Essays audiobooks

The Annotated Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

By: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 10 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Imagine a boardinghouse in the days when the Civil War was still a decade in the future - in which an erudite, polished, witty, sophisticated, learned gentleman holds forth each day at breakfast, entertaining the boarders with fascinating talk: observations on people and nature, occasional flights of verse, remarks on current events,... Read more

Indian Creek Chronicles

By: Pete Fromm

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 7 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, Indian Creek Chronicles is Pete Fromm's account of seven winter months spent alone in a tent in Idaho guarding salmon eggs and coming face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. A gripping story of adventure and a modern-day Walden, this... Read more

Cork Dork

By: Bianca Bosker

Narrated by: Bianca Bosker

Length: 12 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' PICK

“Thrilling . . . [told] with gonzo élan . . . When the sommelier and blogger Madeline Puckette writes that this book is the Kitchen Confidential of the wine world, she’s not wrong, though Bill Buford’s Heat is probably a shade closer.” —Jennifer Senior, The New York... Read more

A Really Big Lunch

By: Jim Harrison

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 8 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of this country’s most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food. A Really Big Lunch collects many of his food pieces for the first time—and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve.Jim... Read more

Strange Company

By: Jean Ryan

Narrated by: Nikiya Palombi

Length: 1 hour 53 minutes

Abridged: No

In Strange Company, a delightful collection of short essays, Jean Ryan brings us closer to the natural world. From lizards to lady bugs, from the inscrutable sloth to the resplendent quetzal, Ryan reveals some of our commonalities with earth's creatures and hints at the lessons we might learn from them.Do lizards fall in love? What do sloths... Read more

The 1997 Masters

By: Tiger Woods

Narrated by: Scott Van Pelt

Length: 6 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

To mark the anniversary of his historic win at the 1997 Masters, Tiger Woods will for the first time reflect on the record-setting win both on and off the course.

In 1997, Tiger Woods was already among the most-watched and closely examined athletes in history. But it wasn't until the Masters Tournament that his career would definitively change... Read more

How to Watch Soccer

By: Ruud Gullit

Narrated by: Shaun Grindell

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Ruud Gullit knows better than anyone else that to understand soccer you have to understand strategy. When he started playing soccer, his only "strategy" was to get the ball, outrun everyone else to the other end of the field, and score. At first it served him well, but as he advanced through the sport, he learned that it takes much more than... Read more

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

By: Nicholas Reynolds

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 9 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum unveils the shocking, untold story of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway’s secret life as a spy for both the Americans and the Soviets before and during World War II.While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime military intelligence expert, began to discover... Read more

Free Women, Free Men

By: Camille Paglia

Narrated by: Camille Paglia

Length: 11 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

From the fiery intellectual provocateur— and one of our most fearless advocates of gender equality—a brilliant, urgent essay collection that both celebrates modern feminism and challenges us to build an alliance of strong women and strong men. 

Ever since the release of her seminal first book, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia has remained one of... Read more

The Fermented Man

By: Derek Dellinger

Narrated by: Sean Crisden

Length: 9 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

On January 1, 2014, homebrewer and writer Derek Dellinger began a journey that would change nearly everything he thought he knew about fermented food and beverage—and as a beer expert, he knew a lot. For an entire year, Dellinger would eat or drink only products that had been created by microbes. Exploring the vast world of fermentation,... Read more

The Possessed

By: Elif Batuman

Narrated by: Elif Batuman

Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year 


THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS

No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University... Read more

Hi-Ho Silver, Anyway

By: Bill Stokes

Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, R. C. Bray, James Foster, Joe ...

Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

For ten years Bill Stokes was a roving reporter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. He has written reams of material about his vivid impressions of people, animals, events, personal activities, and “things in general.”Through his travels, Bill has met with the unusual and unique to the humorous, trivial, and tragic. This select group from... Read more

Thank You for Coming to Hattiesburg

By: Todd Barry

Narrated by: Todd Barry

Length: 5 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

“With this charming, sardonic debut, stand up comedian and actor Todd Barry makes readers laugh as hard as the audiences at his shows” (Publishers Weekly) in this hilarious book of travel essays from his time on tour in the US, Canada, and Israel.

Hello. It’s Todd Barry. Yes, the massively famous comedian. I have billions of fans all over the... Read more

Imaginary Homelands

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: John Curless

Length: 17 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands" is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal oddyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of... Read more

Waking Up Slowly

By: Dave Burchett

Narrated by: Dave Burchett

Length: 6 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

What if every day we are stubbing our toes on the sacred and not realizing it?

We are the most connected culture in history, but we are arguably the most disconnected from the awareness of God’s presence. Waking Up Slowly is author Dave Burchett’s personal challenge to live in the moment and find the everyday joys we miss when we live in... Read more

Fast into the Night

By: Debbie Clarke Moderow

Narrated by: Emily Durante

Length: 7 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

At age forty-seven, a mother of two, Debbie Moderow was not your average musher in the Iditarod, but that's where she found herself when, less than 200 miles from the finish line, her dogs decided they didn't want to run anymore. After all her preparation, after all the careful management of her team, and after their running so well for over a... Read more

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

By: John Baxter

Narrated by: Graham Halstead

Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years.



In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long-time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving "literary walking tours" through the city. Baxter... Read more

South and West

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr & Nathaniel Rich

Length: 2 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks—writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of... Read more

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush - Abridged

By: Eric Newby

Narrated by: Richard E. Grant

Length: 2 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A classic of travel writing, ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ is Eric Newby’s iconic account of his journey through one of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses on earth. It was 1956, and Eric Newby was earning an improbable living in the chaotic family business of London haute couture. Pining for adventure, Newby sent... Read more

A Small Place in Italy - Abridged

By: Eric Newby

Narrated by: Eric Newby

Length: 2 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: Yes

This book is a lush and beautiful memoir of a very special house and a superb recreation of a bygone era. In 1967, veteran travel writer Eric Newby and his heroic wife Wanda fulfiled their dream of a return to life in the Italian hills where they first met during World War II. But this fulfilment would not come easy. The... Read more

Rescuing Penny Jane

By: Amy Sutherland

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Drawing on her work at a shelter, her experiences living with two rescue dogs of her own, and years of research, bestselling author and Boston Globe columnist Amy Sutherland takes us on an unforgettable journey into the special world of rescue and shelter dogs—and the growing number of dedicated people who are deeply invested in saving these... Read more

Animal Wisdom

By: Linda Bender

Narrated by: Ellen Jaffe

Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

How is it that pets are able to travel thousands of miles through unknown territory to reunite with their beloved humans? How can dogs detect cancer with up to a 98 percent accuracy rate, and foresee epileptic or diabetic seizures in their owners? How do animals seem to know an earthquake is coming long before the world's best seismologists?
In... Read more

Know This

By: John Brockman

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman & Dan John Miller

Length: 14 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

The latest volume in the bestselling series from Edge.org—dubbed “the world’s smartest website” by The Guardian—brings together 175 of the world’s most innovative and brilliant thinkers to discuss recent scientific breakthroughs that will shape the future.Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it’s... Read more

All the Lives I Want

By: Alana Massey

Narrated by: Alana Massey

Length: 5 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"Alana Massey's prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she's sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly--so powerfully and cannily--it's hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her." -- Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author... Read more