Essays audiobooks

Can You Tolerate This?

By: Ashleigh Young

Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld

Length: 6 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A dazzling—and already prizewinning—collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.

Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that... Read more

What to Read and Why

By: Francine Prose

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.In an age... Read more

The Call of the Road

By: Chris Sidwells

Narrated by: David Thorpe

Length: 14 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

Eddy Merckx. Fausto Coppi. Jacques Anquetil. Bernard Hinault. Beryl Burton. Marianne Vos. A sole cyclist battling over a pass high in the mountains is one of the most romantic of sporting images. In the past 150 years road cycling has been dominated by a series of iconic people who have redefined... Read more

My Twenty-Five Years in Provence

By: Peter Mayle

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 4 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

From the moment Peter Mayle and his wife, Jennie, uprooted their lives in England and crossed the Channel permanently, they never looked back. Here the beloved author of A Year in Provence pays tribute to the most endearing and enduring aspects of his life in France—the charming and indelible parade of village life, the sheer beauty, the ancient... Read more

Dead Girls

By: Alice Bolin

Narrated by: Em Eldridge

Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body... Read more

How Not to Get Shot

By: D. L. Hughley & Doug Moe

Narrated by: D. L. Hughley

Length: 3 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A cutting satire of race relations in the age of Trump and Black Lives Matter from the hugely popular comedian—one of ""The Original Kings of Comedy""—and author of the New York Times bestseller Black Man, White House.""White people are always giving out ‘helpful’ advice, such as: ‘Comply with the police and you won’t get shot.’ They’ve been... Read more

Notes from a Public Typewriter

By: Michael Gustafson & Oliver Uberti

Narrated by: Michael Gustafson, Will Collyer, Christine Laki...

Length: 59 minutes

Abridged: No

A collection of confessional, hilarious, heartbreaking notes written anonymously on a public typewriter for fans of PostSecret and Other People's Love Letters.

When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people... Read more

Rendezvous with Oblivion

By: Thomas Frank

Narrated by: Thomas Frank

Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times—perfect for this political moment.

What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe... Read more

Choose Your Own Disaster

By: Dana Schwartz

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

A hilarious, quirky, and unflinchingly honest memoir about one young woman's terrible and life-changing decisions while hoping (and sometimes failing) to find herself, in the style of Never Have I Ever and Adulting.

Join Dana Schwartz on a journey revisiting all of the terrible decisions she made in her early twenties through the internet's... Read more

Happísland

By: Cédric H. Roserens

Narrated by: Angus Freathy

Length: 44 minutes

Abridged: No

A first shot of Iceland with an aftertaste of rotten shark. A small unpretentious introduction to Iceland's way of life, focused on Reykjavík. Swiss superspy Hans-Ueli Stauffacher is sent one full calendar year to Iceland to understand why Icelandic people are happier than Swiss people... Read more

Where the Stress Falls

By: Susan Sontag

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 12 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Two decades of indispensable work by a great American writer—more than forty longer and shorter pieces that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideasThirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America’s most important essayist chose more than forty longer... Read more

Lacks Self-Control

By: Roy Sekoff

Narrated by: Roy Sekoff

Length: 5 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

If David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Larry David, and Caitlin Moran had the unlikeliest orgy in history, the resulting love child might one day write a book like this rollicking collection of true tales from Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of the Huffington Post. Whether he’s describing a teenage pilgrimage to a Times Square porn superstore,... Read more

Tonight I'm Someone Else

By: Chelsea Hodson

Narrated by: Chelsea Hodson

Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Tonight I'm Someone Else is a highly anticipated audiobook collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in... Read more

Alone Time

By: Stephanie Rosenbloom

Narrated by: Stephanie Rosenbloom

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

"In Paris (or anywhere else, really) a table for one can be a most delightful place." --Alone Time, as seen in The New York Times

A wise, passionate account of the pleasures of traveling solo

In our increasingly frantic daily lives, many people are genuinely fearful of the prospect of solitude, but time alone can be both rich and restorative,... Read more

