Literary Criticism audiobooks

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

By: Will Durant

Narrated by: John Little

Length: 3 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time—listed in accessible and succinct form—by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the "Hundred Best Books" to the "Ten Greatest Thinkers" to the "Ten Greatest Poets," here is a concise collection of the world's most significant knowledge. For... Read more

Against Interpretation, and Other Essays

By: Susan Sontag

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 12 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays “Notes on Camp” and “Against Interpretation,” as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre,... Read more

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

By: Susan Sontag

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 4 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time.” A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them... Read more

The Art of Cruelty

By: Maggie Nelson

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 8 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn... Read more

The Novel of the Century

By: David Bellos

Narrated by: David Bellos

Length: 12 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general readership. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the... Read more

The Story of Alice

By: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Narrated by: Shaun Grindell

Length: 15 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Following his acclaimed biography of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice... Read more

Worlds Elsewhere

By: Andrew Dickson

Narrated by: Andrew Dickson

Length: 20 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill, the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays—more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early-modern... Read more

The Hour of Land

By: Terry Tempest Williams

Narrated by: Terry Williams

Length: 11 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns... Read more

The Secret Life of the American Musical

By: Jack Viertel

Narrated by: David Pittu

Length: 11 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented... Read more

The Good Book

By: Andrew Blauner

Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli

Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Good Book, thirty-two of today's most prominent writers share never-before-published pieces about passages in the Bible that are most meaningful to them.



The Good Book collects new pieces by writers from many different faiths and ethnicities, including literary fiction writers (Colm Tóibín, Edwidge Danticat, Tobias Wolff, and Rick Moody);... Read more

Luke Skywalker Can't Read

By: Ryan Britt

Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Essayist Ryan Britt got a sex education from dirty pictures of dinosaurs, made out with Jar Jar Binks at midnight, and figured out how to kick depression with a Doctor Who Netflix binge. Alternating between personal anecdote, hilarious insight, and smart analysis, Luke Skywalker Can't Read contends that Barbarella is good for you, that monster... Read more

Jonathan Franzen

By: Philip Weinstein

Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli

Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to... Read more

Mythologies

By: Roland Barthes

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An
epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic
images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are
fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these
"mythologies" appear for what they are: the ideology of mass... Read more

Jane on the Brain

By: Wendy Jones

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 16 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Why is Jane Austen so phenomenally popular? Why do we read Pride and Prejudice again and again? Why do we delight in Emma's mischievous schemes? Why do we care that Anne Elliot of Persuasion suffers?



We care because it is our biological destiny to be interested in people and their stories—the human brain is a social brain. And Austen's characters... Read more

The Mythic Dimension

By: Joseph Campbell

Narrated by: Braden Wright

Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

This work presents twelve eclectic, far-ranging, and brilliant essays gathered together for the first time. The essays explore myth in all its dimensions: its history; its influence on art, literature, and culture; and its role in everyday life.This second volume of Campbell’s essays (following The Flight of the Wild Gander) brings together his... Read more

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words

By: Joseph Campbell

Narrated by: Braden Wright

Length: 12 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was... Read more

Morningstar

By: Ann Hood

Narrated by: Donna Postel

Length: 3 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In her admired works of fiction, including the recent The Book that Matters Most, Ann Hood explores the transformative power of literature. Now, with warmth and honesty, Hood reveals the personal story behind these works of fiction.



Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn't foster the love of literature, Hood... Read more

Packing My Library

By: Alberto Manguel

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

Length: 3 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000-volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of... Read more

Literary Wonderlands

By: Laura Miller

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans four thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine> to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the... Read more

Henry David Thoreau

By: Laura Dassow Walls

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 22 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and... Read more

Sexual Personae

By: Camille Paglia

Narrated by: Emily Durante

Length: 35 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In this brilliantly original book, Camille Paglia identifies some of the major patterns that have endured in western culture from ancient Egypt and Greece to the present. According to Paglia, one source of continuity is paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture. Others,... Read more

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

By: Ben Blatt

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Length: 5 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

In Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt brings big data to the literary canon, exploring the wealth of fun findings that remain hidden in the works of the world's greatest writers. He assembles a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, and starts asking the questions that have... Read more

The Many Lives of Catwoman

By: Tim Hanley

Narrated by: Rachel Dulude

Length: 8 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

For more than seventy-five years, Catwoman has forged her own path in a clear-cut world of stalwart heroes, diabolical villains, and damsels in distress. Her relentless independence across comic books, television, and film set her apart from the rest of the superhero world. When female-led comics were few and far between, Catwoman headlined her... Read more

Equipment for Living

By: Michael Robbins

Narrated by: Rudy Sanda

Length: 7 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

How can art help us make sense of the world? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all.



Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery of poetry and popular music shines in... Read more