29 Best Essays, Literary Collections Books
Essays, Literary Collections is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Essays, Literary Collections audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 29 Essays, Literary Collections audiobooks below.
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The deja vu
- By: Gabrielle Civil
- Length: 7 hours 50 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: June 21, 2022
- Language: English
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4.53(13 ratings)
4.53(13 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDGabrielle Civil mines black dreams and black time to reveal a vibrant archive of black feminist creative expressions. Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the deja vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement,Gabrielle Civil mines black dreams and black time to reveal a vibrant archive of black feminist creative expressions.
Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the deja vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals,
race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life.With intimacy, humor, and verve, the deja vu blurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future.
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Too Much of Life
- By: Clarice Lispector
- Narrator: Roxanne Hernandez
- Length: 23 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2023
- Language: English
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4.52(26 ratings)
4.52(26 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDIn the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her cronicas–short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces–are the delicious canapes. “The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They knowIn the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her cronicas–short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces–are the delicious canapes.
“The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.”
The cronica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers, or even soccer stars, to address a wide readership on any theme they like.
Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love.
This new, beautifully translated work presents a new aspect of the great writer–at once off the cuff and spot on.
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The Pleasure of Writing and Other Essays
- By: A. A. Milne
- Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 1 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Public Domain
- Publish date: January 04, 2022
- Language: English
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4.42(19 ratings)
4.42(19 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.007.99 USDThis collection, written between 1907 and 1920 by beloved children’s author A. A. Milne, contains the following essays: “Bruce: A Short Study of a Great Life?” The Charm of Golf The Cupboard On Going into a House Goldfish MyThis collection, written between 1907 and 1920 by beloved children’s author A. A. Milne, contains the following essays: “Bruce: A Short Study of a Great Life?” The Charm of Golf The Cupboard On Going into a House Goldfish My Library The Old Order Changes The Pleasure of Writing Smoking as a Fine Art Thoughts on Thermometers” The University Boat Race A Word for Autumn The author of more than twenty-five plays, ten nonfiction books, seven novels, five children’s books, and four books of poetry, A. A. Milne was notable for more than just his creation of the Hundred Acre Wood. This collection illustrates just how Milne’s mind worked and offers witty, creative, and entertaining insight into his everyday life.
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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
- By: Alexander Chee
- Narrator: Daniel K. Isaac
- Length: 8 hours 28 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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4.41(8747 ratings)
4.41(8747 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDAn essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist–and how we form our identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary”An essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist–and how we form our identities in life and in art.
As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and “brilliant” by the Washington Post. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he is sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing–Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley–the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
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The Reckonings
- By: Lacy M. Johnson
- Narrator: Candace Thaxton
- Length: 6 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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4.29(604 ratings)
4.29(604 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USD“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side–rooted in her own experience with sexual assault–pursues“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side–rooted in her own experience with sexual assault–pursues questions that strike at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society.
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In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred review). Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her own experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.
“The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Magazine). -
C. S. Lewis
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrator: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 38 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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4.23(2476149 ratings)
4.23(2476149 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDThis is an extensive collection of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis that have been brought together in one volume for the first time. As well as his many books, letters, and poems, Lewis also wrote a great number of essays and shorterThis is an extensive collection of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis that have been brought together in one volume for the first time. As well as his many books, letters, and poems, Lewis also wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on various ethical issues and on the nature of literature and storytelling. In this essay collection we find a treasure trove of Lewis’ reflections on diverse topics.
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My Southern Journey
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrator: Rick Bragg
- Length: 8 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2015
- Language: English
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4.22(3413 ratings)
4.22(3413 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDFrom celebrated New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Rick Bragg, comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor,From celebrated New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Rick Bragg, comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South.
Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, Bragg explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions’ varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions with college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoonbread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook.
Collected from over a decade of his writing, with many never-before-published essays written specifically for this edition, My Southern Journey is an entertaining and engaging listen, especially for Southerners (or Southerners at heart) and anyone who appreciates great writing.
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Out on a Limb
- By: Andrew Sullivan
- Narrator: Andrew Sullivan
- Length: 20 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.19(125 ratings)
4.19(125 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.99 USDAndrew Sullivan, “one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades” (The New York Times) and founding editor of The Daily Dish presents a collection of 60 his most iconic and powerful essays of social and politicalAndrew Sullivan, “one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades” (The New York Times) and founding editor of The Daily Dish presents a collection of 60 his most iconic and powerful essays of social and political commentary from The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and more.
