrated by: various narrators, Graham Halstead, Aven Shore,...

Length: 10 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist... Read more

A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention

By: Rebecca Schiller

Narrated by: Rebecca Schiller

Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

It should have been Rebecca Schiller's dream come true: moving her young family to the English countryside to raise goats and coax their own fruit and vegetables from the land. But, as she writes: The summer of striding out toward a life of open fields and sacks of corn, I brought a confused black hole of something pernicious but not yet... Read more

Dirtbag, Massachusetts

By: Isaac Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Isaac Fitzgerald

Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER



USA TODAY BESTSELLER



Winner of the New England Book Award for Nonfiction



"The best of what memoir can accomplish . . . pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy." —Esquire, "Best Memoirs of the Year"



A TIME Best Book of the Season * A Rolling Stone Top Culture Pick * A... Read more

Burning Questions

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Margaret Atwood & Full Cast

Length: 18 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions... Read more

My Mess Is a Bit of a Life

By: Georgia Pritchett

Narrated by: Katherine Parkinson

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

“Georgia Pritchett is a singularly hilarious person. Her book is a delightful and perfect reflection of her. Its tenderness sneaks up on you and really packs a punch. What a magnificent read!”—Julia Louis DreyfusJenny Lawson meets Nora Ephron in this joyful memoir-in-vignettes on living—and thriving—with anxiety from a multiple Emmy... Read more

On Freedom

By: Maggie Nelson

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long... Read more

The 2000s Made Me Gay

By: Grace Perry

Narrated by: Grace Perry

Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman.

"Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” —Anna Drezen, co-head... Read more

Seed to Dust

By: Marc Hamer

Narrated by: Owen Teale

Length: 9 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Late Migrations and H is for Hawk

A stunning meditation on gardening and the wisdom of plants, " that rare book that will appeal to nonfiction readers everywhere. . . Candid, tender, thoughtful and absorbing."—Shelf Awareness (STARRED Review)

"With chapters. . . [that] shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery. . . Seed... Read more

Like Streams to the Ocean

By: Jedidiah Jenkins

Narrated by: Jedidiah Jenkins

Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “As inviting, wide-ranging, and philosophical as an all-night conversation with a best friend, and as revealing and thought-provoking as the diary of a curious adventurer.”—Sasha Sagan, author of For Small Creatures Such as We

You can travel the world looking for yourself, but if you don't know what you're looking for,... Read more

Stakes Is High

By: Mychal Denzel Smith

Narrated by: Mychal Denzel Smith

Length: 3 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.

The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our... Read more

Having and Being Had

By: Eula Biss

Narrated by: Alex McKenna

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

“A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press 

A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York... Read more

In Praise of Paths

By: Torbjørn Ekelund

Narrated by: TJ Oberholzer

Length: 4 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

“What [Ekelund is] addressing is the intention to walk one’s way to meaning: the walk as spiritual exercise, a kind of vision quest... A key strategy for finding ourselves, then, is to first get lost.”—The New York Times Book Review

An ode to paths and the journeys we take through nature, as told by a gifted writer who stopped driving and... Read more

How to Catch a Mole

By: Marc Hamer

Narrated by: Marc Hamer

Length: 3 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In this evocative and heart-wrenching memoir, a hard-working Welsh molecatcher reveals his double life as a poet and a dreamer • “A wonderful memoir … hands down the most charming book I read last year.”—Margaret Renkl, The New York Times“How to Catch a Mole is a small book of many things. In quiet, crystalline prose, it blends memoir, keen... Read more

Late Migrations

By: Margaret Renkl

Narrated by: Joyce Bean

Length: 5 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

Selected as a TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna book club pick, Late Migrations is an unusual, captivating portrait of a family―and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world―from beloved New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl.Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and... Read more

Eat Like a Fish

By: Bren Smith

Narrated by: Bren Smith

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Part memoir, part manifesto, in Eat Like a Fish Bren Smith—a former commercial fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer—shares a bold new vision for the future of food: seaweed.

Through tales that span from his childhood in Newfoundland to his early years on the high seas aboard commercial fishing trawlers, from pioneering new forms of ocean... Read more

The Accidental Veterinarian

By: Philipp Schott

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 5 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

With insight and humor, Dr. Philipp Schott shares tales from the unlikely path he took into his career of veterinary science and anecdotes from his successful small-animal clinic. Dr. Schott brings to his writing the benefit of many years of expertise. Wisdom he imparts on listeners includes the best way to give your cat a pill, how to prevent... Read more

No Happy Endings

By: Nora McInerny

Narrated by: Nora McInerny

Length: 7 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of It’s Okay to Laugh and host of the popular podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking—interviews that are “a gift to be able to listen [to]” (New York Times)—returns with more hilarious meditations on her messy, wonderful, bittersweet, and unconventional life.

Life has a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose love,... Read more

I Might Regret This

By: Abbi Jacobson

Narrated by: Abbi Jacobson

Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

From the co-creator and co-star of the hit series Broad City, a "poignant, funny, and beautifully unabashed" (Cheryl Strayed) New York Times bestselling essay collection about love, loss, work, comedy, and figuring out who you really are when you thought you already knew.
When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned... Read more

What If This Were Enough?

By: Heather Havrilesky

Narrated by: Heather Havrilesky

Length: 6 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

*A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018*
*A Bustle Best Nonfiction Book of 2018*
*One of Chicago Tribune's Favorite Books by Women in 2018*
*A Self Best Book of 2018 to Buy for the Bookworm in Your Life*

By the acclaimed critic, memoirist, and advice columnist behind the popular "Ask Polly," an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with... Read more

Can We All Be Feminists?

By: June Eric-Udorie

Narrated by: Various

Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

"As timely as it is well-written, this clear-eyed collection is just what I need right now."  —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming

"The intersectional feminist anthology we all need to read" (Bustle), edited by a feminist activist and writer who "calls to mind a young Audre Lorde" (Kirkus)

Why do some women struggle to identify as... Read more