Literary Criticism audiobooks

Wild Things

By: Bruce Handy

Narrated by: Bruce Handy

Length: 7 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1690, the dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children's book, was published in Boston. Offering children gems of advice such as "Strive to learn" and "Be not a dunce," it was no fun at all. So how did we get from there to "Let the wild rumpus start"? And now that we're living in a golden age of children's literature,... Read more

Bunk

By: Kevin Young

Narrated by: Mirron Willis

Length: 20 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice... Read more

From Holmes to Sherlock

By: Mattias Boström

Narrated by: Shaun Grindell

Length: 17 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

In From Holmes to Sherlock, Mattias Boström recreates the full story behind the legendary detective and his many incarnations—a real-life narrative of success, tragedy, and family secrets that has never previously been told in its entirety. The beginning is classic: a young Arthur Conan Doyle sitting in a Scottish lecture hall taking notes on... Read more

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

By: Cynthia Ozick

Narrated by: Donna Postel

Length: 7 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared—if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity—could the novel survive? In a gauntlet throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great... Read more

My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

By: Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by: Kazuo Ishiguro

Length: 46 minutes

Abridged: No

The Nobel Lecture in Literature, delivered by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans) at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 7, 2017, in an elegant, clothbound edition.
       In their announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy recognized the emotional force of Kazuo... 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

Lullaby Road

By: James Anderson

Narrated by: Graham Winton

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Ben Jones, protagonist of the glowingly reviewed Never-Open Desert Diner, returns in a devastatingly powerful literary crime novel about parenthood, loss, and the desert in winter. Winter has come to Highway 117, a remote road through the Utah desert trafficked only by oddballs, fugitives, and those looking to escape the world. So when local... Read more

Silk Parachute

By: John McPhee

Narrated by: John McPhee

Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A WONDROUS BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES-IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker over a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here- highly varied in length and theme-McPhee ranges with his... Read more

The Walking Dead Psychology

By: Travis Langley

Narrated by: Allyson Ryan & Adam Verner

Length: 7 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

By understanding the psychological forces that drive The Walking Dead’s action, fans can better grasp Robert Kirkman's compelling fictional universe. Which characters suffer PTSD, which show the most hope for recovery, and which instead show posttraumatic growth? Has Rick Grimes lost his mind? What's it like for a kid like Carl growing up during... Read more

Captain America vs. Iron Man

By: Travis Langley

Narrated by: Reba Buhr & Kevin T. Collins

Length: 3 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This provocative collection, edited by acclaimed media psychology writer Travis Langley and with a foreword by the legendary Stan Lee, examines the complex psychological and political choices made by Captain America and Iron Man throughout their careers, culminating in Marvel's superhero civil war which spreads far beyond the Avengers... Read more

Anthony Powell

By: Hilary Spurling

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

Length: 16 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life.

Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic... Read more

American Audacity

By: William Giraldi

Narrated by: Stephen Graybill

Length: 14 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American... Read more

Discovering Great Plays

By: Leonard Peikoff

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 13 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Based on a series of lectures by Leonard Peikoff and edited by Marlene Trollope, Discovering Great Plays provides the ability to understand, judge, and savor the values offered by great drama. Listeners will discover plot-theme as the key to a play; see Antigone as a great heroine and Iago as the darkest villain in literature; learn about the... Read more

Radical Sacrifice

By: Terry Eagleton

Narrated by: Roger Clark

Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument... Read more

Game of Thrones Psychology

By: Travis Langley

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard & Esther Wane

Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This thought-provoking anthology offers a close examination of the psychology behind the intricate narrative and compelling characters in author George R.R. Martin's bestselling work, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the popular HBO TV series based upon his books, Game of Thrones.



In Martin's richly detailed world, deceit, manipulation, and greed rule... Read more

A Question of Freedom

By: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Narrated by: Sean Crisden

Length: 6 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts—a good student from a lower-middle-class family—carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a "certifiable" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young... Read more

The Man Who Would Be Sherlock

By: Christopher Sandford

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 14 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Man Who Would Be Sherlock, a world-famous biographer reveals the strange relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's real life and that of Sherlock Holmes.

Though best known for the fictional cases of his creation Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was involved in dozens of real life cases, solving many, and zealously campaigning for justice... Read more

Wonder Woman Psychology

By: Travis Langley & Mara Wood

Narrated by: Stephanie Bentley & Todd McLaren

Length: 6 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

For seventy five years, Wonder Woman has served as an inspiration to people everywhere. Wonder Woman Psychology: Lassoing the Truth examines this powerful superhero—who was created by famous psychologist William Moulton Marston—through twenty chapters, including some very special interviews and the previously unpublished memoir of Elizabeth... Read more

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison

By: Ralph Ellison

Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman & John F. Callahan

Length: 49 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that traces the life and mind of a giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades

These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph... 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

Once Upon an Algorithm

By: Martin Erwig

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Length: 10 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

How Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, the movie Groundhog Day, Harry Potter, and other familiar stories illustrate the concepts of computing.



Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm,... Read more

He Held Radical Light

By: Christian Wiman

Narrated by: John Lescault

Length: 3 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poetsWhat is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and... Read more

Tyrant

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 5 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright's insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of... Read more

The Banished Immortal

By: Ha Jin

Narrated by: David Shih

Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai—also known as Li Po

In his own time (701–762), Li Bai's poems—shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life—were never given their proper due by the official literary... Read more