- Classics (5,710)
- Historical Fiction (15,636)
Bestsellers
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The View from the Cheap Seats
- Selected Nonfiction
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of Neil Gaiman's outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart....
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The very best View is from the Cheap Seats
- By Jessica on 06-20-16
By: Neil Gaiman
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The Anthropocene Reviewed
- Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
- By: John Green
- Narrated by: John Green
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Number-one best-selling author John Green presents a deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast....
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unexpected
- By E. Collins on 05-18-21
By: John Green
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Happy-Go-Lucky
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all....
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Great except for an audio glitch
- By Rynnkins on 06-01-22
By: David Sedaris
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What the Dog Saw
- And Other Adventures
- By: Malcolm Gladwell
- Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The best-selling author of The Bomber Mafia focuses on "minor geniuses" and idiosyncratic behavior to illuminate the ways all of us organize experience in this "delightful" (Bloomberg News) collection of writings from The New Yorker....
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Not Gladwell's best - and a recording problem
- By Rudi on 11-26-09
By: Malcolm Gladwell
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The Best of Me
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
David Sedaris’s best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career - as selected and read by the author himself. Featuring fresh and classic recordings, including a new essay and an interview exclusive to the audiobook....
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Almost No New Material
- By Lizardectomy on 11-05-20
By: David Sedaris
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The Deadline
- Essays
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 22 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness....
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Setting current problems on a historical and human context
- By Jeanette+Gavin on 11-13-23
By: Jill Lepore
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The View from the Cheap Seats
- Selected Nonfiction
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of Neil Gaiman's outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart....
-
-
The very best View is from the Cheap Seats
- By Jessica on 06-20-16
By: Neil Gaiman
-
The Anthropocene Reviewed
- Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
- By: John Green
- Narrated by: John Green
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Number-one best-selling author John Green presents a deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast....
-
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unexpected
- By E. Collins on 05-18-21
By: John Green
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Happy-Go-Lucky
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all....
-
-
Great except for an audio glitch
- By Rynnkins on 06-01-22
By: David Sedaris
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What the Dog Saw
- And Other Adventures
- By: Malcolm Gladwell
- Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The best-selling author of The Bomber Mafia focuses on "minor geniuses" and idiosyncratic behavior to illuminate the ways all of us organize experience in this "delightful" (Bloomberg News) collection of writings from The New Yorker....
-
-
Not Gladwell's best - and a recording problem
- By Rudi on 11-26-09
By: Malcolm Gladwell
-
The Best of Me
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
David Sedaris’s best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career - as selected and read by the author himself. Featuring fresh and classic recordings, including a new essay and an interview exclusive to the audiobook....
-
-
Almost No New Material
- By Lizardectomy on 11-05-20
By: David Sedaris
-
The Deadline
- Essays
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 22 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness....
-
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Setting current problems on a historical and human context
- By Jeanette+Gavin on 11-13-23
By: Jill Lepore
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The Fire Next Time
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Jesse L. Martin
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....
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Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 09-17-15
By: James Baldwin
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Calypso
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation - and humor - toward middle age and mortality....
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Excellent, as always
- By Ruthie on 05-31-18
By: David Sedaris
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Dad Is Fat
- By: Jim Gaffigan
- Narrated by: Jim Gaffigan
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children....
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Good for Gaffigan fans - better for expecting dads
- By Sean on 05-17-13
By: Jim Gaffigan
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Walking in My Joy
- In These Streets
- By: Jenifer Lewis
- Narrated by: Jenifer Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful messages touch your soul....
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Another great work from Jenifer Mfkng Lewis
- By TonyaA6 on 09-20-22
By: Jenifer Lewis
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These Precious Days
- Essays
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart....
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Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times....
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Best in a long time
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-24
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
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How to Be Alone
- If You Want to, and Even If You Don't
- By: Lane Moore
- Narrated by: Lane Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How to Be Alone is a must-listen for anyone whose childhood still feels unresolved, who spends more time pretending to have friends online than feeling close to anyone in real life, who tries to have genuine, deep conversations in a roomful of people who'd rather you not....
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Not a good book
- By Brooke on 08-15-19
By: Lane Moore
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I'll Show Myself Out
- Essays on Midlife and Motherhood
- By: Jessi Klein
- Narrated by: Jessi Klein
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You’ll Grow Out of It....
