Literary Criticism audiobooks

Armageddon in Retrospect

By: Kurt Vonnegut

Narrated by: Rip Torn

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace.

A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve previously unpublished writings. Imbued... Read more

Thug Notes

By: Sparky Sweets, PhD

Narrated by: Greg Edwards

Length: 6 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Sparky Sweets, PhD, and Wisecrack proudly present this outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to literature based on the hit online series, Thug Notes. Inside, you'll find hilarious plot breakdowns and masterful analyses of sixteen of literature's most beloved classics, including: Things Fall Apart, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, The Catcher in... Read more

God

By: Jack Miles

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 19 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

What sort of "person" is God? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book--as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? In this "brilliant, audacious book" (Chicago Tribune), a former Jesuit marshalls a vast array of... Read more

In Other Worlds

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Margaret Atwood & Susan Denaker

Length: 8 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science... Read more

A House of My Own

By: Sandra Cisneros

Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros

Length: 11 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend.

From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico in a... Read more

This Living Hand

By: Edmund Morris

Narrated by: Edmund Morris

Length: 19 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, “You have the most precious gift of all—originality.” That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover... Read more

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

By: Jill Lepore

Narrated by: Jill Lepore

Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism

Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as... Read more

Shakespeare

By: Peter Ackroyd

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 19 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the big one from Peter Ackroyd — and a worthy companion to London: The Biography.

Only Peter Ackroyd can combine readable narrative and unique observation with a sharp eye for the fascinating fact. His method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, he not only richly conjures up the texture of... Read more

Creationists

By: E.L. Doctorow

Narrated by: E.L. Doctorow

Length: 4 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Here now are his rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms, from the literary to the comic to the cosmic. As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and... 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

A Slip of the Keyboard

By: Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Michael Fenton Stevens

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

A collection of essays and other non fiction from Terry Pratchett, spanning the whole of his writing career from his early years to the present day.
     Terry Pratchett has earned a place in the hearts of readers the world over with his bestselling Discworld series -- but in recent years he has become equally well-known and respected as an... Read more

M Train

By: Patti Smith

Narrated by: Patti Smith

Length: 6 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

National Best Seller 

From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes... Read more

James Joyce

By: Edna O'Brien

Narrated by: Donada Peters

Length: 5 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

One of Ireland's best current novelists provides a thumbnail sketch of Ireland's greatest writer. A passionate and sensuous portrait, James Joyce is a return to the land of politics, history, saints, and scholars that shaped the creator of the twentieth century's groundbreaking novel Ulysses. O'Brien traces Joyce's early days as a rambunctious... Read more

Herman Melville

By: Elizabeth Hardwick

Narrated by: Karen White

Length: 4 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

A single novel, an eternal classic, established him as a founding father of American literature. Now, a century after his death, a new popular surge of interest in Herman Melville calls for Elizabeth Hardwick's rich analysis of "the whole of Melville's works, uneven as it is, and the challenging shape of his life . . . a story of the creative... Read more

Virginia Woolf

By: Nigel Nicolson

Narrated by: Karesa McElheny

Length: 5 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Virginia Woolf's life as part of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group has captured the imagination of millions. Now Nigel Nicolson, the distinguished son of British writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West (Vita was one of Woolf's closest and most intimate friends) threads his personal reminiscences through the narrative of her life. In so... Read more

Jane Austen

By: Carol Shields

Narrated by: Donada Peters

Length: 5 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Shields here explores the life of a writer whose own novels have delighted readers for the past 200 years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb novelist from her early family life in Steventon to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement,... Read more

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

By: Daniel Stashower

Narrated by: Richard Matthews

Length: 15 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship, to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and... Read more

Charles Dickens

By: Jane Smiley

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Of Charles Dickens, Jane Smiley says that "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels." Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life. Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: convivial, astute, boundlessly... Read more

All Things Shining

By: Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 8 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them?

Distinguished philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach. It is achieved by... Read more

Selling Ben Cheever

By: Ben Cheever

Narrated by: Ben Cheever

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Ben Cheever was a senior editor for Reader's Digest for 11 years and has published three novels. In 1995, however, his latest book proposal had been rejected, so he went looking for work. This is his wry account of the dozen jobs he held as an entry-level employee in the service sector. As he filled out applications, no one seemed to mind that... Read more

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

By: Maureen Corrigan

Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan

Length: 8 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

A book reviewer for The Washington Post and NPR's Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan is obsessed with books-so much so that they caused her to delay marriage. This audiobook explores her obsession with all things literary. Corrigan expertly weaves together her own life story withthe stories from the books she loves. Read more

Common Sense

By: Thomas Paine

Narrated by: Adrian Cronauer

Length: 1 hour 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir," wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had. Read more

Tail of Vengeance

By: Spencer Quinn

Narrated by: Jim Frangione

Length: 1 hour 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Chet and Bernie-everybody's favorite human-canine detective team-are asked by a beautiful woman to find evidence that would put her cheating boyfriend in the doghouse in this e-original short story from New York Times bestselling author Spencer Quinn. Read more

Shakespeare

By: Raphael Shargel

Narrated by: Raphael Shargel

Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Professor Raphael Shargel channels his passion for teaching and expertise as a Shakespearean scholar into this illuminative study of the Immortal Bard's eight great comedies. Shakespeare's genius is as readily apparent in these comedies as in his timeless tragedies. Often marked by internal and external conflicts, young lovers struggling for... Read more