2023 National Book Critics Circle Finalists

An Immense World

How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

By: Ed Yong
Narrated by: Ed Yong
Length: 14 hours 17 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong
 
“One of this year’s finest works of narrative... Read more

Fen, Bog and Swamp

A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

By: Annie Proulx
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
Length: 5 hours 6 minutes

*Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* A Finalist for the 2022 NBCC Awards in Nonfiction, the 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award, and the NEIBA 2023 New England Book Award*

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic... Read more

Virology

Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between

By: Joseph Osmundson
Narrated by: Joseph Osmundson
Length: 13 hours 7 minutes

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub

A leading microbiologist tackles the scientific and sociopolitical impact of viruses in twelve striking essays.
Invisible in the food we eat, the people we kiss, and inside our own bodies, viruses flourish—with the power to shape not only our health, but our social, political, and economic... Read more

Bad Mexicans

Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

By: Kelly Lytle Hernández
Narrated by: Joana Garcia
Length: 13 hours 34 minutes

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and... Read more

The Furrows

A Novel

By: Namwali Serpell
Narrated by: Kristen Ariza, Ryan Vincent Anderson & Dion Graham
Length: 8 hours 44 minutes

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • One of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year • Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize

“A triumph.”—New York Magazine

From one of the most celebrated new voices in American literature, a brilliantly inventive and “enthralling” (Oprah Daily) novel about the eternal bonds of family... Read more

Bliss Montage

Stories

By: Ling Ma
Narrated by: Katharine Chin
Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

"Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection."- AudioFile

A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages.

What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss... Read more

All the Lovers in the Night

By: Mieko Kawakami
Narrated by: Mirai Booth-Ong
Length: 7 hours 44 minutes

The bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami invites listeners back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists.Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and... Read more

A New Name

Septology VI-VII

Septology: Book #3

By: Jon Fosse
Narrated by: Kyle Snyder
Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers—two versions of the... Read more

Dr. No

A Novel

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That... Read more

Constructing a Nervous System

A Memoir

By: Margo Jefferson
Narrated by: Karen Murray
Length: 5 hours 1 minute

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom).

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME... Read more

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

By: Rachel Aviv
Narrated by: Andi Arndt
Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

“This is part memoir, part examination of the experiences of four other people who experienced mental illness and struggled with the treatments available. Aviv is most insightful when writing about herself, or the affluent young woman who decides to go off her medications, most likely because Aviv relates more easily to her circumstances. Her... Read more

Metaphysical Animals

How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

By: Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
Narrated by: Alex Dunmore
Length: 12 hours 35 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR• A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II.

The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In... Read more

The Grimkes

The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

By: Kerri K. Greenidge
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 15 hours 48 minutes

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite, slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become... Read more

G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

By: Beverly Gage
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
Length: 36 hours 35 minutes

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington... Read more

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

A Memoir

By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez
Length: 10 hours 58 minutes

A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER  

From the author of the “original, politically daring and passionately written” (Vogue) novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s... Read more

Stay True

A Memoir

By: Hua Hsu
Narrated by: Hua Hsu
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

“Stay True by Hua Hsu is a memoir set largely in/at Berkeley in the 1990s. A quietly profound look at the momentousness of the decisions you make as an emerging adult - about friendship, romance, art, music, activism, and family. Read more

The Immortal King Rao

By: Vauhini Vara
Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
Length: 15 hours 2 minutes

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.
In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with... Read more

Night of the Living Rez

By: Morgan Talty
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep... Read more

Ancestor Trouble

A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

By: Maud Newton
Narrated by: Catherine Taber
Length: 11 hours 13 minutes

An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.

“A roadmap for all of us who long to understand, at the deepest level, where we come from.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF... Read more

The Rabbit Hutch

A novel

By: Tess Gunty
Narrated by: Tess Gunty, Scott Brick, Suzanne Toren, Kirby Heyborne & Kyla Garcia
Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

“The Rabbit Hutch is an inventive and lyrical tale of Midwestern decay, environmental destruction, and toxic masculinity. John Brandon meets Lauren Groff with the occasional experimental aside. An ambitious and assured debut. Read more