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Complete sanctimommy navel gaze
- By NJVJ on 05-05-22
By: Jessi Klein
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Managing Expectations
- A Memoir in Essays
- By: Minnie Driver
- Narrated by: Minnie Driver
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this intimate, beautifully crafted collection, Driver writes and narrates with disarming charm and candor about her bohemian upbringing between England and Barbados; her post-university travails and triumphs....
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Love the stories
- By None of Your Business on 09-27-22
By: Minnie Driver
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Love's Executioner
- By: Irvin D. Yalom
- Narrated by: C.M. Carlson
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter....
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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
- By Espanolish on 11-02-16
By: Irvin D. Yalom
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Sullivan's Island
- A Lowcountry Tale
- By: Dorothea Benton Frank
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born and raised in idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass....
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Wish there were more
- By Amy on 05-19-16
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Ghost Dogs
- On Killers and Kin
- By: Andre Dubus III
- Narrated by: Andre Dubus III
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
During bright summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III’s grandfather taught him that men’s work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug lord in Mexico as a bounty hunter or grappling with privilege while living with a rich girlfriend in New York City, Dubus worked.
By: Andre Dubus III
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This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband....
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Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
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Consider the Lobster
- And Other Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Robert Petkoff
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures....
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How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
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Hijab Butch Blues
- A Memoir
- By: Lamya H
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown....
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Believe the Hype
- By Taz Ahmed on 09-30-23
By: Lamya H
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Little Weirds
- By: Jenny Slate
- Narrated by: Jenny Slate
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
You may "know" Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright, as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of Obvious Child. But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style....
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softness is earned and it is wonderful
- By Van on 12-09-19
By: Jenny Slate
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Quietly Hostile
- Essays
- By: Samantha Irby
- Narrated by: Samantha Irby
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts....
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Extremely disappointed
- By Diana in Michigan on 07-20-23
By: Samantha Irby
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Crying in the Bathroom
- A Memoir
- By: Erika L. Sánchez
- Narrated by: Erika L. Sánchez
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy....
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I cried
- By Veronica Castellanos on 08-13-23
By: Erika L. Sánchez
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On Tennis
- Five Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers....
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Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform
- By Darwin8u on 01-27-17
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American Like Me
- By: America Ferrera
- Narrated by: America Ferrera, Bambadjan Bamba, Joy Cho, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures....
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Not all chapters were narrated by the corresponding author
- By Katy F. on 03-09-19
By: America Ferrera
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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
- By: Christopher Hitchens
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 28 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers....
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Grab it
- By Davol2449 on 09-02-11
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Upstream
- Selected Essays
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan, Joy Sullivan, Kate Baer
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty of the natural world....
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Feet in the water and in the right direction
- By Ellery Littlefield on 04-04-24
By: Mary Oliver
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Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
- Unabridged Selections
- By: Alice Wong
- Narrated by: Alejandra Ospina, Alice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture....
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Missing stories
- By Adrianna A. on 11-19-20
By: Alice Wong
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Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter....
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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
New releases
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Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia
- By: Samantha Faulkner
- Narrated by: Aaron Fa'Aoso, Adam Lees, Daniella Williams, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What makes Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait unique? And what is it like to be a Torres Strait Islander in contemporary Australia? Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, compiled by poet and author Samantha Faulkner, showcases the distinct identity of Torres Strait Islanders through their diverse voices and journeys.
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The Call Is Coming from Inside the House
- Essays
- By: Allyson McOuat
- Narrated by: Allyson McOuat
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.
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Like eating ice cream! Entertaining, thought provoking and smart personal storytelling.
- By Suzanne on 05-30-24
By: Allyson McOuat
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All Things Are Too Small
- Essays in Praise of Excess
- By: Becca Rothfeld
- Narrated by: Ruth Crawford
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.
By: Becca Rothfeld
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A View from the Stars
- By: Cixin Liu
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.
By: Cixin Liu
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Like Love
- Essays and Conversations
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Senn Annis
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts.
By: Maggie Nelson
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The Headmaster
- Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities."
By: John McPhee
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Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia
- By: Samantha Faulkner
- Narrated by: Aaron Fa'Aoso, Adam Lees, Daniella Williams, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What makes Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait unique? And what is it like to be a Torres Strait Islander in contemporary Australia? Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, compiled by poet and author Samantha Faulkner, showcases the distinct identity of Torres Strait Islanders through their diverse voices and journeys.
