Essays audiobooks

Stranger Than Fiction - Abridged

By: Chuck Palahniuk

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris & Chuck Palahniuk

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Included are encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar... Read more

Lost In My Own Backyard - Abridged

By: Tim Cahill

Narrated by: Tim Cahill

Length: 2 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: Yes

“Let’s get lost together . . . ”

Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his—and America’s—favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Cahill has been “puttering around in the park” for a quarter of a century, slowly covering its vast scope and exploring its remote backwoods. So... Read more

Time and Tide - Abridged

By: Frank Conroy

Narrated by: Frank Conroy

Length: 1 hour 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged... Read more

Loud and Clear - Abridged

By: Anna Quindlen

Narrated by: Anna Quindlen

Length: 5 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: Yes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winner Anna Quindlen offers wisdom, opinions, insights, and reflections about current events and modern life in this provocative and inspiring book.

“A tour de force for our time, [Loud and Clear] is equally as compelling as a look at public events as it is a reflection on being a woman and on... Read more

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Audio Collection

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Paul Auster & James Naughton

Length: 5 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got on together for the next three weeks is the subject of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, by Papa, a tender and funny extract from Hawthorne's... Read more

City of the Soul - Abridged

By: William Murray

Narrated by: William Murray

Length: 2 hours

Abridged: Yes

“One lifetime is not enough for Rome,” the famous saying goes, and anyone who’s ever been there knows these words to be true. In City of the Soul, William Murray begins to show us why.

Growing up in Rome and spending much of his life in the city, William Murray is an expert guide as he takes us on an intimate walking tour of some of Rome’s most... Read more

Why I Love Baseball

By: Larry King

Narrated by: Larry King

Length: 2 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Larry King was a true-blue baseball fanatic. A lifelong love affair began the night he attended a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field as a kid in 1940s Brooklyn. That was a simpler era in America's history, a time when tickets to a game cost fifty cents and parish priests prayed for Gil Hodges to break out of a slump. In this heartfelt valentine to... Read more

The John Updike Audio Collection

By: John Updike

Narrated by: John Updike

Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful... Read more

Nancy

By: Michael Deaver

Narrated by: Michael Deaver

Length: 5 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Candid, moving and insightful, Nancy is the most personal look at Nancy Davis Reagan ever publishedNancy Davis Reagan has led an extraordinary life; it has also been an extraordinarily private one. Now Mike Deaver, whose relationship with Mrs. Reagan dates back to the1960s, shares the side of Nancy that only her intimates know.The woman... Read more

Time and Tide

By: Frank Conroy

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 2 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged... Read more

Loud and Clear

By: Anna Quindlen

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winner Anna Quindlen offers wisdom, opinions, insights, and reflections about current events and modern life in this provocative and inspiring book.

“A tour de force for our time, [Loud and Clear] is equally as compelling as a look at public events as it is a reflection on being a woman and on... Read more

City of the Soul

By: William Murray

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 2 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

“One lifetime is not enough for Rome,” the famous saying goes, and anyone who’s ever been there knows these words to be true. In City of the Soul, William Murray begins to show us why.

Growing up in Rome and spending much of his life in the city, William Murray is an expert guide as he takes us on an intimate walking tour of some of Rome’s most... Read more

Idyll Banter - Abridged

By: Chris Bohjalian

Narrated by: Chris Bohjalian

Length: 4 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers were about to storm a crack house.... Read more

The Funny Thing Is...

By: Ellen DeGeneres

Narrated by: Ellen DeGeneres

Length: 3 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

An indispensable reference for anyone who knows how to read—or wants to fool people into thinking they do—The Funny Thing Is... is sure to make you laugh.

Ellen DeGeneres published her first book of comic essays, the #1 bestselling My Point...And I Do Have One, way back in 1996. Not one to rest on her laurels, the witty star of stage and screen... Read more

Blues City - Abridged

By: Ishmael Reed

Narrated by: Ishmael Reed

Length: 2 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes and a bay—and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost,... Read more

Cosmopolitan - Abridged

By: Toby Cecchini

Narrated by: Toby Cecchini

Length: 2 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Cosmopolitan is a memoir of the bartending life structured as a day in the life of Passerby, the bar owned and run by Toby Cecchini. It is, as well, a rich study of human nature—of the outlandish behavior of the human animal under the influence of alcohol, of lust, and of the sheer desire to bust loose and party. As the typical day progresses,... Read more

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

By: Sarah Vowell

Narrated by: Conan O'Brien, Seth Green, Stephen Colbert, Pau...

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

From This American Life contributor and self-described “history nerd” Sarah Vowell comes a collection of humorous and personal essays investigating American history, pop culture, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In this insightful and funny collection of personal stories Vowell travels through the American past and in doing so ponders a number of... Read more

The Borderlands of Science

By: Michael Shermer

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 13 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

As author of the bestselling Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe, and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer has emerged as the nation's number one scourge of superstition and bad science. Now, in The Borderlands of Science, he takes us to the place where real science (such as the big bang theory), borderland science... Read more

Home on the Prairie

By: Garrison Keillor

Length: 4 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The latest in a line of bestselling collections that began with News from Lake Wobegon, this set selects monologues from four years (1999-2002) of live radio programs. Some were broadcast from the Fitzgerald Theatre, the show's St. Paul home. Others were recorded on the road in Dublin, Pasadena, Grand Forks, and other exotic places. Read more

Blues City

By: Ishmael Reed

Narrated by: Richard Allen

Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes and a bay—and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost,... Read more

True Believers - Abridged

By: Joe Queenan

Narrated by: Joe Queenan

Length: 5 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Bestselling author Joe Queenan's True Believers explores the world of sports fans in an attempt to understand the inexplicable: What does anyone get out of it?

For Yankee, Cowboy, and Laker fans the answer is fairly clear: the return on investment is relatively high. But why do people root so passionately for formerly inept teams like the Boston... Read more

Adventure Capitalist - Abridged

By: Jim Rogers

Narrated by: Jim Rogers

Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Drive . . . and grow rich!

The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In AdventureCapitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed “the Indiana Jones of finance” by Time magazine, proves... Read more

Hallowed Ground - Abridged

By: James M. McPherson

Narrated by: James M. McPherson

Length: 1 hour 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, and arguably the finest Civil War historian in the world, walks us through the site of the bloodiest and perhaps most consequential battle ever fought by Americans: the Battle of Gettysburg.

The events that occurred at Gettysburg are etched into our collective... Read more

Who's Your Caddy? - Abridged

By: Rick Reilly

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 5 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The funniest and most popular sportswriter in America abandons his desk at Sports Illustrated to caddy for some of the world’s most famous golfers, and some celebrity duffers, recounting it all in this hilarious and revealing look at the world of golf.

Who knows a golfer best? Who’s with them every minute of every round, hears their muttering,... Read more