Literary Criticism audiobooks

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

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
Abridged: No

From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA... Read more »

Minor Feelings

By: Cathy Park Hong
Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes
Abridged: No

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 »

Pandora's Jar

By: Natalie Haynes
Narrated by: Natalie Haynes
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No

“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 Tale

The 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...

Orwell's Roses

By: Rebecca Solnit
Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
Length: 7 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No

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 »

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 debt and tech to the climate crisis and freedom and the importance of how to define granola—and seeks answers to Burning Questions... Read more »

Bad Feminist

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes
Abridged: No

“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 Bestseller

Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •...

Red Comet

By: Heather Clark
Narrated by: Laura Jennings
Length: 45 hours 26 minutes
Abridged: No

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

With a... Read more »

The Toni Morrison Book Club

By: Juda Bennett
Narrated by: Daniel Henning
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: No

In this startling group memoir, four friends—black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born—use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and... Read more »

A Little History of Poetry

By: John Carey
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
Length: 9 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the...

Notes of a Native Son

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 5 hours 3 minutes
Abridged: No

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin's most influential work!

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained...

Constructing a Nervous System

By: Margo Jefferson
Narrated by: Karen Murray
Length: 5 hours 1 minutes
Abridged: No

From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom).

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast... Read more »

All of the Marvels

By: Douglas Wolk
Narrated by: Douglas Wolk
Length: 12 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No

The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale

“Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. .... Read more »

Craft in the Real World

By: Matthew Salesses
Narrated by: Matthew Salesses
Length: 5 hours 56 minutes
Abridged: No

This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind;... Read more »

Please Miss

By: Grace Lavery
Narrated by: Grace Lavery, Daniel Lavery & Marc Vietor
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No

“The queer memoir you’ve been waiting for”—Carmen Maria Machado

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a...

Letters to a Young Poet

By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Narrated by: Dan Stevens & Max Deacon
Length: 1 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have...

The Gift

By: Lewis Hyde
Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
Length: 13 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No

A modern classic cherished by many of the greatest artists of our time, The Gift is a brilliant, life-changing defense of the value of creative labor.

Drawing on examples from folklore and literature, history and tribal customs, economics and modern copyright law, Lewis Hyde demonstrates how our society—governed by the marketplace—is poorly...

A House of My Own

By: Sandra Cisneros
Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
Length: 11 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend.

From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico in a...

Proust and the Squid

By: Maryanne Wolf
Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
Length: 8 hours 21 minutes
Abridged: No

Reading is a miracle, because the brain was never wired for written language. This eloquent, accessible look at reading explores how it has transformed our brains, our lives, and the world.

It took 2,000 years for written language to develop, and it takes 2,000 days for a child's brain to learn to read. During that time, the brain must... Read more »

A Slip of the Keyboard

By: Terry Pratchett
Narrated by: Michael Fenton Stevens
Length: 9 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: No

A collection of essays and other non fiction from Terry Pratchett, spanning the whole of his writing career from his early years to the present day.
     Terry Pratchett has earned a place in the hearts of readers the world over with his bestselling Discworld series -- but in recent years he has become equally well-known and respected as an... Read more »

Armageddon in Retrospect

By: Kurt Vonnegut
Narrated by: Rip Torn
Length: 5 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: No

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace.

A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve previously unpublished writings. Imbued... Read more »

Agatha Christie’s Poirot

By: Mark Aldridge
Narrated by: Clare Corbett
Length: 11 hours 16 minutes
Abridged: No

From the very first book publication in 1920 to the upcoming film release of Death on the Nile, this investigation into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world’s favourite fictional detective.This book tells his story decade-by-decade, exploring his appearances not only in the original novels, short stories... Read more »

Leaves of Grass

By: Walt Whitman
Narrated by: Mel Foster
Length: 15 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: No

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." And Ralph Waldo Emerson found Leaves of Grass "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," calling it a "combination of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald." Published at the author's own... Read more »

The Wordhord

By: Hana Videen
Narrated by: Sara Powell
Length: 8 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No

This audiobook narrated by Sara Powell takes listeners on an entertaining and illuminating tour of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of...

Harry Potter and History

By: Nancy R. Reagin
Narrated by: Rachel Perry
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes
Abridged: No

Harry Potter lives in a world that is both magical and historical. Hogwarts pupils ride an old-fashioned steam train to school, notes are taken on parchment with quill pens, and Muggle legends come to life in the form of werewolves, witches, and magical spells. This book is the first to explore the real history in which Harry's world is...