Tin House Summer Workshop Reads 2020

I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying

Essays

By: Bassey Ikpi
Narrated by: Bassey Ikpi
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

2020 Audie Finalist – Short Stories/CollectionsIn I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our... Read more

This Is Major

Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope

By: Shayla Lawson
Narrated by: Shayla Lawson
Length: 8 hours 48 minutes

From a fierce and humorous new voice comes a relevant, insightful, and riveting collection of personal essays on the richness and resilience of black girl culture—for readers of Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Lindy West. Shayla Lawson is major. You don’t know who she is. Yet. But that’s okay. She is on a mission to move black... Read more

All This Could Be Yours

By: Jami Attenberg
Narrated by: Therese Plummer
Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

“I am in love with Jami Attenberg’s writing, and was gripped by All This Could Be Yours from the opening pages. Everything about the Tuchmans felt so true to me: Alex’s confusion and anger toward the family’s toxic, now-comatose patriarch, Victor; Barbra’s isolation in her later years after a long marriage to a brute; Twyla and Gary’s unwinding... Read more

A River of Stars

A Novel

By: Vanessa Hua
Narrated by: Jennifer Lim
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California.

“Utterly absorbing.”—Celeste Ng • “A marvel of a first novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.”—Entertainment Weekly

NAMED ONE... Read more

The Incendiaries

A Novel

By: R. O. Kwon
Narrated by: Keong Sim
Length: 5 hours 11 minutes

“R.O. Kwon’s debut knocked me sideways. The Incendiaries is a serious reckoning with the problem of fanaticism and the violence of blind devotion. The story of Will and Phoebe is told with an extraordinarily smart and soulful style. I was amazed at how perfectly Kwon’s spare language fit her novel’s expansive scope. A stunning portrait of what... Read more

Fruit of the Drunken Tree

A Novel

By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra & Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Length: 12 hours 25 minutes

“Fruit of the Drunken Tree made me cry at the airport. I was impressed by the small kingdom of women Contreras builds, with violence always threatening to creep in, all seen through the eyes of Chula, the youngest daughter. Contreras made her perspective believably cloistered while masterfully writing all the people around Chula in ways that made... Read more

Good Talk

A Memoir in Conversations

By: Mira Jacob
Narrated by: Mira Jacob, Kivlighan de Montebello & Full Cast
Length: 2 hours 46 minutes

A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”—Celeste Ng

“How brown is too brown?”
“Can Indians be racist?”
“What does... Read more

Real Life

A Novel

By: Brandon Taylor
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
 
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington... Read more

The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

A Novel

By: Mira Jacob
Narrated by: Mira Jacob
Length: 15 hours 7 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past

“With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”—People

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews

With depth, heart, and agility, debut... Read more

Cleanness

By: Garth Greenwell
Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

“Cleanness is a trance-inducing read. I started this book and was immediately swept up in it, and before I knew it, hours had passed. Greenwell describes human relationships in raw, beautiful detail while also exploring the power dynamics at play. If Cleanness is not one of my favorite books of 2020, it will have been a spectacular year for books. Read more

Red Clocks

A Novel

By: Leni Zumas
Narrated by: Karissa Vacker
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes

“Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is a dystopian novel that hits close to home. What if Roe v Wade was overturned and only married couples were allowed to adopt? This is the state of affairs when we are introduced to a cast of characters known only by their primary roles: The Biographer, The Mender, The Wife and The Daughter. Each of these women is... Read more

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

By: Kaitlyn Greenidge
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Karole Foreman & Myra Lucretia Taylor
Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African-American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their downwardly-mobile, over-educated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for Cortland County, Massachusetts. The Freemans are to... Read more

All Grown Up

By: Jami Attenberg
Narrated by: Mia Barron
Length: 5 hours 42 minutes

“Finally, a book which tackles singleness with the nuance such a subject deserves. Thank you, Jami Attenberg, for pushing back against society’s assumptions about what is allowed to matter in our lives. For giving us a different kind of narrative. All Grown Up is not all fluffy and lovely. It turns out that we have other stories — we single... Read more

How We Fight For Our Lives

By: Saeed Jones
Narrated by: Saeed Jones
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

“Saeed Jones does amazing transformative things with words. This stunning coming-of-age memoir is no exception. Prepare yourself for intense vulnerability as he fights to find and take up space as a Black gay man growing up in the American South. Read more

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Stories

By: Lesley Nneka Arimah
Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

“Intense, haunting, and exquisitely rendered, the stories in Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut collection exist in a category of their own. They are individual worlds linked together by familiar themes - self-discovery, yearnings to love and be loved, generational divides, and the meanings of home and place - refashioned in a fresh, new light. Arimah... Read more

The Golden State

By: Lydia Kiesling
Narrated by: Amanda Dolan
Length: 9 hours 9 minutes

A gorgeous, raw debut novel about a young woman braving the ups and downs of motherhood in a fractured AmericaIn Lydia Kiesling’s razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her... Read more

Here Comes the Sun

A Novel

By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 42 minutes

Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is... Read more

The Glass Eye

A Memoir

By: Jeannie Vanasco
Narrated by: Julie McKay
Length: 6 hours 6 minutes

The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died.



After his funeral,... Read more

Patsy

A Novel

By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Sharon Gordon
Length: 17 hours 9 minutes

“I feel that Dennis-Benn is unparalleled in writing the insidious unforgivables. The mother who can't find love for her daughter, the more-than-friend who takes everything you give them and never gives back, the daughter told to be a "good girl" who finds difficulty doing either of those things for the woman who ends up raising her. Like her... Read more

The World Doesn't Require You

Stories

By: Rion Amilcar Scott
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 11 hours 59 minutes

The World Doesn't Require You announces the arrival of a generational talent, as Rion Amilcar Scott shatters rigid genre lines to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love—all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism.



Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, Cross... Read more