Literary Criticism bestsellers

Meet Me in the Margins

A Rom-Com for People Who Love Books

By: Melissa Ferguson
Narrated by: Talon David
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

“Savannah is secretly writing a romance novel—something that the highly selective Nashville publishing house that employs her as an editor would never deign to pick up—but after a chance meeting with the editor-in-chief of her favorite romance imprint, Savannah thinks she might actually have a chance at getting published. In a cutthroat... Read more

To Save and to Destroy

Writing as an Other

By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Length: 5 hours 20 minutes

“For: Anyone interested in anything human; interested in what in the world is happening in the world; anyone who is a fan of the author; anyone who loves when the author narrates; anyone who grapples with being the other... This is a must read, such an important work! It's rare for me to ever want to ever meet authors, but I would be honored to... Read more

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

By: Jia Tolentino
Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

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

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

By: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Narrated by: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Length: 2 hours 17 minutes

First published three years ago before the print edition of Women Who Run with the Wolves made publishing history, this original audio edition quickly became an underground best seller. For it's insights into the inner lives of women, it established Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes as one of the most important voices of our time in the fields of... Read more

One in a Millennial

On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

By: Kate Kennedy
Length: 9 hours 26 minutes

“Kate Kennedy’s One in a Millennial is the memoir you didn’t know you needed to understand the chaos of adulting in the digital age. She blends pop culture references with millennial struggles like navigating mental health, figuring out relationships, and making sense of a world that’s kinda falling apart. It’s raw, funny, and real—perfect for... Read more

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

By: George Saunders
Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, Glenn Close, Keith David, Rainn Wilson, BD Wong & Renée Elise Goldsberry
Length: 14 hours 43 minutes

“In this literal master class on literature and writing, Saunders earnestly yet playfully dissects 19th-century Russian short stories to discover how they exude life to this very day, while highlighting methods any aspiring writer can employ. The huge bonus: reading the wondrous stories themselves, and experiencing Tolstoy’s authority, Chekhov’s... Read more

Authority

Essays

By: Andrea Long Chu
Narrated by: Andrea Long Chu
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

“Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu returns for a victory lap in this obsessively engrossing collection of not just her previously published writing on topics ranging from excrement-focused fiction to the right to choose one’s sex, but also two new pieces on the state of literary criticism today! I’m a long-time fan of Chu’s acerbic,... Read more

Jane Austen's Bookshelf

A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

By: Rebecca Romney
Narrated by: Rebecca Romney
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that... Read more

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Essays

Picador Modern Classics

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Maya Hawke
Length: 6 hours 23 minutes

“In this snapshot of mid-century American culture, Didion, deliberate and unabashed, takes the reader on journeys across the United States - from Newport, to Sacramento, to Hollywood, to Hawaii, and back to San Francisco - digesting political unrest, youthful buoyancy, and fundamental questions of morality and human responsibility. Her essays... Read more

Monsters

A Fan's Dilemma

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

“As a reader and a bookseller and a lover of all kinds of art, I’m confronted daily by the question of how to reconcile my love with the sometimes horrible artists who created those works. This intelligent essay collection gave me a lot to think about and was even comforting in the end. Read more

Odyssey

Stephen Fry’s Greek Myths: Book #4

By: Stephen Fry
Narrated by: Stephen Fry
Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Sunday Times bestseller

The next book in Stephen Fry's acclaimed internationally bestselling Greek myths series telling the story of The Odyssey.

Sometimes the hardest journey is the way back home . . .

Wily Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has won Troy for the Greeks – after a decade of brutal, bloody warfare. But now this... Read more

Mythology

By: Edith Hamilton
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 14 hours 34 minutes

Dive into the timeless tales of gods and heroes in this bestselling A-to-Z encyclopedia detailing classic myths and legends—perfect for curious readers and academics alike. Edith Hamilton's mythology succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture-the... Read more

How to Think Like a Woman

Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

By: Regan Penaluna
Narrated by: Angie Kane
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

As a young woman growing up in Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we, and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academic—the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What she didn’t... Read more

A Bookshop of One’s Own

How a group of women set out to change the world

By: Jane Cholmeley
Narrated by: Jane Cholmeley
Length: 10 hours 56 minutes

A Waterstones Best Memoir of 2024 An Independent and Stylist Best Non-Fiction Book for 2024 The captivating true story of an underdog business – a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher’s Britain – from a woman at the heart of the women’s liberation... Read more

Troy

Our Greatest Story Retold

Stephen Fry’s Greek Myths: Book #3

By: Stephen Fry
Narrated by: Stephen Fry
Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

'An inimitable retelling of the siege of Troy . . . Fry's narrative, artfully humorous and rich in detail, breathes life and contemporary relevance into these ancient tales' -- Observer

THE #1 BESTSELLER.

