Literary Criticism audiobooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maya Hawke performs this classic collection superbly...Hawke gets Didion's measured... 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

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

Red Comet

By: Heather Clark

Narrated by: Laura Jennings

Length: 45 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

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

Happily

By: Sabrina Orah Mark

Narrated by: Gilli Messer

Length: 5 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily”

“One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese... 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

Bibliophobia

By: Sarah Chihaya

Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama

Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

“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

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

Didion and Babitz

By: Lili Anolik

Narrated by: Lili Anolik

Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more!

Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and... Read more

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

The Monster and the Mirror

By: K.J. Aiello

Narrated by: K.J. Aiello

Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Revelatory memoir and cultural criticism that connects popular fantasy and our perceptions of mental illness to offer an empathetic path to compassionate care Growing up, K.J. Aiello was fascinated by magical stories of dragons, wizards, and fantasy, where monsters were not what they seemed and anything was possible. These books and films... Read more

Ernest Hemingway on Writing

By: Larry W. Phillips

Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd

Length: 2 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

A collection of reflections on writing and the nature of the writer from one the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or... Read more

Pandora's Jar

By: Natalie Haynes

Narrated by: Natalie Haynes

Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

“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

Girlhood

By: Melissa Febos

Narrated by: Melissa Febos

Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Bloomsbury presents Girlhood written and read by Melissa Febos.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
National Bestseller
Lambda Literary Award Finalist

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy... Read more

Constructing a Nervous System

By: Margo Jefferson

Narrated by: Karen Murray

Length: 5 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom).

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME... Read more

Why Read Moby-Dick?

By: Nathaniel Philbrick

Narrated by: Nathaniel Philbrick

Length: 2 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye

One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour... Read more

Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz

By: Gail Crowther

Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers

Length: 8 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

In this vividly rendered and empathetic biography of two of the greatest poets of the 20th century—Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—“the friendship and rivalry that the pair shared—not to mention the titular cocktails at a Boston hotel—is explored in fascinating detail” (Town & Country).

Introduced at a poetry workshop in Boston University,... Read more

The Children's Book of Virtues - Abridged

By: William J. Bennett

Narrated by: William J. Bennett

Length: 1 hour 13 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From the #1 national bestseller comes the definitive audio treasury of great moral takes for young children and their parents, including ten postcard-sized reproductions of Michael Hague's beautiful illustrations and featuring performances by:

The Bennett Family
(William, Elayne, John and Joseph)

Barbara Bush

Dorian Harewood

Charlton... Read more