2023 National Book Critics Circle Finalists

How to Say Babylon

A Memoir

By: Safiya Sinclair
Narrated by: Safiya Sinclair
Length: 16 hours 46 minutes

“A poetic memoir of growing up Rastafari in Jamaica. A gripping story of growing up under a fundamentalist father who tried to mold her into the perfect Rasta daughter but who eventually rebelled and broke free. The writing is wonderful, melodious - it’s so clear it’s a poet who’s writing. The author’s many years of reciting poetry shines thru in... Read more

King: A Life

By: Jonathan Eig
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 20 hours 45 minutes

Winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narrator!

This program is narrated by Dion Graham, narrator of over 300 audiobooks and an AudioFile Golden Voice. Dion has won multiple Earphones and Audie Awards.

"Dion Graham superbly narrates this riveting audiobook, emulating the majestic cadence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, speeches. He... Read more

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative

By: Gregg Hecimovich
Narrated by: Ron Butler & Janina Edwards
Length: 12 hours 58 minutes

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for BiographyFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.In 1857, a woman escaped... Read more

Daughter of the Dragon

Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History

By: Yunte Huang
Narrated by: Rebecca Lam
Length: 13 hours 15 minutes

A trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history.

Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood's most famous... Read more

Betty Friedan

Magnificent Disruptor

Jewish Lives

By: Rachel Shteir
Narrated by: Kim Niemi
Length: 10 hours 59 minutes

The feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan (1921–2006), pathbreaking author of The Feminine Mystique, was powerful and polarizing. In this biography, the first in more than twenty years, Rachel Shteir draws on Friedan's papers and on interviews with family, colleagues, and friends to create a nuanced portrait.



Friedan, born Bettye Naomi... Read more

Winnie and Nelson

Portrait of a Marriage

By: Jonny Steinberg
Narrated by: Puleng Lange-Stewart
Length: 19 hours 47 minutes

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • AN LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • A WASHINGTON POST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that “does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that... Read more

Creep

Accusations and Confessions

By: Myriam Gurba
Narrated by: Myriam Gurba
Length: 11 hours 11 minutes

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST
A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

“Quite simply one of the best books of the decade.” —Los Angeles Review of Books * “The mother of intersectional Latinx identity.” —Cosmopolitan * “Brilliant…a hopeful book…rooted in the steadfast belief other worlds are possible.” —The New York Observer * “Witty,... Read more

Doppelganger

A Trip into the Mirror World

By: Naomi Klein
Narrated by: Naomi Klein
Length: 14 hours 47 minutes

“What an evocative book, especially as read by the author! Come for the critical cultural analysis and stay for Klein's thoughtful, generous, hopeful conclusions. Read more

Tremor

A Novel

By: Teju Cole
Narrated by: Atta Otigba & Yetide Badaki
Length: 7 hours 48 minutes

An “extraordinary, ambitious” (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • “Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere.”—The New Yorker

WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD • FINALIST... Read more

North Woods

A Novel

By: Daniel Mason
Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, Mark Deakins, Jayne Entwistle, Billie Fulford-Brown, Arthur Morey, George Newbern, Kirsten Potter & Simon Vance
Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

“North Woods is a novel about a house, its inhabitants, and the land over four centuries set in the hills of western Massachusetts. A gorgeous, layered tapestry in which the house and the woods play into the lives of those who live there. Read more

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

A novel

By: Lorrie Moore
Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
Length: 6 hours 16 minutes

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen... Read more

Vengeance Is Mine

A novel

By: Marie NDiaye
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Length: 6 hours 35 minutes

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer’s childhood.

A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, The Guardian,... Read more

Blackouts

A Novel

By: Justin Torres
Narrated by: Ozzie Rodriguez & Torian Brackett
Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

“A deep meditation on queerness, memory, and the nature of history. Moments of transcendent beauty and stark reality often share the same page. Read more

We Were Once a Family

A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

By: Roxanna Asgarian
Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2023

"Narrator Suehyla El-Attar gives an impassioned performance that enhances the touching, terrifying tale of social injustice and systemic failure. Her delivery is compelling and clear, evoking a captivating listening experience from this true-crime tragedy."- Library Journal

The shocking, deeply... Read more

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

A Journey Through the Deep State

By: Kerry Howley
Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
Length: 7 hours

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York Times

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data... Read more

Ordinary Notes

By: Christina Sharpe
Narrated by: Christina Sharpe
Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

This program is read by the author.

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about... Read more

Information Desk

An Epic

Penguin Poets

By: Robyn Schiff
Narrated by: Robyn Schiff
Length: 1 hour 54 minutes

Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick

“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post

“An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data,... Read more

Trace Evidence

By: Charif Shanahan
Narrated by: Charif Shanahan
Length: 1 hour 25 minutes

A Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Chicago Book of 2023

"A truly magical achievement." —Ocean Vuong

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and... Read more

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

By: Tahir Hamut Izgil
Narrated by: Greg Watanabe
Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the year

Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIME

A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide

One by... Read more

When Crack Was King

A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

By: Donovan X. Ramsey
Narrated by: Donovan X. Ramsey
Length: 11 hours 33 minutes

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic
 
“A master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative, a monumental feat for the fraught subject of addiction... Read more