Double Life: A Love Story from Broadway to Hollywood

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 13 mins)
• By Hanne Blank
• Narrated By Fran Tunno

It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations - a subject that is anything but straight and narrow.

The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Anthony Pagden
• Narrated By Robert Blumenfeld
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One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world.

Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Kevin Cook
• Narrated By Stephen Hoye
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On the 50th anniversary of her murder, Kevin Cook presents the real Kitty Genovese. She was a vibrant young woman - unbeknownst to most, a lesbian - a bartender working (and dancing) her way through the colorful, fast-changing New York of the ’60s, a cultural kaleidoscope marred by the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, and race riots. Downtown, Greenwich Village teemed with beatniks, folkies, and so-called misfits like Kitty and her lover. Kitty Genovese evokes the Village’s gay and lesbian underground with deep feeling and colorful detail.

Sutphin Boulevard

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 54 mins)
• By Santino Hassell
• Narrated By Rusty Topsfield
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Michael Rodriguez and Nunzio Medici have been friends for two decades. From escaping their dysfunctional families in the working-class neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, to teaching in one of the city's most queer-friendly schools in Brooklyn, the two men have shared everything. Or so they thought until a sweltering night of dancing leads to an unexpected encounter that forever changes their friendship.

Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 27 mins)
• By Tracy Borman
• Narrated By Julian Elfer
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Thomas Cromwell has long been reviled as a Machiavellian schemer who stopped at nothing in his quest for power. As Henry VIII's right-hand man, Cromwell was the architect of the English Reformation, secured Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and plotted the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and upon his arrest, was accused of trying to usurp the King himself. But here Tracy Borman reveals a different side of one of the most notorious figures in history.

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Jazz Jennings
• Narrated By Jazz Jennings
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Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest and most prominent voices in the national discussion about gender identity. At the age of five, Jazz transitioned to life as a girl, with the support of her parents. A year later her parents allowed her to share her incredible journey in her first Barbara Walters interview, aired at a time when the public was much less knowledgeable about or accepting of the transgender community.

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 20 mins)
• By Shaun Considine
• Narrated By January LaVoy

This joint biography of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford follows Hollywood's most epic rivalry throughout their careers. They only worked together once, in the classic spine-chiller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and their violent hatred of each other as rival sisters was no act. In real life they fought over as many men as they did film roles.

Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Thomas Brothers
• Narrated By Andy Caploe

The definitive account of Louis Armstrong - his life and legacy - during the most creative period of his career. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone.

Lincoln

• UNABRIDGED (30 hrs and 27 mins)
• By David Herbert Donald
• Narrated By Dick Estell
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In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

When We Rise: My Life in the Movement

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 31 mins)
• By Cleve Jones
• Narrated By Cleve Jones
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From longtime activist Cleve Jones, here is a sweeping, beautifully written memoir about a full and remarkable American life. Jones brings to life the magnetic spell cast by 1970s San Francisco, the drama and heartbreak of the AIDS crisis and the vibrant generation of gay men lost to it, and his activist work on labor, immigration, and gay rights, which continues today.

A Day's Read

• ORIGINAL (18 hrs and 24 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Arnold Weinstein, Professor Emily Allen, Professor Grant L. Voth

Join three literary scholars and award-winning professors as they introduce you to dozens of short masterpieces that you can finish - and engage with - in a day or less. Perfect for people with busy lives who still want to discover-or rediscover-just how transformative an act of reading can be, these 36 lectures range from short stories of fewer than 10 pages to novellas and novels of around 200 pages. Despite their short length, these works are powerful examinations of the same subjects and themes that longer "great books" discuss.

There's This Guy

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Rhys Ford
• Narrated By Greg Tremblay

Jake Moore's world fits too tightly around him. Every penny he makes as a welder goes to care for his dying father, an abusive, controlling man who's the only family Jake has left. Because of a promise to his dead mother, Jake resists his desire for other men, but it leaves him consumed by darkness. It takes all of Dallas Yates's imagination to see the possibilities in the fatigued art deco building on WeHo's outskirts, but what seals the deal is a shy smile from the handsome metal worker across the street.

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Staceyann Chin
• Narrated By Staceyann Chin
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Stacyann Chin has appeared on television and radio, including The Oprah Winfrey Show , CNN, and PBS, discussing issues of race and sexuality. But it is her extraordinary voice that launched her career as a performer, poet, and activist. Here, she shares her unforgettable story of triumph against all odds in this brave and fiercely candid memoir.

No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Jamaica, on Christmas Day.

Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Leslie Bennetts
• Narrated By Erin Bennett
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Joan Rivers was more than a legendary comedian; she was an icon and a role model to millions, a fearless pioneer who left a legacy of expanded opportunity when she died in 2014. Her life was a dramatic roller coaster of triumphant highs and devastating lows: the suicide of her husband, her feud with Johnny Carson, her estrangement from her daughter, her many plastic surgeries, her ferocious ambition, and her massive insecurities.

Born on the Fourth of July

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Ron Kovic
• Narrated By Holter Graham, Bruce Springsteen - introduction
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This New York Times best seller (more than one million copies sold) details the author's life story (portrayed by Tom Cruise in the Oliver Stone film version) - from a patriotic soldier in Vietnam, to his severe battlefield injury, to his role as the country's most outspoken anti-Vietnam War advocate, spreading his message from his wheelchair.

My Man, Jeeves

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 54 mins)
• By P. G. Wodehouse
• Narrated By Jonathan Cecil
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Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature’s most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie.

The Doors of Perception

• UNABRIDGED (2 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Aldous Huxley
• Narrated By Rudolph Schirmer

The critically acclaimed novelist and social critic Aldous Huxley, describes his personal experimentation with the drug mescaline and explores the nature of visionary experience. The title of this classic comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 29 mins)
• By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
• Narrated By Philip Hoffman

The human body is the most fraught and fascinating, talked-about and taboo, unique yet universal fact of our lives. It is the inspiration for art, the subject of science, and the source of some of the greatest stories ever told. In Anatomies, acclaimed author of Periodic Tales Hugh Aldersey-Williams brings his entertaining blend of science, history, and culture to bear on this richest of subjects.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 3 mins)
• By David Sedaris
• Narrated By David Sedaris

Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him all over again. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine.

Openly Straight

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 1 min)
• By Bill Konigsberg
• Narrated By Pete Cross
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Rafe is a normal teenager from Colorado. He's been out since 8th grade, accepted by his peers & championed by his progressive parents. And while that's important, all Rafe really wants is to be a regular guy. To have his sexuality be a part of who he is, but not the headline, every single time. So when Rafe transfers to an all-boys' boarding school in New England, he decides to keep his sexuality a secret - not so much going back in the closet as starting over with a clean slate.

They're Playing Our Song: A Memoir

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 55 mins)
• By Carole Bayer Sager
• Narrated By Carole Bayer Sager
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Grammy and Academy Award-winning songwriter Carole Bayer Sager shares the remarkably frank and darkly funny story of her life in and out of the recording studio, from her fascinating (and sometimes calamitous) relationships to her collaborations with some of the greatest composers and musical artists of our time.

Nevertheless: A Memoir

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Alec Baldwin
• Narrated By Alec Baldwin
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One of the most accomplished and outspoken actors today chronicles the highs and lows of his life in this beautifully written, candid memoir.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 29 mins)
• By Barbara Demick
• Narrated By Karen White

Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.