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Over the course of his career, Andrew Sullivan has never shied away from staking out bold positions on social and political issues. A fiercely independent conservative, in 1989 he wrote the first national cover story in favor of marriage equality, and then an essay, “The Politics of Homosexuality,” in The New Republic in 1993, an article called the most consequential of the decade in the gay rights movement. A pioneer of online journalism, he started blogging in 2000 and helped define the new medium with his blog, The Daily Dish. In 2007, he was one of the first political writers to champion the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, and his cover story for The Atlantic, “Why Obama Matters,” was seen as a milestone in that campaign’s messaging. In the past five years, he has proved a vocal foe both of Donald Trump and of wokeness on the left. Loved and loathed by both left and right, Sullivan is in a tribe of one.
Bold, timely, and thought-provoking, this collection of “trenchant observations from an influential journalist” (Kirkus Reviews) on culture, politics, religion, and philosophy demonstrates why he continues to be ranked among the most intriguing and important public intellectuals in US media. -
High Tide in Tucson
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrator: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: November 08, 2005
- Language: English
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4.06(10193 ratings)
4.06(10193 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0016.99 USDBarbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns onceBarbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven.
In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Her canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.
In sharing her thoughts about the urgent business of being alive, kingsolver the essayist employs the same keen eyes, persuasive tongue, and understanding heart that characterize her acclaimed fiction.
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The Best American Food Writing 2022
- By: Sohla El-Waylly
- Narrator: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 9 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: November 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.04(104 ratings)
4.04(104 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.99 USDA collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by guest editor Sohla El-Waylly and series editor Silvia Killingsworth. Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021A collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by guest editor Sohla El-Waylly and series editor Silvia Killingsworth.
Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
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Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through
- By: T Fleischmann
- Narrator: Joel Froomkin
- Length: 4 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: October 15, 2019
- Language: English
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4.03(940 ratings)
4.03(940 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDHow do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres’s artwork–piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles–as a path throughHow do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres’s artwork–piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles–as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo to the galleries of New York and L.A. and the farmhouses of rural Tennessee, artwork acts as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.
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Small Wonder
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrator: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 10 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: November 08, 2005
- Language: English
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4.03(9758 ratings)
4.03(9758 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.99 USDIn twenty-two wonderfully articulate essays, Barbara Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world From the author of HighIn twenty-two wonderfully articulate essays, Barbara Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world
From the author of High Tide in Tucson, comes Small Wonder, a new collection of essays that begins with a parable gleaned from recent news: villagers search for a missing infant boy and find him, unharmed, in the cave of a dangerous bear that has mothered him like one of her own. Clearly, our understanding of evil needs to be revised. What we fear most can save us. From this tale, Barbara Kingsolver goes on to consider the chasm between the privileged and the poor, which she sees as the root cause of violence and war in our time. She writes about her attachment to the land, to nature and wilderness, trees and mountains–the place from which she tells her stories. Whether worrying about the dangers of genetically engineered food crops, or creating opportunities for children to feel useful and competent–like growing food for the family’s table–Kingsolver looks for small wonders, where they grow, and celebrates them.
Cover illustration (c) Panteek
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This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrator: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hours 36 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: November 05, 2013
- Language: English
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4(26416 ratings)
4(26416 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USDA Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick “I had been so engaged by Ann Patchett’s multifaceted story, so lured in by her confiding voice, that I forgot I was on the job. […] As the best personal essays often do, Patchett’s is aA Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
“I had been so engaged by Ann Patchett’s multifaceted story, so lured in by her confiding voice, that I forgot I was on the job. […] As the best personal essays often do, Patchett’s is a two-way mirror, reflecting both the author and her readers.” — New York Times Book Review
Blending literature and memoir, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto, examines her deepest commitments–to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband–creating a resonant portrait of a life in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore.
As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.
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Fear of Falling
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Carmela Marner
- Length: 9 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: January 07, 2020
- Language: English
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3.98(456 ratings)
3.98(456 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.98 USDA brilliant and insightful exploration of the rise and fall of the American middle class by New York Times bestselling author, Barbara Ehrenreich.One of Barbara Ehrenreich’s most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examinesA brilliant and insightful exploration of the rise and fall of the American middle class by New York Times bestselling author, Barbara Ehrenreich.
