Essays audiobooks

I'm Wearing Tunics Now

By: Wendi Aarons

Narrated by: Wendi Aarons

Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

An honest and hilarious memoir about second acts, self-acceptance, and celebrating what happens when a woman gets older, wiser, and a lot more excited by sales at Eileen Fisher.
A late bloomer who came to her career later in life, humorist Wendi Aarons shares the joys, stumbles, and outfit mishaps she’s experienced on her road to no longer giving... Read more

Bad Vibes Only

By: Nora McInerny

Narrated by: Nora McInerny

Length: 5 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking—called “a gift” by The New York Times—a raw and humorous essay collection in the spirit of Jenny Lawson and Samantha Irby.

Nora McInerny does not dance like no one is watching. In fact, she dances like everyone is watching, which is to say, she does not dance at all. A... Read more

Nerd

By: Maya Phillips

Narrated by: Maya Phillips

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

In the vein of You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Black Nerd Problems, this witty, incisive essay collection from New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips explores race, religion, sexuality, and more through the lens of her favorite pop culture fandoms.

From the moment Maya Phillips saw the opening scroll of Star Wars, Episode V:... Read more

Taming the Potted Beast

By: Molly Williams

Narrated by: Molly Williams

Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

The colorful, peculiar history of the houseplant—from ancient Rome to Victorian England to Instagram—a botanical adventure full of histrionic highs, devastating lows, and sensational turning points along the way.

From the hanging gardens of Babylon to that fiddle-leaf fig in your living room, houseplants have been humanity's companions for a... Read more

Walking in My Joy

By: Jenifer Lewis

Narrated by: Jenifer Lewis

Length: 7 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

A new offering from the author of the hugely successful Mother of Black Hollywood.Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful... Read more

A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention

By: Rebecca Schiller

Narrated by: Rebecca Schiller

Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

It should have been Rebecca Schiller's dream come true: moving her young family to the English countryside to raise goats and coax their own fruit and vegetables from the land. But, as she writes: The summer of striding out toward a life of open fields and sacks of corn, I brought a confused black hole of something pernicious but not yet... Read more

Dirtbag, Massachusetts

By: Isaac Fitzgerald

Narrated by: Isaac Fitzgerald

Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER



USA TODAY BESTSELLER



Winner of the New England Book Award for Nonfiction



"The best of what memoir can accomplish . . . pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy." —Esquire, "Best Memoirs of the Year"



A TIME Best Book of the Season * A Rolling Stone Top Culture Pick * A... Read more

The Crane Wife

By: CJ Hauser

Narrated by: CJ Hauser

Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation “The Crane Wife” with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy, and self in the twenty-first century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this “elegant masterpiece” (Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger) asks what more expansive definitions of love... 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

My Mess Is a Bit of a Life

By: Georgia Pritchett

Narrated by: Katherine Parkinson

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

“Georgia Pritchett is a singularly hilarious person. Her book is a delightful and perfect reflection of her. Its tenderness sneaks up on you and really packs a punch. What a magnificent read!”—Julia Louis DreyfusJenny Lawson meets Nora Ephron in this joyful memoir-in-vignettes on living—and thriving—with anxiety from a multiple Emmy... Read more

On Freedom

By: Maggie Nelson

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long... Read more

The 2000s Made Me Gay

By: Grace Perry

Narrated by: Grace Perry

Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman.

"Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” —Anna Drezen, co-head... Read more

Seed to Dust

By: Marc Hamer

Narrated by: Owen Teale

Length: 9 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

For readers of Late Migrations and H is for Hawk

A stunning meditation on gardening and the wisdom of plants, " that rare book that will appeal to nonfiction readers everywhere. . . Candid, tender, thoughtful and absorbing."—Shelf Awareness (STARRED Review)

"With chapters. . . [that] shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery. . . Seed... Read more

The Wreckage of My Presence

By: Casey Wilson

Narrated by: Casey Wilson

Length: 6 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

""Magnificent."" —People MagazineThe instant New York Times bestseller: Laugh-out-loud, deeply insightful, and emotion-filled essays from multitalented actress, comedian, podcaster, and writer Casey Wilson.Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn’t afraid to share. In this dazzling collection, each essay skillfully constructed and brimming... Read more

Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

By: Lauren Hough

Narrated by: Cate Blanchett & Lauren Hough

Length: 9 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "A memoir in essays about so many things—growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough’s writing will break your heart." —Roxane Gay, author of... Read more

The Hard Crowd

By: Rachel Kushner

Narrated by: Rachel Kushner

Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

AUDIO EXCLUSIVE: INCLUDES GALAXIE 500’S SONG “ANOTHER DAY!”

“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” —Taylor Antrim, Vogue

From a writer celebrated for her “chops, ambition, and killer instinct” (John Powers, Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.

Rachel... Read more

Like Streams to the Ocean

By: Jedidiah Jenkins

Narrated by: Jedidiah Jenkins

Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “As inviting, wide-ranging, and philosophical as an all-night conversation with a best friend, and as revealing and thought-provoking as the diary of a curious adventurer.”—Sasha Sagan, author of For Small Creatures Such as We

You can travel the world looking for yourself, but if you don't know what you're looking for,... Read more

Stakes Is High

By: Mychal Denzel Smith

Narrated by: Mychal Denzel Smith

Length: 3 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.

The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our... Read more

Having and Being Had

By: Eula Biss

Narrated by: Alex McKenna

Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

“A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press 

A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York... Read more

In Praise of Paths

By: Torbjørn Ekelund

Narrated by: TJ Oberholzer

Length: 4 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

“What [Ekelund is] addressing is the intention to walk one’s way to meaning: the walk as spiritual exercise, a kind of vision quest... A key strategy for finding ourselves, then, is to first get lost.”—The New York Times Book Review

An ode to paths and the journeys we take through nature, as told by a gifted writer who stopped driving and... Read more

Erosion

By: Terry Tempest Williams

Narrated by: Terry Tempest Williams

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist

In Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of... Read more

How to Catch a Mole

By: Marc Hamer

Narrated by: Marc Hamer

Length: 3 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In this evocative and heart-wrenching memoir, a hard-working Welsh molecatcher reveals his double life as a poet and a dreamer • “A wonderful memoir … hands down the most charming book I read last year.”—Margaret Renkl, The New York Times“How to Catch a Mole is a small book of many things. In quiet, crystalline prose, it blends memoir, keen... Read more

Eat Like a Fish

By: Bren Smith

Narrated by: Bren Smith

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Part memoir, part manifesto, in Eat Like a Fish Bren Smith—a former commercial fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer—shares a bold new vision for the future of food: seaweed.

Through tales that span from his childhood in Newfoundland to his early years on the high seas aboard commercial fishing trawlers, from pioneering new forms of ocean... Read more

The Accidental Veterinarian

By: Philipp Schott

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 5 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

With insight and humor, Dr. Philipp Schott shares tales from the unlikely path he took into his career of veterinary science and anecdotes from his successful small-animal clinic. Dr. Schott brings to his writing the benefit of many years of expertise. Wisdom he imparts on listeners includes the best way to give your cat a pill, how to prevent... Read more