AN EPIC BATTLE THAT LASTED TEN YEARS. A LEGENDARY STORY THAT HAS SURVIVED THOUSANDS.

'Troy. The most marvellous kingdom... Read more

Minor Feelings

An Asian American Reckoning

By: Cathy Park Hong
Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

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 Poetry Handbook

By: Mary Oliver
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
Length: 3 hours 33 minutes

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles TimesFrom the beloved, legendary poet, the ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.With... 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

Mythica

A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It

By: Emily Hauser
Narrated by: Emily Hauser
Length: 16 hours 22 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends, and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . . .

Contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient... Read more

The Real Lolita

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

By: Sarah Weinman
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

“Any fan of Nabokov’s Lolita will be enthralled by Sarah Weinman’s investigation of the real-life kidnapping and sexual assault that became the basis for the 20th-century masterpiece. Weinman dives deep into the archives to piece together the ties between fact and fiction, even when the author or the victim’s family refused to discuss history.... Read more

The Book-Makers

A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

By: Adam Smyth
Narrated by: Adam Smyth
Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

The five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them

Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the... Read more

On Reading Well

Finding the Good Life through Great Books

By: Karen Swallow Prior
Narrated by: Lisa Larsen
Length: 8 hours 46 minutes

Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue. Great literature increases knowledge of and desire for the good life by showing readers what virtue looks like and where vice leads. It is not just what one reads but how one reads that cultivates virtue. Reading good literature well requires one to practice numerous virtues, such... Read more

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron

By: Jonathon Shears & Alan Rawes
Narrated by: Mike Cooper
Length: 28 hours 20 minutes

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable listeners to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European,... Read more

Everything Must Go

The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

By: Dorian Lynskey
Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey
Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.

As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for... Read more

A Wilder Shore

The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

By: Camille Peri
Narrated by: Jeanette Illidge
Length: 16 hours 14 minutes

ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW  EDITORS' CHOICE PICK AND 2024 NOTABLE BOOK
AN NPR FAVORITE READ OF 2024

“Peri’s joint biography is a thrilling, haunting yarn of the sort that the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson himself became famous for—and couldn’t have written without his wife.” —The... Read more

Pandora's Jar

Women in the Greek Myths

By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

“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

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 - Abridged

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Narrated by: Ignat Solzhenitsyn
Length: 21 hours 52 minutes

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New YorkerThe Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one... Read more

Didion and Babitz

By: Lili Anolik
Narrated by: Lili Anolik
Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

“"Art, my God, Joan, I'm embarrassed to mention it in front of you, you know, but you mentioned burning babies in locked cars so I can mention Art." Eve Babitz to Joan Didion, 1972. In this blazing memoir, one feels like they're out for drinks discussing '70s Hollywood sleaze, female chauvinist pigs, and Charles Manson with your wildly messy and... Read more

The Genius of Judy

How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

By: Rachelle Bergstein
Narrated by: Mia Barron
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

This “lively and important portrait of a true literary revolutionary” (Los Angeles Times) explores Judy Blume’s life, work, and cultural impact, focusing on her most iconic—and controversial—young adult novels, from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to Blubber.

Everyone knows Judy Blume.

Her books have garnered her fans of... Read more

Bad Feminist

Essays

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?A New York Times BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •... Read more

Orwell's Roses

By: Rebecca Solnit
Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood

“A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire... Read more

Red Comet

The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

By: Heather Clark
Narrated by: Laura Jennings
Length: 45 hours 26 minutes

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.

“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed

A... Read more

Divine Might

Goddesses in Greek Myth

By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

“Natalie Haynes writes as if she knows these goddesses personally, and this audiobook is her telling us all their secrets. I found myself falling back in love with greek mythology, and looking at it's female deities in new lights, for better and for worse. Read more

Signs and Wonders

Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

By: Delia Falconer
Narrated by: Delia Falconer
Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review.

The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our... Read more

Tolkien and the Great War

The Threshold of Middle-earth

By: John Garth
Narrated by: John Garth
Length: 11 hours 25 minutes

A new biography exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Lord of The Rings. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 … by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The... Read more

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need

By: Jessica Brody
Narrated by: Jessica Brody
Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

The first novel-writing guide from the best-selling Save the Cat! story-structure series, which reveals the 15 essential plot points needed to make any novel a success.

