I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying
Essays
By Bassey Ikpi
Narrated by: Bassey Ikpi
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes
2020 Audie Finalist – Short Stories/Collections
In I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our...
Read more »This Is Major
Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope
By Shayla Lawson
Narrated by: Shayla Lawson
Length: 8 hours 48 minutes
From a fierce and humorous new voice comes a relevant, insightful, and riveting collection of personal essays on the richness and resilience of black girl culture—for readers of Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Lindy West.
Shayla Lawson is major. You don’t know who she is. Yet. But that’s okay. She is on a mission to move black...
Read more »All This Could Be Yours
By Jami Attenberg
Narrated by: Therese Plummer
Length: 7 hours 45 minutes
All This Could Be Yours
“I am in love with Jami Attenberg’s writing, and was gripped by All This Could Be Yours from the opening pages. Everything about the Tuchmans felt so true to me: Alex’s confusion and anger toward the family’s toxic, now-comatose patriarch, Victor; Barbra’s isolation in her later years after a long marriage to a brute; Twyla and Gary’s unwinding secret selves—all of it is so perfectly told and paced. Full of Attenberg’s trademark dry wit and precise, uncomfortable insight into the psychology of family love (and its close cousin, family hate), this novel had me laughing with genuine joy and crying in real sadness at the same time.”
Liv Stratman, Books Are Magic
A River of Stars
A Novel
By Vanessa Hua
Narrated by: Jennifer Lim
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California.
“Utterly absorbing.”—Celeste Ng • “A marvel of a first novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.”—Entertainment Weekly
NAMED ONE... Read more »
The Incendiaries
A Novel
By R. O. Kwon
Narrated by: Keong Sim
Length: 5 hours 11 minutes
The Incendiaries
“R.O. Kwon’s debut knocked me sideways. The Incendiaries is a serious reckoning with the problem of fanaticism and the violence of blind devotion. The story of Will and Phoebe is told with an extraordinarily smart and soulful style. I was amazed at how perfectly Kwon’s spare language fit her novel’s expansive scope. A stunning portrait of what faith can do and undo, The Incendiaries will delight and disturb. But, most of all, it will impress.”
John Francisconi, Bank Square Books
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
A Novel
By Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra & Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Length: 12 hours 25 minutes
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
“Fruit of the Drunken Tree made me cry at the airport. I was impressed by the small kingdom of women Contreras builds, with violence always threatening to creep in, all seen through the eyes of Chula, the youngest daughter. Contreras made her perspective believably cloistered while masterfully writing all the people around Chula in ways that made them feel real. Also masterful was the way Contreras used Petrona’s narrative throughout and the restraint she showed in dipping into her thoughts; she always left me wanting more. What Contreras chooses not to write has as big an effect as what she does. This novel is a dynamic exploration of what is known and, sometimes willfully, what is left unknown.”
Lillian Li, Literati Bookstore
Good Talk
A Memoir in Conversations
By Mira Jacob
Narrated by: Mira Jacob, Kivlighan de Montebello & Full Cast
Length: 2 hours 46 minutes
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.
“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”—Celeste Ng
“How brown is too brown?”
“Can Indians be racist?”
“What does... Read more »
Real Life
A Novel
By Brandon Taylor
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 9 hours 25 minutes
A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington... Read more »
The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
A Novel
By Mira Jacob
Narrated by: Mira Jacob
Length: 15 hours 7 minutes
A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past—for readers of J. Courtney Sullivan, Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, and Jhumpa Lahiri
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE BOSTON GLOBE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BUSTLE, AND EMILY GOULD, THE MILLIONS
With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes... Read more »
Cleanness
By Garth Greenwell
Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes
If you enjoyed What Belongs to You, then you’ll love Cleanness.
