Lenin's Kisses

The Four Books

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas - translator
• Narrated By George Backman

In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling reeducation compound, freethinking artists and academics are detained to strengthen their loyalty to Communist ideologies. Here, the Musician and her lover, the Scholar, along with the Author and the Theologian, are forced to carry out grueling physical work and are encouraged to inform on each other for dissident behavior. The prize: winning a chance at freedom.

Waiting: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 4 mins)
• By Ha Jin
• Narrated By Dick Hill
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

For more than 17 years, Lin Kong has been in love with an educated, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young - a touchingly loyal woman, whom he repeatedly visits in order to ask for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's love is stretched taut by the passing years.

Moonglow: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 46 mins)
• By Michael Chabon
• Narrated By George Newbern
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Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.

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.

Soul Mountain

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 1 min)
• By Gao Xingjian
• Narrated By Brian Keeler
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Facing time on a prison farm for defying his country’s laws of cultural conformity, artist/writer Gao Xingjian embarked on an epic search for his roots and for freedom. His journey through Southern China’s ancient mountains and forests, inspired this immensely wise and beautiful novel.

NOS4A2: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 41 mins)
• By Joe Hill
• Narrated By Kate Mulgrew
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn't tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

• UNABRIDGED (24 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Peter Frankopan
• Narrated By Laurence Kennedy

It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions, and it was the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the emergence of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death, the struggles of the Great Game, and the fall of Communism - the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.

Garlic Ballads

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 49 mins)
• By Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (translator)
• Narrated By Robert Woo
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands....

The American Civil War

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 36 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Gary W. Gallagher
• Narrated By Professor Gary W. Gallagher

Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.

The Republic of Wine

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 4 mins)
• By Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt
• Narrated By Louis Changchien

In this hypnotic epic novel, Mo Yan, the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of this generation, takes us on a journey to a conjured province of contemporary China known as the Republic of Wine - a corrupt and hallucinatory world filled with superstitions, gargantuan appetites, and surrealistic events. When rumors reach the authorities that strange and excessive gourmandize is being practiced in the city of Liquorland (so named for the staggering amount of alcohol produced and consumed there), veteran special investigator Ding Gou'er is dispatched from the capital.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

• UNABRIDGED (23 hrs and 6 mins)
• By Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
• Narrated By full cast
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 18 mins)
• By Michael Lewis
• Narrated By Dennis Boutsikaris
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.

The Sellout: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Paul Beatty
• Narrated By Prentice Onayemi
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.

Half a Lifelong Romance: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 42 mins)
• By Eileen Chang
• Narrated By Emily Woo Zeller
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together - until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime?

China in Ten Words

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 47 mins)
• By Yu Hua, Allan H. Barr (translator)
• Narrated By Don Hagen
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From one of China’s most acclaimed writers, his first work of nonfiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country’s meteoric economic and social transformation. Characterized by Yu Hua’s trademark wit, insight, and courage, China in Ten Words is a refreshingly candid vision of the “Chinese miracle” and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a writer living in China today.

Red Sorghum: A Novel of China

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (translator)
• Narrated By George Backman
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. A legend in China, where it won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film directed by Zhang Yimou, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new—and unforgettable.

Brothers

• UNABRIDGED (28 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Yu Hua
• Narrated By Louis Changchien
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Acclaimed novelist Yu Hua became the first Chinese author to win the distinguished James Joyce Foundation Award. Controversial in his own country for his biting satire, he creates insightful portraits of Chinese society. Step-brothers Baldy Li and Song Gang couldn't be more different. While Baldy is a girl-chasing teen, Song is quiet and studious. The two come of age in a vibrant Chinese culture struggling with constant change.

Here I Am: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 59 mins)
• By Jonathan Safran Foer
• Narrated By Ari Fliakos
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, DC, Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home - and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.