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The Call Is Coming from Inside the House
- Essays
- By: Allyson McOuat
- Narrated by: Allyson McOuat
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.
-
-
Like eating ice cream! Entertaining, thought provoking and smart personal storytelling.
- By Suzanne on 05-30-24
By: Allyson McOuat
-
All Things Are Too Small
- Essays in Praise of Excess
- By: Becca Rothfeld
- Narrated by: Ruth Crawford
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.
By: Becca Rothfeld
-
A View from the Stars
- By: Cixin Liu
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.
By: Cixin Liu
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Like Love
- Essays and Conversations
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Senn Annis
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts.
By: Maggie Nelson
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The Headmaster
- Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities."
By: John McPhee
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The Art of Dying
- Writings, 2019-2022
- By: Peter Schjeldahl, Steve Martin - foreword by, Jarrett Earnest - introduction by
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”
By: Peter Schjeldahl, and others
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Magical/Realism
- Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders
- By: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
- Narrated by: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality. In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
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I died a thousand times
- By Millican on 06-02-24
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I Think I'll Prune the Lemon Tree
- Essays from My Arizona Life
- By: Mark Johnson
- Narrated by: Virtual Voice
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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If you are captivated by creative storytelling—brimming with vivid imagery and emotional honesty—you will love Mark Johnson’s fourth book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree. Set against the warm and rugged landscape of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, it features thirty-nine serendipitous, provocative, and humorous essays. Mark’s true stories and desert fantasies chronicle his triumphs as a gay man and journey with husband Tom to build a healthy, open, and literary life in Arizona, while revisiting indelible memories from his Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina past. Throughout his ...
By: Mark Johnson
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A Black Girl in the Middle
- Essays on (Allegedly) Figuring It All Out
- By: Shenequa Golding
- Narrated by: Aure Nash
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In A Black Girl in the Middle, a timely, compelling, and blazingly honest essay collection, Shenequa Golding holds up her magnifying glass to both her own experiences and those of young Black women everywhere. With her trademark wit and originality, Shenequa covers identity-searching themes of white supremacy, feminism, misogyny, love, sex and heartbreak. But this isn't just a book about Black women's trauma, it is also a book that embraces and celebrates the things that make Black women different.
By: Shenequa Golding
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Metamorphoses
- In Search of Franz Kafka
- By: Karolina Watroba
- Narrated by: Deborah Balm
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers and listeners all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia.
By: Karolina Watroba
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Small Victories
- Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
- By: Anne Lamott
- Narrated by: Anne Lamott
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us--our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives.
By: Anne Lamott
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Mean Boys
- A Personal History
- By: Geoffrey Mak
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Mak
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants listeners an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging.
By: Geoffrey Mak
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Bite by Bite
- Nourishments and Jamborees
- By: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Narrated by: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukmatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities and explores the boundaries between heritage and memory.
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Excitable Boy
- Essays on Risk
- By: Dominic Gordon
- Narrated by: Dominic Gordon, Kyle Walmsley
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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What happens to the adolescent spirit when all vestiges of innocence about the world are foregone, replaced within the grinding sounds of concrete and metal of the CBD of Melbourne? A place where train tunnels become nesting sites, carpark stairwells spots to refuel on methamphetamine and hide from predators; where agility leads you across nightclub rooftops, yielding cash in tight spaces with a quick reflex. For a rest, why not ride on the back of a train as it speeds through the night? The dangers of a decades-long exploration of risk in the streets of his city is exhilarating.
By: Dominic Gordon
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Dispersals
- On Plants, Borders and Belonging
- By: Jessica J. Lee
- Narrated by: Jessica J. Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.
By: Jessica J. Lee
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Like Love
- Essays and Conversations
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Senn Annis
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur.
By: Maggie Nelson
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Familiarity Breeds Content
- New and Selected Essays
- By: Joseph Epstein
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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America’s greatest living essayist writes about life and aging and being all too nicely out of it. In these personal pieces, he takes on topics as varied as grieving for a dead son, learning Latin late in life, and the pleasures of living with cats. Epstein gives us a “bonfire of his own vanities,” his thoughts about why watching sports is so impossibly seductive, what it is like to be short, and why he misses smoking even decades as a health-obsessed non-smoker.
By: Joseph Epstein