Literary Criticism audiobooks

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

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

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

Afrofuturism

By: Ytasha L. Womack

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

Length: 5 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A 2014 Locus Awards finalist, nonfiction category. Wonderfully narrated by Karen Chilton, Afrofuturism is an engaging, hip, and accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism. Author Ytasha Womack introduces listeners to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works. She writes engagingly about the... Read more

Meet Me in the Margins

By: Melissa Ferguson

Narrated by: Talon David

Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

You’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 of the most successful romance publishing company in the country, has requested to see the manuscript Savannah’s been secretly writing. The only problem: she’s an editor for a different company, and... Read more

The Anatomy of Genres

By: John Truby

Narrated by: Nick Mondelli

Length: 22 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story John Truby. Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the... Read more

Recognizing the Stranger

By: Isabella Hammad

Narrated by: Isabella Hammad

Length: 2 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

“Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much
more revealing than political writing.” — Rashid Khalidi, New York Times bestselling author of The Hundred
Years’ War on Palestine
From the award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian
struggle... 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

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

Dark Archives

By: Megan Rosenbloom

Narrated by: Justis Bolding

Length: 6 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand?

In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy?the... Read more

Novelist as a Vocation

By: Haruki Murakami

Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe

Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • An insightful look into the mind of a master storyteller—and a unique look at the craft of writing from the beloved and best-selling author of 1Q84, Norwegian Wood, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you... 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

A Wilder Shore

By: Camille Peri

Narrated by: Jeanette Illidge

Length: 16 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE PICK

“Engrossing . . . [A] richly researched and vivid double portrait.” —Phyllis Rose, The Atlantic

“A love story, an adventure story, two literary biographies in one; A Wilder Shore is these things and more—and it's very, very good.” —Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha... Read more

The Wife of Bath

By: Marion Turner

Narrated by: Marion Turner

Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce,... Read more

Essential Anais Nin - Abridged

By: Anais Nin

Narrated by: Anais Nin

Length: 44 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From her famous diaries, that she began in 1914 at the age of eleven, Anais Nin reads passages which reflect the recurring themes of her work. In a slow, clear, heavily accented, hypnotic voice, Nin draws the listener into her spell–binding stories of a highly personal world as she paints a vivid picture of a woman as artist and self. This is an... Read more

Words Are My Matter

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Words Are My Matter gathers talks, essays, introductions to beloved books, and book reviews by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our foremost public literary intellectuals. A must-listen collection, Words Are My Matter is a manual for investigating the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—and, through the lens of deep considerations of contemporary... Read more

Furies

By: Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Emma Donoghue, Kirs...

Narrated by: Anna Bentinck, Charles Armstrong, Gabrielle Gla...

Length: 8 hours

Abridged: No

'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine
'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror
'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist
______________________________

A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:

Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue,... Read more

The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

By: Robert Jordan & Teresa Patterson

Narrated by: Paul Woodson

Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Since its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan has captivated millions of readers around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters.



The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns... Read more

Agatha Christie’s Marple

By: Mark Aldridge

Narrated by: Jane Slavin

Length: 11 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

A new investigation from Dr Mark Aldridge, exploring a lifetime of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple. In Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness,‘Agathologist’ Dr Mark Aldridge looks at nearly a century of St Mary Mead’s most famous resident and uses his own detective skills to uncover new... Read more

But Have You Read the Book?

By: Kristen Lopez

Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau

Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

For film buffs and literature lovers alike, Turner Classic Movies presents an essential guide to 52 cinema classics and the literary works that served as their inspiration. 
 
“I love that movie!”
 
“But have you read the book?”
 
Within these pages, Turner Classic Movies offers an endlessly fascinating look at 52 beloved screen adaptations and... Read more

American Scary

By: Jeremy Dauber

Narrated by: Jeremy Dauber

Length: 16 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

From the acclaimed author of American Comics and Jewish Comedy comes a highly entertaining book that examines the American obsession with horror—and what it tells us about ourselves.
 
In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United... Read more

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

By: J. R. R. Tolkien & Chris Smith

Narrated by: Samuel West & Mike Grady

Length: 29 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

The comprehensive collection of letters spanning the adult life of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, now revised and expanded to include more than 150 previously unseen letters, with revealing new insights into The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of... 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

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