The Gentle Bookshop Playlist

The Mushroom at the End of the World

On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

By: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions,... Read more

Sissy

A Coming-of-Gender Story

By: Jacob Tobia
Narrated by: Jacob Tobia
Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Transformative ... If Tobia aspires to the ranks of comic memoirists like David Sedaris and Mindy Kaling, Sissy succeeds." --The New York Times Book Review

A heart-wrenching, eye-opening, and giggle-inducing memoir about what it's like to grow up not sure if you're (a) a boy, (b) a girl, (c) something in between, or (d)... Read more

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Crossing Press Feminist: Book #1

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action... Read more

These Ghosts are Family

A Novel

By: Maisy Card
Narrated by: Karl O’Brian Williams
Length: 9 hours 55 minutes

PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist​
Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

A “rich, ambitious debut novel” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

Stanford Solomon’s shocking,... Read more

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

By: Becky Chambers
Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
Length: 4 hours 30 minutes

“Extraordinary . . . A future sci-fi masterwork in a new and welcome tradition.” -- Joanne Harris, author of ChocolatA stand-alone science fiction novella from the award-winning, bestselling, critically-acclaimed author of the Wayfarer series.At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a... Read more

The Tradition

By: Jericho Brown
Narrated by: Jericho Brown
Length: 1 hour 3 minutes

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry



Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award



Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What... Read more

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

By: Hiro Arikawa
Narrated by: George Blagden
Length: 5 hours 59 minutes

“The time comes when you’ve just had enough: enough bad news, enough hateful words, enough human suffering, enough gloom and doom. The perfect antidote for those times is The Travelling Cat Chronicles. This exquisitely sized book not only feels good in your hand, but its essence feels good in your brain. Satoru and his cat, Nana, travel miles and... Read more

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

Essays

By: Samantha Irby
Narrated by: Samantha Irby
Length: 9 hours 16 minutes

“There are many ways to craft a humorous essay. One of the most straightforward is to harness the clarity to tell it exactly like it is. You know, through the warped lens of personality. Samantha Irby sees all, and she sees it through wickedly potent bifocals. Read more

When Katie Met Cassidy

By: Camille Perri
Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
Length: 6 hours 20 minutes

"A film-ready rom-com about finding love when you least expect it."--Elle

"My favorite romantic book of recent memory." --Emma Straub

"The delightful, sexy, queer rom-com of the summer . . . [with] all the makings of a Nora Ephron classic." --Vogue

*One of NPR's Best Books of 2018*
*One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2018*

From... Read more

You Exist Too Much

A Novel

By: Zaina Arafat
Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi
Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

“Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much is one of my favorite books of the year. This debut novel blew me away. Arafat’s narrator is confident in her vulnerability; her desire to be seen and understood is visceral and uncomfortably familiar. The intoxication of unrequited love and the disconcerting feeling that can accompany settling down are... Read more

Dust Tracks on a Road

An Autobiography

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 22 minutes

“Warm, witty, imaginative.... This is a rich and winning book.”—The New YorkerDust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors. Hurston’s powerful novels of the South—including Jonah’s Gourd Vine... Read more

Without You, There Is No Us

My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

By: Suki Kim
Narrated by: Janet Song
Length: 8 hours 33 minutes

A haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign
 
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but... Read more

Human Acts

A Novel

By: Han Kang
Narrated by: Sandra Oh, Deborah Smith, Greta Jung, Jae Jung, Jennifer Kim, Raymond J. Lee & Keong Sim
Length: 6 hours 43 minutes

“Listen, I don’t recommend this book lightly. It is so well-written that it’s honestly difficult to read. Han Kang has written this slim but devastating novel based on the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character who experienced this time when the military dictatorship massacred... Read more

Bury What We Cannot Take

A novel

By: Kirstin Chen
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 8 hours 52 minutes

“Complex and rich, Chen’s story serves as a fascinating window into a unique period of history and the plight of one displaced family.” —Harper’s BazaarThe day nine-year-old San San and her twelve-year-old brother, Ah Liam, discover their grandmother taking a hammer to a framed portrait of Chairman Mao is the day that forever changes their... Read more

Willa & Hesper

By: Amy Feltman
Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg & Christine Lakin
Length: 10 hours 53 minutes

For fans of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and The Futures by Anna Pitoniak, a soul-piercing debut that explores the intertwining of past and present, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times.

Willa's darkness enters Hesper's light late one night in Brooklyn. Theirs is a whirlwind romance until Willa starts to know Hesper too... Read more

Eat a Peach

A Memoir

By: David Chang & Gabe Ulla
Narrated by: David Chang
Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

“I'm a sucker for egomaniacal chef memoirs, and this one is no exception. Packed with mistakes, moments of genius and lots of culinary vocabulary, Chang's narration is direct, his style efficient as knife skills on the line. Amazing to think that Momofuku changed the way we eat more than 15 years ago. If you liked "Kitchen Confidential," download... Read more

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir

By: Kai Cheng Thom
Narrated by: Adri Almeida
Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

“'Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true, or false. Maybe what matters is the story itself; what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.' This book was so good and paradigm shifting. It turns real life experience and hard, tragic ones at that (in this case, of being a trans girl of color who leaves home... Read more

Finna

Poems

By: Nate Marshall
Narrated by: Nate Marshall
Length: 1 hour 35 minutes

Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy

“Terrific . . . illuminates life in this country in a strikingly original way.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF... Read more

Alligator and Other Stories

By: Dima Alzayat
Narrated by: Jeed Saddy
Length: 6 hours 37 minutes

The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection, Alligator and Other Stories, are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman preforming burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl," or the great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians."



Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a... Read more

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

By: Andrea Lawlor
Narrated by: Dani Martineck
Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

"In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle." —O, The Oprah Magazine

“HOT” (Maggie Nelson) • “TIGHT” (Eileen Myles) • “DEEP” (Michelle Tea)

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town... Read more