Best of 2023: Nonfiction

Opinions

A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Roxane Gay
Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, “a strikingly fresh cultural critic” (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling... Read more

Quietly Hostile

Essays

By: Samantha Irby
Narrated by: Samantha Irby
Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

“Samantha Irby, modern classic pop culture humorist, holds nothing back in her latest essay collection, whose topics range from how to stay relentlessly positive in the face of the incurably judgmental to ways to ruin Sex and the City (she wrote for the reboot) to too-real family (mis)connections to the time she almost died. Irby’s life and... Read more

Sing a Black Girl's Song

The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange

By: Ntozake Shange
Narrated by: Alfre Woodard, D. Woods, Regina Taylor, Lynn Whitfield, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ifa Bayeza, Imani Perry, Robin Miles, Tarana Burke & Savannah Shange
Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

“Ntozake Shange, author of the seminal for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, was one of our greatest writers, and this collection, curated by editor Imani Perry, is a feast for those who have loved her work and love the literary word. Sing a Black Girl’s Song collects essays, poetry, and plays taken from... Read more

Crossings

How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

By: Ben Goldfarb
Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the... Read more

The Deadline

Essays

By: Jill Lepore
Narrated by: Jill Lepore
Length: 22 hours 30 minutes

A book to be listened to and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best. Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary... Read more

The Body Liberation Project

How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom

By: Chrissy King
Narrated by: Chrissy King
Length: 6 hours 35 minutes

From author and wellness personality Chrissy King, an exciting, genre-redefining narrative mix of memoir, inspiration, and activities and prompts, with timely messages about social and racial justice and how the world needs to move beyond body positivity to something even more exciting and revolutionary: body liberation.

When Chrissy King first... Read more

What an Owl Knows

The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

By: Jennifer Ackerman
Narrated by: Jennifer Ackerman
Length: 9 hours 13 minutes

An instant New York Times bestseller!

A New York Times Notable Book of 2023

Named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly

From the author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination

With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls... Read more

Falling Back in Love with Being Human

Letters to Lost Souls

By: Kai Cheng Thom
Narrated by: Kai Cheng Thom
Length: 1 hour 34 minutes

“A perfect, poetic work of art by an imperfect, beautiful person. Do the audiobook version if you can. Her performance and words make you feel all the things. Read more

The Great White Bard

How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race

By: Farah Karim-Cooper
Narrated by: Farah Karim-Cooper & Adjoa Andoh
Length: 8 hours 46 minutes

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly

As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant?

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his... Read more

The Lumumba Plot

The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination

By: Stuart A. Reid
Narrated by: Michael Boatman
Length: 18 hours 15 minutes

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times

“This is one of the best books I have read in... Read more

Eve

How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

By: Cat Bohannon
Narrated by: Cat Bohannon
Length: 15 hours 54 minutes

“This is hands down one of the most fascinating reads. I learned so much about the female sex I had no idea about. I will definitely be going back to dive deeper into topics, although Cat explored each with such colorful depth, there is still so much more I have questions for now. Read more

Palo Alto

A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

By: Malcolm Harris
Narrated by: Patrick Harrison
Length: 28 hours 19 minutes

“From The Gold Rush to Google, Harris spins a tale of greed, racism, union-busting and violence that built California and Silicon Valley. The book offers an alternate view of California and world history that many of us missed in school. Read more

The Rediscovery of America

Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity)

By: Ned Blackhawk
Narrated by: Jason Grasl
Length: 17 hours 18 minutes

“Ned Blackhawk joins the growing (and overdue) pantheon of historians looking to restore Indigenous history to the story of “America.” Ambitiously tackling the arc commonly taught (and normalized) in US schools, Blackhawk swiftly but comprehensively charts a course from Spanish colonization to the 20th century, covering 500 years in fewer than... Read more

Leg

The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It

By: Greg Marshall
Narrated by: Greg Marshall
Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

“This hilarious memoir tells the story of Greg Marshall's coming of age as a gay and disabled boy in the ’90s and of his being unaware of either label. Told by his parents that he had “tight tendons,” Marshall did not know that he had cerebral palsy until he was in his thirties. Marshall brings us into his wild and bizarre family, their fights... Read more

Art Monsters

Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

By: Lauren Elkin
Narrated by: Lauren Elkin
Length: 9 hours 37 minutes

Coming across the term "art monster" in Jenny Offill's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, Lauren Elkin was intrigued. What kinds of connections might there be between art and monstrosity, and how was it different when the artist in question was a woman?



Art Monsters is a landmark feminist intervention in the way we think about women's stories and... Read more

Emperor of Rome

Ruling the Ancient World

By: Mary Beard
Narrated by: Mary Beard
Length: 14 hours 43 minutes

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who... Read more

A Renaissance of Our Own

A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining

By: Rachel E. Cargle
Narrated by: Rachel E. Cargle
Length: 5 hours 51 minutes

From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do.

“Powerful . . . You will leave these pages changed for the better.”—Gabrielle Union, New York Times... Read more

Enchantment

Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

By: Katherine May
Narrated by: Rebecca Lee
Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

“May writes with such magic; accurately capturing the collective feeling of grief and trauma while also sharing examples of moments of gratitude and wonder. I enjoyed every word of this book. Read more

Rough Sleepers

Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people

By: Tracy Kidder
Narrated by: Tracy Kidder
Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

“I couldn’t put Rough Sleepers down. I am left in awe of the human spirit and inspired to... Read more

Thin Skin

Essays

By: Jenn Shapland
Narrated by: Jenn Shapland
Length: 9 hours 9 minutes

A GOODREADS MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • Examining capitalism’s toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking, this incisive new work is “a visceral exploration” (Katherine May, author of Wintering) from a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind.

"A wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear weapons... Read more