Novelist Jessica Brody presents a comprehensive story-structure guide for novelists that applies the famed Save the Cat! screenwriting methodology to the world of novel writing.... Read more

Ayn Rand Answers

The Best of Her Q&A

By: Ayn Rand
Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
Length: 10 hours 1 minute

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Ayn Rand turned to nonfiction writing and occasional lecturing. Her aim was to bring her philosophy to a wider audience and to apply it to current cultural and political issues. The taped lectures and the question-and-answer sessions that followed added not only an eloquent new dimension to Ayn... Read more

The Language of the Night

Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

By: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan & Michael Crouch
Length: TBA

“Delightful, refreshing, composed of words most warm and ever-welcoming. As a lover of all things Le Guin, even I expected this collection to be a rather dense, academic read (she is, after all, a brilliant mind, and essays on writing by such an author...I was excited for the challenge). I feel very humbled, by her humility. My surprise feels a... Read more

Year of the Monkey

By: Patti Smith
Narrated by: Patti Smith
Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

“I’m convinced that Patti Smith is the reincarnation of some spiritual mystic. Someone like Joan of Arc or Hildegard von Bingen. At this point I am committed to only listening to her audiobooks because her words are even more powerful in her own dreamy cadence. I sound like a school girl mooning over her first loved celebrity but, I can’t say... Read more

A Room of One's Own

By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Sara Nichols
Length: 4 hours 9 minutes

"A Room of One's Own" began life as a pair of lectures delivered by Virginia Woolf in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge and was published as a stand-alone book in 1929. In this brilliant examination of literature, history and gender discrimination, Woolf posits that the dearth of... Read more

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies

How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

By: Elizabeth Winkler
Narrated by: Eunice Wong
Length: 14 hours 28 minutes

An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.

The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most... Read more

Bibliotherapy

Books to Guide You Through Every Chapter of Life

By: Molly Masters
Narrated by: Molly Masters
Length: 4 hours 12 minutes

A beautiful, thoughtful guide to finding your perfect next read, no matter what life’s throwing at you, from the founder of Aphra a.k.a. ‘your inclusive AF feminist book club’ Through turbulent times, stories keep us afloat. Books, particularly, console and guide us, feed our souls, and open our eyes... Read more

Minority Rule

Adventures in the Culture War – the instant Sunday Times bestseller

By: Ash Sarkar
Narrated by: Ash Sarkar
Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

** The instant top 5 Sunday Times bestseller from political commentator Ash Sarkar **

'One of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation' NAOMI KLEIN
'Delivers its message with punch and panache ... A joy to read' GUARDIAN
'If leftists feel they have been stumbling around in the darkness, Minority Rule flicks on the light' STANDARD

We... Read more

Humans

A Monstrous History

By: Surekha Davies
Narrated by: Christina Delaine
Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.



Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to... Read more

Recognizing the Stranger

On Palestine and Narrative

By: Isabella Hammad
Narrated by: Isabella Hammad
Length: 2 hours 28 minutes

Nine days before October 7, 2023, award-winning author Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of... Read more

Ulysses by James Joyce

By: James Joyce
Narrated by: Sam Blair , Pietro Kelley, Teo Harding, Sefa Chandler, Clarissa Meyer Samuel Welch, Arina Sharp, Joshua Riley
Length: 31 hours 28 minutes

Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. It is considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature.
Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main... Read more

Story - Abridged

Style, Structure, Substance, and the Pri

By: Robert McKee
Narrated by: Robert McKee
Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

For more than 15 years, Robert McKee's students have been taking Hollywood's top honors. His “Story Seminar” is the world's ultimate seminar for screenwriters, filmmakers, and novelists. Now, Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting reveals the award-winning methods of the man universally regarded as... Read more

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

A Journey Through the Deep State

By: Kerry Howley
Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
Length: 7 hours

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York Times

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data... Read more

Jane Austen at Home

A Biography (250th Birthday Edition)

By: Lucy Worsley
Narrated by: Lucy Worsley
Length: 17 hours 17 minutes

THE REMARKABLE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE BBC'S MISS AUSTEN: THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANY JANE AUSTEN LOVER

Readers LOVE Jane Austen at Home:

'A "tour de force" which should be in the reading list of anyone who has either read the books or watched the film adaptations.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'This book is a delight . . . I will return to Austen's novels with a... Read more

How to Read Now

Essays

By: Elaine Castillo
Narrated by: Elaine Castillo
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

“How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.”

“A book that doesn’t seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up.” (The New York Times Book... Read more