“I liked What Belongs to You, but I LOVED Cleanness. In this honest and utterly human work, Greenwell revisits the narrator and world of his previous novel. In beautifully crafted prose, he deftly captures the complexities of human interiority, identity, and sexuality. Where What Belongs to You offered a deep dive into the narrator's sense of self through the lens of a single relationship, Cleanness uses a kaleidoscopic and episodic structure to great effect. We move easily from the intimately personal to the global and political. Throughout the collection, Greenwell's narrator offers a deeply resonant look at growing up and living as a gay man, both in the American South and in Eastern Europe; falling in and out of love; and sex as an act of healing and of self-destruction. Greenwell is a gem of a writer, and he's a truly stellar reader. I both read a copy and listened to the audiobook, and Cleanness gains even more immediacy and empathy when it's voiced. Slim but never light, this volume cements Greenwell's place in my personal literary canon alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf. ”
Rayne, Rediscovered Books
Red Clocks
A Novel
By Leni Zumas
Narrated by: Karissa Vacker
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes
Red Clocks
“I never understood what it meant for someone's writing to be 'lyrical' until I picked up Red Clocks. With beautiful prose, Leni Zumas tells the story of a young girl seeking an abortion in a world where abortion is illegal and dangerous; a woman on the quest to have children when in-vitro fertilization is illegal and folks aren't allowed to adopt without a partner; a woman in a dead-end marriage desperate to escape from her husband and children; and a woman considered a witch by most who provides homeopathic reproductive healthcare, including illegal abortions. Zumas beautifully weaves these stories together and gives each individual a strong and unique voice, while also maintaining suspended disbelief. These characters felt real and this world felt possible. I suspect this will be one of the best books published in 2018.”
Hanna Foster, BookPeople
We Love You, Charlie Freeman
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Karole Foreman & Myra Lucretia Taylor
Length: 10 hours 16 minutes
Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African-American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their downwardly-mobile, over-educated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for Cortland County, Massachusetts. The Freemans are to... Read more »
What Belongs to You
By Garth Greenwell
Narrated by: Piter Marek
Length: 6 hours 16 minutes
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship... Read more »
All Grown Up
By Jami Attenberg
Narrated by: Mia Barron
Length: 5 hours 42 minutes
All Grown Up
“Finally, a book which tackles singleness with the nuance such a subject deserves. Thank you, Jami Attenberg, for pushing back against society’s assumptions about what is allowed to matter in our lives. For giving us a different kind of narrative. All Grown Up is not all fluffy and lovely. It turns out that we have other stories — we single people. We human beings.”
Claire, East City Bookshop
How We Fight For Our Lives
By Saeed Jones
Narrated by: Saeed Jones
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes
How We Fight For Our Lives
“Saeed Jones does amazing transformative things with words. This stunning coming-of-age memoir is no exception. Prepare yourself for intense vulnerability as he fights to find and take up space as a Black gay man growing up in the American South.”
Zinna, A Great Good Place for Books
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Stories
By Lesley Nneka Arimah
Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
Length: 5 hours 19 minutes
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
“Intense, haunting, and exquisitely rendered, the stories in Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut collection exist in a category of their own. They are individual worlds linked together by familiar themes - self-discovery, yearnings to love and be loved, generational divides, and the meanings of home and place - refashioned in a fresh, new light. Arimah shines in this debut, whose magic will surely live with you beyond the final page. Absolutely stunning.”
Purvis Cornish, Square Books
The Golden State
By Lydia Kiesling
Narrated by: Amanda Dolan
Length: 9 hours 9 minutes
A gorgeous, raw debut novel about a young woman braving the ups and downs of motherhood in a fractured America
In Lydia Kiesling’s razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her...
Read more »Here Comes the Sun
A Novel
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 42 minutes
Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is... Read more »
The Glass Eye
A Memoir
By Jeannie Vanasco
Narrated by: Julie McKay
Length: 6 hours 6 minutes
The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died.
After his funeral,... Read more »
Patsy
A Novel
By Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Sharon Gordon
Length: 17 hours 9 minutes
Patsy
“I feel that Dennis-Benn is unparalleled in writing the insidious unforgivables. The mother who can't find love for her daughter, the more-than-friend who takes everything you give them and never gives back, the daughter told to be a "good girl" who finds difficulty doing either of those things for the woman who ends up raising her. Like her debut, this novel is filled with characters tormented by the compromises they made but whose character Dennis-Benn refuses to compromise. The painfully recognizable humanity of everyone in Patsy asks us all to reach inside for the empathy we're capable of for people we wouldn't normally think to give it to.”
Alice, Water Street Bookstore
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