Literary Criticism audiobooks


Monsters
By: Claire Dederer
Narrated by: Claire Dederer
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes
Abridged: No
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?
"A lively, personal... Read more


Meet Me in the Margins
By: Melissa Ferguson
Narrated by: Talon David
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No
"Meet Me in the Margins is a delightfully charming jewel of a book that fans of romantic comedy won't be able to put down!" --Kristy Woodson Harvey, New York Times bestselling author of A Happier LifeYou've Got Mail meets The Proposal--this romance is one for the books.Savannah Cade's dreams are coming true. The Claire Donovan, editor-in-chief... Read more
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
By: George Saunders
Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman...
Length: 14 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No
From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.
For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA... Read more


Jane Austen's Bookshelf
By: Rebecca Romney
Narrated by: Rebecca Romney
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes
Abridged: No
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


A Room of One's Own
By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Sara Nichols
Length: 4 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No
"A Room of One's Own" began life as a pair of lectures delivered by Virginia Woolf in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge and was published as a stand-alone book in 1929. In this brilliant examination of literature, history and gender discrimination, Woolf posits that the dearth of... Read more
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Maya Hawke
Length: 6 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No
This program is read by actor and singer-songwriter Maya Hawke, star of Netflix's Stranger Things.
"Narrating in a voice as clear and sustaining as a cool glass of water, Hawke’s unflashy approach allows the words to reveal their magic."—The Orange County Register
"Didion’s timeless essays shine with Hawke at the helm. This audiobook will bring... Read more


Divine Might
By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No
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
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Authority
By: Andrea Long Chu
Narrated by: Andrea Long Chu
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes
Abridged: No
Read by the author, this bold, provocative collection of essays asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the... Read more


What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
By: Leah Price
Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
Length: 5 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No
Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the... Read more
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Everything Must Go
By: Dorian Lynskey
Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey
Length: 14 hours 49 minutes
Abridged: No
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


The Light Room
By: Kate Zambreno
Narrated by: Kate Zambreno
Length: 6 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No
“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.“ —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
From “one of our most formally ambitious writers” (Esquire), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss
In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and... Read more


Trick Mirror
By: Jia Tolentino
Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No
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


Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
By: Elizabeth Winkler
Narrated by: Eunice Wong
Length: 14 hours 28 minutes
Abridged: No
An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most... Read more


Trauma Plot
By: Jamie Hood
Narrated by: Jamie Hood
Length: 9 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No
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


Minor Feelings
By: Cathy Park Hong
Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes
Abridged: No
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


Dangerous Fictions
By: Lyta Gold
Narrated by: Amy O'Donnell
Length: 11 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No
In a political moment when social panics over literature are at their peak, Dangerous Fictions is a mind-expanding treatise on the nature of fictional stories as cultural battlegrounds for power. Fictional stories have long held an uncanny power over hearts and minds, especially those of young people. In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces... Read more
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The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1
By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
Length: 25 hours 56 minutes
Abridged: No
“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


All Things Are Too Small
By: Becca Rothfeld
Narrated by: Ruth Crawford
Length: 10 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No
A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as decluttering, mindfulness, David Cronenberg, sadomasochism, and women who wait. All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession,... Read more
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Putting the Fact in Fantasy
By: Dan Koboldt
Narrated by: Eunice Wong
Length: 10 hours 18 minutes
Abridged: No
A collection of essays from historians, linguists, martial artists, and other experts to help you write more compelling fantasy by getting the facts right
Whether it's correctly naming the parts of a horse, knowing how lords and ladies address one another, or building a realistic fantasy army, getting the details right takes fantasy writing to... Read more


One in a Millennial
By: Kate Kennedy
Length: 9 hours 26 minutes
Abridged: No
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


The Fellowship
By: Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski
Narrated by: John Curless
Length: 26 hours 31 minutes
Abridged: No
A stirring group biography of the Inklings, the Oxford writing club featuring J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis C.S. Lewis is the twentieth century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in... Read more
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Istanbul
By: Orhan Pamuk
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No
From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.
"Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." —The Washington Post Book World
A... Read more


She Speaks!
By: Harriet Walter
Narrated by: Harriet Walter
Length: 3 hours 30 minutes
Abridged: No
New parts for thirty of Shakespeare's women, letting them speak their minds, written by famed stage and screen actress, Dame Harriet Walter DBE
'It is STUNNING and I simply sat and read it right through, and shall start again at once. I had no idea that she is such a sensationally fine poet. Astonishing' JOANNA LUMLEY
'Bold and original . . .... Read more


The Bright Book of Life
By: Harold Bloom
Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
Length: 21 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No
America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition—from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man—in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.
In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom—who for more than half a century was... Read more