Fall Independent Press Picks

Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think

How Humans Learned to See the Future–and Shape It

By: Byron Reese
Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
Length: 9 hours 44 minutes

What makes the human mind so unique? And how did we get this way?



This fascinating tale explores the three leaps in our history that made us what we are—and will change how you think about our future.



Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron... Read more

Black Lives Matter at School

An Uprising for Educational Justice

By: Denisha Jones & Jesse Hagopian
Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts, Mirron Willis & Kirsten Potter
Length: 10 hours 28 minutes

"Black Lives Matter at School is an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system." —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times Bestselling Author.



Black Lives Matter at School succinctly generalizes lessons from successful challenges to institutional racism that have been won through the... Read more

Agatha Christie

An Elusive Woman

By: Lucy Worsley
Narrated by: Lucy Worsley
Length: 13 hours 46 minutes

"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."



Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in... Read more

Viral Justice

How We Grow the World We Want

By: Ruha Benjamin
Narrated by: Ruha Benjamin
Length: 13 hours 24 minutes

This audiobook narrated by Ruha Benjamin offers an inspiring and uniquely personal vision of how we can build a more just world one small change at a time "A book as urgent as the moment that produced it."—Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and... Read more

On Repentance and Repair

Making Amends in an Unapologetic World

By: Danya Ruttenberg
Narrated by: Sara Sheckells
Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice
Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award

A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues.

American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives... Read more

Sinister Graves

Cash Blackbear Mystery: Book #3

By: Marcie R. Rendon
Narrated by: Isabella Star LaBlanc
Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Minnesota, 1970s: A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymn written in English and Ojibwe.

Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old, tough-as-nails Ojibwe... Read more

Rainbow Rainbow

By: Lydia Conklin
Narrated by: Julia Weldon
Length: 5 hours 39 minutes

A fearless collection of stories that celebrate the humor, darkness, and depth of emotion of the queer and trans experience that's not typically represented: liminal or uncertain identities, queer conception, and queer joy



In this exuberant, prize-winning collection, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters seek love and connection in... Read more

By Hands Now Known

Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

By: Margaret A. Burnham
Narrated by: Diana Blue
Length: 10 hours 59 minutes

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.



If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law?



In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative... Read more

Cleopatra

Her History, Her Myth

Ancient Lives

By: Francine Prose
Narrated by: Katherine Fenton
Length: 6 hours 14 minutes

A feminist reinterpretation of the myths surrounding Cleopatra casts new light on the Egyptian queen and her legacy
The siren passionately in love with Mark Antony, the seductress who allegedly rolled out of a carpet she had herself smuggled in to see Caesar, Cleopatra is a figure shrouded in myth. Beyond the legends immortalized by Plutarch,... Read more

Moshi Moshi

By: Banana Yoshimoto
Narrated by: Kathleen Li
Length: 6 hours 20 minutes

"A beautiful translation . . . Yoshimoto deploys a magically Japanese light touch to emotionally and existentially tough subject matter: domestic disarray, loneliness, identity issues, lovesickness . . . [a] nimble narrative." —ELLE



In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie's much-loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only... Read more

Who's Raising the Kids?

Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

By: Susan Linn
Narrated by: Susan Linn
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes

From a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of commercial marketing on children comes a timely investigation into how big tech is hijacking childhood—and what we can do about it.Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the... Read more

Soul Culture

Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

By: Remica Bingham-Risher
Narrated by: Delva Roline
Length: 7 hours 58 minutes

Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as... Read more

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times

Stories

By: Meron Hadero
Narrated by: Emebeit Beyene, Dele Ogundiran, various narrators, Benjamin Onyango Ochieng, Raymond Karago, Waceke Wambaa & Samba Schutte
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes

Award-winning Ethiopian-American author Meron Hadero’s gorgeously wrought stories in A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times offer poignant, compelling narratives of those whose lives have been marked by border crossings and the risk of displacement.Set across the United States and abroad, Meron Hadero’s stories feature immigrants, refugees,... Read more

Which Side Are You On

A Novel

By: Ryan Lee Wong
Narrated by: Scott Takeda
Length: 5 hours 38 minutes

How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful—and funny—debut novel of generational change, a mother’s secret, and an activist’s coming-of-ageTwenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a... Read more

The House in the Orchard

By: Elizabeth Brooks
Narrated by: Ell Potter
Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

When a World War II widow inherits a dilapidated English estate, she uncovers a diary written by an adolescent girl named Maude Gower. Looking for answers, she begins reading, only to unravel more questions about the mysterious past and many secrets hidden deep within the walls of Orchard House.



In 1876, orphaned Maude is forced to leave London,... Read more

Black Folk Could Fly

Selected Writings

By: Randall Kenan
Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smith
Length: 8 hours 29 minutes

A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction.



Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking... Read more

Lungfish

By: Meghan Gilliss
Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
Length: 6 hours 4 minutes

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize



Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape... Read more

Monsters Born and Made

By: Tanvi Berwah
Narrated by: Deepa Samuel
Length: 11 hours 4 minutes

You swim with monsters, these people cannot scare you.

Sixteen-year-old Koral and her brother, Emrik, risk their lives to capture the monstrous maristags that live in the black seas around their island. They have to, or else their family will starve.

In an oceanic world swarming with vicious beasts, the ruling elite have indentured her family to... Read more

Quack Quack

The Threat of Pseudoscience

By: Dr. Joe Schwarcz
Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

Let the one and only Dr. Joe battle pseudoscience and cast a life preserver out to all those drowning in a sea of misinformation



We are in a crisis. A tsunami of misinformation and disinformation is threatening to engulf evidence-based science. While quackery—loosely defined as the spread of false "knowledge," often accompanied by various... Read more

Bad Girls

By: Camila Sosa Villada & Kit Maude - Translator
Narrated by: Sena Bryer
Length: 6 hours 8 minutes

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s coming-of-age tale about finding a community among fellow outcasts.

Camila Sosa Villada’s extraordinary first novel is a rich, nuanced portrait of a marginalized community: their romantic relationships, friendships and squabbles, difficulties at work, aspirations and... Read more