Eating My Heroes

By: Rick Bass

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

On the Road meets Tuesdays with Morrie in this pilgrimage by "an American classic" (Newsweek) to thank his most important mentors through memorable meals and conversations

"Some years later, George Plimpton offered to punch me in the nose," recounts Rick Bass, remembering fondly a conversation with the famed Paris Review editor in his office, in... Read more

Daditude

By: Chris Erskine

Narrated by: Claton Butcher

Length: 4 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Life is never peaceful in Chris Erskine's house, what with the four kids, the 300-pound beagle, the chronically leaky roof, and his long-suffering wife, Posh. And that's exactly the way he likes it-except when he doesn't. Every week in the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune (and now and then in many other papers), he distills, mocks, and... Read more

The Traveling Feast

By: Rick Bass

Narrated by: Rick Bass

Length: 7 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Acclaimed author Rick Bass decided to thank all of his writing heroes in person, one meal at a time, in this "rich smorgasbord of a memoir . . . a soul-nourishing, road-burning act of tribute" (New York Times Book Review).

From his bid to become Eudora Welty's lawn boy to the time George Plimpton offered to punch him in the nose, lineage has... Read more

Shapeshifters

By: Gavin Francis

Narrated by: Thomas Judd

Length: 6 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

From birth to death, a lyrical exploration of the role of transformation in human life

To be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis: growing, healing, learning, aging. In Shapeshifters, physician and writer Gavin Francis considers the inevitable changes all of our bodies undergo -- such as birth, puberty, and death, but also laughter,... Read more

Your Dad Stole My Rake

By: Tom Papa

Narrated by: Tom Papa

Length: 6 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

"Papa's warm tone and varied timing will draw listeners into the book and enable them to see that, as is the case with most good comedy, there's truth that supports the jokes." — AudioFile Magazine

This program is read by the author.

It’s hard being a person, especially in a family, and no one knows that better than stand-up comedian, family man,... Read more

Travel Tales: Women Alone — The #MeToo of Travel!

By: Michael Brein

Narrated by: Gary Roelofs & Rose Dupouy

Length: 12 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

THIS SERIESThese are the true travel tales of solo women travelers being sexually harassed and assaulted in their travels around the world and what some of them were able to do about it! This is a book about how to survive as a solo woman traveler abroad.They are shouting “Me Too!” to you through these pages! No one should be subjected to the... Read more

There Are No Grown-ups

By: Pamela Druckerman

Narrated by: Pamela Druckerman

Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

The best-selling author of BRINGING UP BÉBÉ investigates life in her forties, and wonders whether her mind will ever catch up with her face.

When Pamela Druckerman turns 40, waiters start calling her "Madame," and she detects a disturbing new message in mens' gazes: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever.
 
Yet... Read more

See You Again in Pyongyang

By: Travis Jeppesen

Narrated by: Will Collyer

Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A "close-up look at the cloistered country" (USA Today), See You Again in Pyongyang is American writer Travis Jeppesen's "probing" and "artful" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of his travels in North Korea--an eye-opening portrait that goes behind the headlines about Trump and Kim, revealing North Koreans' "entrepreneurial spirit, and... Read more

Blame It On Bianca Del Rio

By: Bianca Del Rio

Narrated by: Bianca Del Rio

Length: 4 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

The cheeky, larger-than-life drag queen and outrageous comic—""The Joan Rivers of the Drag World,"" (New York Times)—who isn’t afraid to shock or offend brings her trademark acerbic wit and sharp commentary to the page in an uproarious collection of advice.When it comes to insult comics, Bianca Del Rio is in a class by herself. Fierce, funny,... Read more

By the Smoke and the Smell

By: Thad Vogler

Narrated by: Alexander Cendese

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

We care so much about the food we eat: how it is made, by whom, and where. Yet we are far less careful about the spirits we drink, often allowing the biggest brands with the most marketing dollars to control the narrative. In By the Smoke and the Smell, Vogler is here to set the record straight. This remarkable memoir is the first book to ask... Read more