... Read moreOne of Barbara Ehrenreich’s most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examines the insecurities of the American middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the last two decades of the 20th century.Weaving finely-tuned expert analysis with her trademark voice, Ehrenreich traces the myths about the middle class to their roots, determines what led to the shrinking of what was once a healthy percentage of the population, and how, in its ambition and anxiety, that population has retreated from responsible leadership.Newly reissued and timely as ever, Fear of Falling places the middle class of yesterday under the microscope and reveals exactly how we arrived at the middle class of today. -
Far and Away
- By: Andrew Solomon
- Narrator: Andrew Solomon
- Length: 22 hours 12 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
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3.92(474 ratings)
3.92(474 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.99 USDFrom the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award–and one of the most original thinkers of our time–“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century ofFrom the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award–and one of the most original thinkers of our time–“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays” (Vanity Fair).
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Far and Away chronicles Andrew Solomon’s writings about places undergoing seismic shifts–political, cultural, and spiritual. From his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom, and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change. With his signature brilliance and compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities are altered when governments alter.
A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon captures the essence of these cultures. Ranging across seven continents and twenty-five years, these “meaty dispatches…are brilliant geopolitical travelogues that also comprise a very personal and reflective resume of the National Book Award winner’s globe-trotting adventures” (Elle). Far and Away takes a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences: “You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomon’s eyes, you will also care about it more” (Elizabeth Gilbert). -
A History of Scars
- By: Laura Lee
- Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.89(308 ratings)
3.89(308 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDFrom a writer whose work has been called “breathtaking and dazzling” by Roxane Gay, this moving, illuminating, and multifaceted memoir explores, in a series of essays, the emotional scars we carry when dealing with mental and physicalFrom a writer whose work has been called “breathtaking and dazzling” by Roxane Gay, this moving, illuminating, and multifaceted memoir explores, in a series of essays, the emotional scars we carry when dealing with mental and physical illnesses–reminiscent of The Collected Schizophrenias and An Unquiet Mind.
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In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics.
In “History of Scars” and “Aluminum’s Erosions,” Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World,” Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea.
Through the vivid imagery of mountain climbing, cooking, studying writing, and growing up Korean American, Lee explores the legacy of trauma on a young queer child of immigrants as she reconciles the disparate pieces of existence that make her whole.
By tapping into her own personal, emotional, and psychological struggles in these powerful and relatable essays, Lee encourages all of us to not be afraid to face our own hardships and inner truths. -
The Fun Stuff
- By: James Wood
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2012
- Language: English
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3.86(406 ratings)
3.86(406 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDA new, far-ranging collection of essays from “the strongest…literary critic we have.” (New York Review of Books) Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works–books that established James Wood asA new, far-ranging collection of essays from “the strongest…literary critic we have.” (New York Review of Books)
Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works–books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation–The Fun Stuff confirms Wood’s preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-five passionate, sparkling dispatches–which range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov–Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.
Included in The Fun Stuff is the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming–which was a finalist for last year’s National Magazine Awards–as well as Wood’s essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for The Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.
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The Hard Crowd
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrator: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 7 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.85(1155 ratings)
3.85(1155 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDAUDIO EXCLUSIVE: INCLUDES GALAXIE 500’S SONG “ANOTHER DAY!”“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” –Taylor Antrim, Vogue From a writer celebrated for her “chops,AUDIO EXCLUSIVE: INCLUDES GALAXIE 500’S SONG “ANOTHER DAY!”
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“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” –Taylor Antrim, Vogue
From a writer celebrated for her “chops, ambition, and killer instinct” (John Powers, Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.
Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today” (The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times–and illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.
In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
These pieces, new and old, are electric, vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. “Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.” -
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
- By: Tom Wolfe
- Narrator: Harold N. Cropp
- Length: 4 hours 6 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2012
- Language: English
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3.8(2719 ratings)
3.8(2719 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0012.95 USDIn these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, “black rage,” and “white guilt” in our status-minded world. In “These Radical Chic Evenings,” Wolfe focuses primarilyIn these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, “black rage,” and “white guilt” in our status-minded world.
In “These Radical Chic Evenings,” Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with high fidelity.
And in “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” Wolfe travels to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. This time the meeting deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco’s militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program.
With his fourth book, which brought the phrase “radical chic” into the cultural lexicon, Wolfe has never been more unflinching with his patented social criticism.
