Bookstore at Fitger's: Blake's Recommendations

Playing In The Dark

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that... Read more

Invisible Cities

By: Italo Calvino
Narrated by: Richard Higgins
Length: 2 hours 52 minutes

“This novel deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre; specially, the 13th-century travelogue that depicts the journey of the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo. Known for his brevity and fluidity, Calvino depicts transient experiences as invisible edges between reality and fiction. Calvino employs semiotics and structuralism... Read more

Into the Wild

By: Jon Krakauer
Narrated by: Philip Franklin
Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for... Read more

Carol

The Price of Salt

By: Patricia Highsmith
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is... Read more

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie SmithOne of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love... Read more

Cunning Folk

By: Adam Nevill
Narrated by: Peter Walters
Length: 12 hours

A compelling folk-horror story of deadly rivalry and the oldest magic from the author of The Ritual, The Reddening, No One Gets Out Alive and the four times winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.
No home is heaven with hell next door.
Money's tight and their new home is a fixer-upper. Deep in rural South West England, with an... Read more

Song of Solomon

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 15 hours 27 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain... Read more

Sing, Unburied, Sing

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Chris Chalk & Rutina Wesley
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is a dark and gorgeous song of love and heartbreak, haunting and tragic and disorienting in its timelessness. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill anchors Ward's tale to Mississippi today, which is almost indistinguishable from its notorious yesterday, a present and past (ironically) made more alive in the novel by ghosts and... Read more

A Little Life

A Novel

By: Hanya Yanagihara
Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
Length: 32 hours 51 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE

A Little Life follows four college... Read more

Death in Her Hands

A Novel

By: Ottessa Moshfegh
Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
Length: 7 hours 50 minutes

“While on her daily walk in the woods with her dog, and elderly widow finds a handwritten note on the ground that seems to describe the details of a murder. Without evidence of a body, or any other visible clues to go on, the unreliable and quirky narrator somehow becomes obsessed with the mystery and sets out to solve it. Death in Her Hands is a... Read more

Life for Sale

By: Yukio Mishima
Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
Length: 7 hours 20 minutes

“A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. • "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic

After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly... Read more

The Glass Castle

A Memoir

By: Jeannette Walls
Narrated by: Jeannette Walls
Length: 10 hours 25 minutes

THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER—FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOON

The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply... Read more

Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories

By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Narrated by: Theodore Bikel
Length: 2 hours 29 minutes

These four stories are infused with the wit and imagination, the humor and wisdom, that characterizes all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. Theodore Bikel reads these wise and funny tales in classic Yiddish storyteller cadence, injecting special warmth and resonance. The tales include "Gimpel the Fool," "Esther Kreindel the Second," "The Spinoza... Read more

Jazz - Abridged

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 3 hours

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.

“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison... Read more

The Overstory

By: Richard Powers
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 22 hours 58 minutes

“The Overstory is a difficult novel to encapsulate in a sentence or two. It is an epic novel of interconnected stories that all revolve in one way or another to trees and our kinship with the natural world. I listened to this over a few months and found it captivating, especially the sections of the stories that deal with the non-violent direct... Read more