Picks of the Month

The Cheesemaker's Daughter

By: Kristin Vukovic
Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

“I loved this book about a daughter returning home to Croatia to help her father with his failing cheese factory. You might suspect a formula in the making, but The Cheesemaker's Daughter is so much more. The novel explores love, loss, severed connections, and displacement. How do you put the pieces back together, if you can at all? I also... Read more

There's Always This Year

On Basketball and Ascension

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

“Using basketball as a vehicle for reflection of East Columbus history and personal memoir, There’s Always This Year is a triumph of contemplative, emotionally-rich writing that will have you wiping tears and on the edge of your seat. Read more

Figuring

By: Maria Popova
Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
Length: 21 hours 26 minutes

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the... Read more

Half an Inch of Water

Stories

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Sean Crisden
Length: 4 hours 44 minutes

A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR)



Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found... Read more

Without Exception

Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom

By: Pam Houston
Narrated by: Pam Houston
Length: 3 hours 41 minutes

Without Exception is an unflinching call for freedom by way of abortion rights.



"A story told with honesty. I thank Pam Houston for this timely and timeless book" —CAMILLE T. DUNGY, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden



Written with equal parts candor and lyricism, Pam Houston illuminates the interconnected histories of abortion in the United... Read more

Whiskey Tender

A Memoir

By: Deborah Taffa
Narrated by: Charley Flyte
Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Finalist for the National Book AwardLonglisted for a Carnegie Medal for ExcellenceWinner of the Southwest Book AwardA Best Book of the Year: Washington Post, Esquire, Time, The Atlantic, NPR, and Publishers WeeklyAn Oprah Daily ""Best New Book"" and ""Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read"" * A New York Times ""New Book to Read"" * A... Read more

A Forty Year Kiss

A Novel

By: Nickolas Butler
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

“Can a love be rekindled after forty years? Charlie has been living with regrets since the ending of his first marriage to Vivian. He arranges a meeting to find out if she’s still the one. A Forty Year Kiss is a tale of love, hope, and change. Read more

Martyr!

A novel

By: Kaveh Akbar
Narrated by: Arian Moayed
Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

“I honestly have a hard time verbalizing exactly what I love about this novel, except to say that I am writing this staff pick months after reading it because it's still on my mind. Cyrus Shams was a baby when his mother's plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. Following her death, Cyrus and his father move to Indiana; his father dies as... Read more

All The Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

By: Patrick Bringley
Narrated by: Patrick Bringley
Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

“A truly lovely book that captures the sort of reverence and passion I feel for art museums. If you know me, you know that taking me to any art museum is bound to result in a whole day spent there. Bringley's memoir and his musings here are entertaining, moving, and resonate deeply. Read more

Winter Pasture

One Woman's Journey with China's Kazakh Herders

By: Li Juan
Narrated by: Nancy Wu
Length: 12 hours 24 minutes

Li Juan and her mother own a small convenience store in the Altai Mountains in Northwestern China, where she writes about her life among grasslands and snowy peaks. To her neighbors' surprise, Li decides to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take their thirty boisterous camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the... Read more

A Woman in the Polar Night

By: Christiane Ritter
Narrated by: Rebecca Gallagher
Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.



In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it... Read more

The Snow Child

A Novel

By: Eowyn Ivey
Narrated by: Therese Plummer
Length: 10 hours 56 minutes

“What I love most about this haunting and beautiful fairytale from Ivey is the way she evokes the wilderness as her setting. Alaska, in all its harsh and terrible beautiful, is as much a character as the elderly couple struggling to survive and the young girl who appears seemingly by magic into their lives. I lost myself in this story, in the... Read more

Hester

A Novel

By: Laurie Lico Albanese
Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
Length: 9 hours 52 minutes

“I listened to Hester via Libro.fm and loved the book. I was originally a little hesitant but that quickly went away once the story began to unwind. Hester is the fictionalized story of the woman who inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynn in The Scarlet Letter. But this story is so much more than that. It is the story of a woman who... Read more

Monsters

A Fan's Dilemma

By: Claire Dederer
Narrated by: Claire Dederer
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

“What do we do with the great art of monstrous men (and women)? Do we throw away all of its merit, determining it filthy and unworthy of our admiration? Do we separate the art from the artist, and the impact it’s had on society? Studying a variety of influential figures of the past, and the acts they committed, author Clare Dederer tackles this... Read more

Dayswork

A Novel

By: Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel
Narrated by: Janet Metzger
Length: 5 hours 57 minutes

A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.



In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense... Read more

Once Upon a Prime

The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature

By: Sarah Hart
Narrated by: Sarah Hart
Length: 8 hours 51 minutes

This program is read by the author.

"An exuberant enthusiasm for mathematics (and life in general) shines through Dr. Hart." —The New York Times

“An absolute joy to read!" —Steven Levitt, New York Times bestselling author of Freakonomics

"Listeners, however well versed in literature and mathematics, or not, will relish author/narrator Sarah Hart's... Read more

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner)

A Sister's Search for Justice

By: Cristina Rivera Garza
Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

“Liliana of the title has been thirty years dead at the writing of this book but Cristina Rivera Garza brings her sister in her into full three-dimensional view with this book. Written as only a poet can write, Liliana's Invincible Summer is the story of a vivacious college student murdered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend is... Read more

I Have Some Questions for You

A Novel

By: Rebecca Makkai
Narrated by: Julia Whelan & JD Jackson
Length: 14 hours 3 minutes

“Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, returns to teach at the New Hampshire boarding school where she spent four not-so-happy years. Questions arise that lead Bodie to reinvestigate the murder of her high-school roommate. Sex, privilege, power, wrongful convictions, shared-memories, and changing ideas are all explored in this clever novel,... Read more

Murder Your Employer

The McMasters Guide to Homicide

By: Rupert Holmes
Narrated by: Neil Patrick Harris & Simon Vance
Length: 14 hours 13 minutes

“I started writing this before I even finished listening. I practically could have written it before I even started to listen, I've been so excited about this book. I have never felt so conflicted over laughing so much. And Neil Patrick Harris...I've not heard his narration before, but I'm pretty sure Cliff Iverson was written for him. Absolute... Read more

I Cheerfully Refuse

By: Leif Enger
Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
Length: 11 hours 54 minutes

“Haunting yet hopeful, this futuristic tale will hit close to home with its honesty and pertinent observation of what it is to be human. I Cheerfully Refuse is proof of the power of a well-told story to ask the reader to live and feel deeply. Read more