A Journal of Love

Tropic of Cancer

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 1 min)
• By Henry Miller
• Narrated By Campbell Scott

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for 27 years after its first publication in Paris in 1943. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction.

Paris 1928

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Henry Miller
• Narrated By Lynn Hard
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Henry Miller's Nexus was censored 50 years ago, while Miller and his publishers fought for freedom of speech. Nexus II was never published, and looks at his first trip to Paris and Europe in 1928, a world on the edge of the great depression. Paris 1928 collates these unpublished memoirs as Henry Miller wished, together with the censored pages from Nexus.

Essential Tools for Empaths: A Survival Guide for Sensitive People

• ORIGINAL (4 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Judith Orloff
• Narrated By Judith Orloff

Are you an empath? If you've ever felt overwhelmed by noise and crowds, been put down for being too shy and introverted, or suffered "emotional hangovers" from someone else's bad mood, chances are you're at least partially an empath. With Essential Tools for Empaths, Dr. Judith Orloff presents a wealth of techniques, insights, and guided practices for addressing the challenges sensitive people face - while developing your unique qualities and strengths.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 59 mins)
• By Matthew Sullivan
• Narrated By Madeleine Maby
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Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, her eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs - the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store's overwhelmed shelves. But when Joey McGinty, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore's back room, Lydia's life comes unglued.

Marrow: A Love Story

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 42 mins)
• By Elizabeth Lesser
• Narrated By Elizabeth Lesser, Sally Field
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A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.

The Weight of Lies: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Emily Carpenter
• Narrated By Kate Orsini
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Reformed party girl Meg Ashley leads a life of privilege, thanks to a bestselling horror novel her mother wrote decades ago. But Meg knows that the glow of their very public life hides a darker reality of lies, manipulation, and the heartbreak of her own solitary childhood. Desperate to break free of her mother, Meg accepts a proposal to write a scandalous, tell-all memoir.

Notes from the Underground

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Narrated By Simon Vance
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A predecessor to such monumental works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From Underground represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side.

In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground.

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 8 mins)
• By Esther Perel
• Narrated By Esther Perel
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Esther Perel takes on tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.

The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 42 mins)
• By Robin Rinaldi
• Narrated By Kate Udall
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The project was simple: An attractive, successful magazine journalist, Robin Rinaldi, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was 44, or that she was married to a man she'd been in love with for 18 years. What followed - a year of sex, heartbreak, and unexpected revelation - is the topic of this riveting memoir, The Wild Oats Project.

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."

Lady Chatterley's Lover

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 35 mins)
• By D. H. Lawrence
• Narrated By Veronika Hyks
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Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928, tells the story of a passionate love affair between an upper class woman and her husband’s gamekeeper, which was thought to be so shocking in its content and its straightforward use of explicit sexual terms, that it was not officially published until 1960.

Bad Behavior: Stories

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 16 mins)
• By Mary Gaitskill
• Narrated By Mary Gaitskill
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This is a reissue of National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill's debut collection, Bad Behavior - powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire that depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban-fringe generation as it searches for human connection. Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill's arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as a sharp, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writer of contemporary literature.

The Bell Jar

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Sylvia Plath
• Narrated By Maggie Gyllenhaal

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Invisible Monsters

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 56 mins)
• By Chuck Palahniuk
• Narrated By Anna Fields
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She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.

Damned

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Chuck Palahniuk
• Narrated By Tai Sammons
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison,” declares the whip-tongued 13-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk’s subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose—and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

Marriage Games: The Games Duet

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 15 mins)
• By CD Reiss
• Narrated By Elena Wolfe, Sebastian York
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Thirty days. That's all Adam Steinbeck demands of his wife. Thirty days in a remote cottage, doing everything he demands. After that, he'll sign her divorce papers and give her their company. That's how long he has to rediscover the man he once was. The dominant master he hid when he fell in love with her five years before.

Fear of Flying

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 45 mins)
• By Erica Jong
• Narrated By Hope Davis

Originally published in 1973, the groundbreaking, uninhibited story of Isadora Wing and her desire to fly free caused a national sensation. In The New York Times, Henry Miller compared it to his own classic, Tropic of Cancer and predicted that "this book will make literary history..." It has sold more than 12-million copies. Now, after 30 years, the revolutionary novel known as Fear of Flying still stands as a timeless tale of self-discovery, liberation, and womanhood.

Lolita

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Vladimir Nabokov
• Narrated By Jeremy Irons
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Why we think it’s a great listen: Among the great literary achievements of the 20th century, Lolita soars in audio thanks to the incomparable Jeremy Irons, bringing to life Nabokov’s ability to shock and enthrall more than 50 years after publication. Lolita became a cause celebre because of the erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Nabokov's masterpiece owes its stature not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story that is shocking in its beauty and tenderness.