Staff Picks

A Wizard of Earthsea

Earthsea Cycle: Book #1

By: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: Rob Inglis
Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award
Winner of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
One of TIME's 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This... Read more

I Will Die In A Foreign Land

By: Kalani Pickhart
Narrated by: Adam Barr
Length: 8 hours 4 minutes

In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych's failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President... Read more

The Year of Magical Thinking

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
Length: 5 hours 10 minutes

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.



This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had... Read more

The Song of Achilles

A Novel

By: Madeline Miller
Narrated by: Frazer Douglas
Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

“Madeline Miller's retelling of the Iliad is beautifully written. From page one, I was sucked into the story, and it never let me go. Frazer Douglas' narration is impeccable, bringing the story to life in ways that I'd never dreamed possible. Such a beautiful audiobook, through and through. I can't count how many times I've listened to this... Read more

In the Dream House

A Memoir

By: Carmen Maria Machado
Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

“Welcome to the Dream House in this daring new kind of memoir that defies boundaries and boldly discards the conventions of genre. Inside, Carmen Maria Machado bares her soul in all of its pain and beauty, offering an intimate and profoundly vulnerable look at her own life, love, and sexuality. Machado has a gift for exposing the raw nerves and... Read more

Autobiography of Red

Vintage Contemporaries

By: Anne Carson
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Length: 3 hours 55 minutes

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.


Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile,... Read more

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

“This book is so beautiful and made me cry multiple times. The author, who does a great job as the narrator, is both informational and poetic. She tells us about so many terrible things happening to the environment yet somehow she remains hopeful and uplifting at times. Just like the title says, this book is a beautiful weaving of interesting... Read more

The Poet X

By: Elizabeth Acevedo
Narrated by: Elizabeth Acevedo
Length: 3 hours 30 minutes

“Acevedo's book is full of raw emotion, poetic descriptions, and gut-wrenching plot points. It explores themes of religious identity, female rage, and embracing a creative lifestyle in the immigrant Latinx community. READ it. Read IT. READ IT! NOW. Stop reading this and go read this book! Read more

Clap When You Land

By: Elizabeth Acevedo
Narrated by: Elizabeth Acevedo & Melania-Luisa Marte
Length: 5 hours 32 minutes

“Its category as a young adult novel shouldn't keep grownups from listening to "Clap When You Land." The parallel first-person stories of two teenage girls who lose their fathers in the same plane crash from NY to the Dominican Republic -- and the revelation that their fathers were the same man, who had led a double life -- is tender and wise.... Read more

The Smell of Other People's Houses

By: Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Erin Tripp, Karissa Vacker & Robbie Daymond
Length: 5 hours 37 minutes

In Alaska, 1970, being a teenager here isn’t like being a teenager anywhere else. This deeply moving and authentic debut is for fans of Rainbow Rowell, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Benjamin Alire Saenz. Intertwining stories of love, tragedy, wild luck, and salvation on the edge of America’s Last Frontier introduce a writer of rare... Read more

Kafka on the Shore

By: Haruki Murakami
Narrated by: Sean Barrett & Oliver Le Sueur
Length: 19 hours 6 minutes

“One of Murakami's best, Kafka on the Shore is a stunning tour of adolescence with a strange background of Oedipus complex. I was hooked from the start. Read more

The Jakarta Method

Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

By: Vincent Bevins
Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQ

“A radical new history of the United States abroad” (Wall Street Journal) which uncovers U.S. complicity in the mass-killings of left-wing activists in Indonesia, Latin America and around the world

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill... Read more

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

A Novel

By: Ocean Vuong
Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

“A rare poignant visceral reading experience, tackling themes of war, immigration, identity, sexuality, violence, and carving out your place in the world. More poetic than narrative. Deeply Affecting! Absolutely Brilliant! Stunning! Read more

A Really Good Day

How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

By: Ayelet Waldman
Narrated by: Ayelet Waldman
Length: 7 hours 37 minutes

The true story of how a renowned writer’s struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a onceinfamous drug seen through new eyes.

When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from “Lewis Carroll,” Ayelet Waldman is... Read more

The Communism of Love

An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value

By: Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Narrated by: Bea Flowers
Length: 14 hours 51 minutes

Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism—understood as a way of living, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the... Read more

Neuromancer

Sprawl Trilogy

By: William Gibson
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 10 hours 30 minutes

“if you want to be a hacker, start here. Read more

No One Is Talking About This

A Novel

By: Patricia Lockwood
Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
Length: 4 hours 43 minutes

“Patricia Lackwood's Priestdaddy is one of my favorite memoirs of all time, so I knew I just HAD to get my hands on her debut novel. As expected it's weird and quirky as hell, a tad inappropriate but makes you literally LOL. She creates a plot through a constellation of nebulous observations and witticisms that, as I said, is expected from her.... Read more

Bluets

By: Maggie Nelson
Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
Length: 2 hours 4 minutes

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color …Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human—via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. This new edition celebrates Maggie... Read more

Devolution

A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

By: Max Brooks
Narrated by: Judy Greer, Max Brooks, Jeff Daniels, Nathan Fillion, Mira Furlan, Terry Gross, Kimberly Guerrero, Kate Mulgrew, Kai Ryssdal & Steven Weber
Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

“When I heard Brooks y’all about his research process, how he describes his process, and why Devolution despite it being about a “Bigfoot” attack had so much relevance, I was sold. And, as my instincts predicted, I was totally hooked, and fast! Then I realized that Brooks writes about these futuristic horror-ish survival adventures, in a way that... Read more

State and Revolution

By: Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Narrated by: Chris Matthews
Length: 4 hours 4 minutes

State and Revolution (1917) describes the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution. It describes the inherent nature of the state as a tool for class oppression, a creation born of one social class' desire to control all other social classes.... Read more