Literary Criticism audiobooks

Devotion

By: Patti Smith

Narrated by: Patti Smith

Length: 2 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

From the renowned artist and author Patti Smith, an inspired exploration of the nature of creative invention.A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of... Read more

No Judgment

By: Lauren Oyler

Narrated by: Lauren Oyler

Length: 8 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

""The essay collection everyone’s talking about.""—New YorkA MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024: Elle, The Millions, LitHub, Nylon, BookPage, PureWow, and moreFrom the national bestselling novelist and essayist, a groundbreaking collection of brand-new pieces about the role of cultural criticism in our ever-changing world.In her writing for Harper’s,... Read more

The Light Room

By: Kate Zambreno

Narrated by: Kate Zambreno

Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.“  —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 

From “one of our most formally ambitious writers” (Esquire), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss

In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and... Read more

Ordinary Wonder Tales

By: Emily Urquhart

Narrated by: Anne Wessel

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with... Read more

Happily

By: Sabrina Orah Mark

Narrated by: Gilli Messer

Length: 5 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily”

“One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese... Read more

Burning Questions

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Margaret Atwood & Full Cast

Length: 18 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions... Read more

Unfinished Business

By: Vivian Gornick

Narrated by: Vivian Gornick

Length: 4 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life.“I sometimes think I was born reading…I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.”Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate... Read more

Books for Living

By: Will Schwalbe

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of the beloved New York Times best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club, an inspiring and magical exploration of the power of books to shape our lives in an era of constant connectivity.


Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain... Read more

Thalia Book Club: Emma Donoghue's Room

By: Emma Donoghue

Narrated by: Michael Cunningham, John Connolly & Maria Tucci

Length: 1 hour 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Emma Donoghue discusses her extraordinary new novel with author Michael Cunningham (The Hours and By Nightfall). This wondrous book is told from the point of view of a five-year-old boy who lives with his mother in an 11-by-11 foot room. Performance playlist: Reading by Michal Friedman, a conversation between Emma Donoghue and Michael... Read more

The Genius of Judy

By: Rachelle Bergstein

Narrated by: Mia Barron

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

An intimate and expansive look at 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 all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so... Read more

Let's Go Exploring: Calvin and Hobbes

By: Michael Hingston

Narrated by: John Pirhalla

Length: 3 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all... Read more

An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays

By: Jon Fosse

Narrated by: Kåre Conradi

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature Jon Fosse said farewell to theory early in his career, choosing poetry, fiction, and drama as his mediums of choice. Here, however, in a selection from his two books of essays, we see just how incisive a critic and memoirist he can be. Not only including a generous portion of Fosse's writing on... Read more

Los que sueñan el sueño dorado

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Susie Caraballo

Length: 13 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Una antología de los mejores artículos y ensayos de la periodista y escritora Joan Didion. «En la tierra dorada el futuro siempre es atractivo, porque nadie recuerda el pasado.» Joan Didion es una de las cronistas fundamentales de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En una edición a cargo de Claudio López de Lamadrid, Los que sueñan el sueño dorado... Read more

Modern Genre Theory

By: Andrew Judd

Narrated by: Les Horovitz

Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Genre theory has experienced a renaissance in the last thirty years, but biblical studies has been left in the dark ages of rigid taxonomies and stubborn essentialism. The Bible deserves better. This book offers students in biblical studies an accessible but comprehensive introduction to modern genre theory, providing access to literary tools... Read more

El coloso de Nueva York

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Víctor Sabi

Length: 3 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Un tributo a la ciudad que nunca duerme, un homenaje literario al paisaje urbano y al ambiente fascinante y febril que dibujan sus habitantes. Por el autor galardonado con el Premio Pulitzer y el National Book Award por El ferrocarril subterráneo. A través de trece episodios, Colson Whitehead traza un recorrido visual por las calles de la... Read more

Big Fiction

By: Dan Sinykin

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

Length: 11 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent... Read more

The Amen Corner

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor, Dion Graham, January LaVo...

Length: 2 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

From one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century—a masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons.

"[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves." —Langston Hughes

In his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all... Read more

The Return of the Light

By: Carolyn McVickar Edwards

Narrated by: Siiri Scott

Length: 2 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

A collection of twelve traditional tales from around the world that honor the "return of the light" that takes place on the winter solstice



The winter solstice, the day the "sun stands still," marks the longest night and the shortest day of the year, and it comes either on December 20th or 21st. Celebrations honoring the winter solstice as a... Read more

Orwell's Ghosts

By: Laura Beers

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

Length: 6 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

For the seventy-fifth anniversary of 1984, Laura Beers explores George Orwell's still-radical ideas and why they are critical today.



George Orwell devoted his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era... Read more

The Great Gatsby: The Original 1925 Edition

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Joseph Bayda

Length: 4 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
The novel was inspired by a youthful... Read more

Metamorphoses

By: Karolina Watroba

Narrated by: Deborah Balm

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist... Read more

The Most Inspiring Short Stories for Seniors

By: Wildemind Publications

Narrated by: Eric Carpenter

Length: 2 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Did you know that listening to a story engages the mind twice as much as watching the the TV?Stories are known to improve mental cognition, improve memory, and keep the mind stimulated.Perhaps you (or your parents) are looking for some inspiring stories from the last century?Our audiobook is exactly that! A handful of 22 short-stories (each... Read more

Deep Reading

By: Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms & Rachel M. De Sm...

Narrated by: Connie Shabshab

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

This book helps readers develop practices that will result in deep, formative, and faithful reading so they can contribute to the flourishing of their communities and cultivate their own spiritual and intellectual depth.

The authors present reading as a remedy for three prevalent cultural vices—distraction, hostility, and consumerism—that... Read more

All Things Are Too Small

By: Becca Rothfeld

Narrated by: Ruth Crawford

Length: 10 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as decluttering, mindfulness, David Cronenberg, sadomasochism, and women who wait. All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession,... Read more