Essays & Lit Crit

Tiny Beautiful Things (10th Anniversary Edition)

Advice from Dear Sugar (A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick)

By: Cheryl Strayed
Narrated by: Cheryl Strayed
Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

“Before she was known as the author of Wild, Cheryl Strayed was the anonymous Dear Sugar on The Rumpus website – an agony aunt of sorts, if agony aunts were endowed with ruthless compassion, profound honesty, and excellent prose. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of these columns. After I listened to Dear Sugar, the podcast she shared with... Read more

Bad Feminist

Essays

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

“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 BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •... 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

“Indigenous wisdom meets scientific theory in this memoir by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer offers a more positive and hopeful approach to healing the vital relationship between people and nature in a time when the climate crisis feels too overwhelming to overcome. Read more

Girls Can Kiss Now

Essays

By: Jill Gutowitz
Narrated by: Jill Gutowitz
Length: 7 hours 4 minutes

“Wickedly funny and heartstoppingly vulnerable…every page twinkles with brilliance.” —Refinery29

Perfect for fans of Samantha Irby and Trick Mirror, a hilarious, whip-smart collection of personal essays exploring the intersection of queerness, pop culture, the internet, and identity, introducing one of the most undeniably original new voices... Read more

Dead Girls

Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

By: Alice Bolin
Narrated by: Em Eldridge
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body... Read more

I Like to Watch

Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

By: Emily Nussbaum
Narrated by: Emily Nussbaum
Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

From The New Yorker’s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, a provocative collection of new and previously published essays arguing that we are what we watch.

“Emily Nussbaum is the perfect critic—smart, engaging, funny, generous, and insightful.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF... Read more

Packing My Library

An Elegy and Ten Digressions

By: Alberto Manguel
Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
Length: 3 hours 54 minutes

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000-volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of... Read more

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give

By: Ada Calhoun
Narrated by: Ada Calhoun
Length: 3 hours 17 minutes

Inspired by her wildly popular New York Times essay The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give, Ada Calhoun provides a funny (but not flip), smart (but not smug) take on the institution of marriage. Weaving intimate moments from her own married life with frank insight from experts, clergy, and friends, she upends expectations of total marital bliss to... Read more

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

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

“In this literal master class on literature and writing, Saunders earnestly yet playfully dissects 19th-century Russian short stories to discover how they exude life to this very day, while highlighting methods any aspiring writer can employ. The huge bonus: reading the wondrous stories themselves, and experiencing Tolstoy’s authority, Chekhov’s... Read more

Unlikeable Female Characters

The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate

By: Anna Bogutskaya
Narrated by: Raquel Beattie
Length: 11 hours 22 minutes

How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice.



Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are... Read more

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

By: Jia Tolentino
Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire
 
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia... Read more