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Hungry Heart
- By: Jennifer Weiner
- Narrator: Jennifer Weiner
- Length: 13 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
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3.78(6577 ratings)
3.78(6577 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USD“Generous and entertaining.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Nominated for “Best Memoir & Autobiography” by Goodreads Choice Awards“Generous and entertaining.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Nominated for “Best Memoir & Autobiography” by Goodreads Choice Awards 2016 * Named a “Best Book of the Year” by New York Post
“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to read it again.” —TheSkimm
“I’m mad Jennifer’s Weiner’s first book of essays is as wonderful as her fiction. You will love this book and wish she was your friend.” –Mindy Kaling, author of Why Not Me?
“Fiercely funny, powerfully smart, and remarkably brave.” –Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an “unlikely feminist enforcer” (The New Yorker). She’s also a mom, a daughter, and a sister, a clumsy yogini, and a reality-TV devotee. In this “unflinching look at her own experiences” (Entertainment Weekly), Jennifer fashions tales of modern-day womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Nora Ephron and Tina Fey.
No subject is off-limits in these intimate and honest essays: sex, weight, envy, money, her mother’s coming out of the closet, her estranged father’s death. From lonely adolescence to hearing her six-year-old daughter say the F word–fat–for the first time, Jen dives into the heart of female experience, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world. -
The Unspeakable
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrator: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hours 49 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: November 18, 2014
- Language: English
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3.74(4769 ratings)
3.74(4769 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDIt’s a report tempered by hard times. In ‘Matricide,’ Daum unflinchingly describes a parent’s death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in ‘Diary of a Coma’ she relates her own journey to the twilightIt’s a report tempered by hard times. In ‘Matricide,’ Daum unflinchingly describes a parent’s death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in ‘Diary of a Coma’ she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital. Elsewhere, she writes searchingly about cultural nostalgia, Joni Mitchell, and the alternating heartbreak and liberation of choosing not to have children.
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Hi-Ho Silver, Anyway
- By: Bill Stokes
- Narrator: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 11 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.7(16 ratings)
3.7(16 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDFor ten years Bill Stokes was a roving reporter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. He has written reams of material about his vivid impressions of people, animals, events, personal activities, and “things in general.” Through hisFor ten years Bill Stokes was a roving reporter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. He has written reams of material about his vivid impressions of people, animals, events, personal activities, and “things in general.”
Through his travels, Bill has met with the unusual and unique to the humorous, trivial, and tragic. This select group from his collection of stories and columns indicates the broad scope of his journalistic efforts, brilliant talents, and professional ability. Listeners will enjoy this potpourri of delightful columns as they move with Bill through the seasonal changes of life in Wisconsin.
People rarely succeed at anything unless they have fun doing it. Bill Stokes obviously enjoys his role as Wisconsin’s favorite journalist. In this delightful book he shares that fun with all.
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See What Can Be Done
- By: Lorrie Moore
- Narrator: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 16 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.69(287 ratings)
3.69(287 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.95 USDA welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America’s most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary–appearing in the NewA welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America’s most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary–appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere–have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.
From Lorrie Moore’s earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman’s 2016 O. J. Simpson documentary, and in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the works of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker, et al.); on the continuing unequal state of race in America; on the shock of the shocking GOP; on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs; on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer); on the (d)evolving environment; on terrorism, the historical imagination, and the world’s newest form of novelist; on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anais Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others); on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown; and much, much more.
“Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore” (Harper’s Magazine).
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The Guinea Pig Diaries
- By: A. J. Jacobs
- Narrator: A. J. Jacobs
- Length: 6 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2009
- Language: English
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3.68(8715 ratings)
3.68(8715 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.95 USDA collection of A.J. Jacobs’s hilarious adventures as a human guinea pig, including “My Outsourced Life,” “The Truth About Nakedness,” and a never-before-published essay.One man. Ten extraordinary quests. BestsellingA collection of A.J. Jacobs’s hilarious adventures as a human guinea pig, including “My Outsourced Life,” “The Truth About Nakedness,” and a never-before-published essay.
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One man. Ten extraordinary quests.
Bestselling author and human guinea pig A.J. Jacobs puts his life to the test and reports on the surprising and entertaining results. He goes undercover as a woman, lives by George Washington‚Äôs moral code, and impersonates a movie star. He practices “radical honesty,” brushes his teeth with the world‚Äôs most rational toothpaste, and outsources every part of his life to India‚Äîincluding reading bedtime stories to his kids.
And in a new adventure, Jacobs undergoes scientific testing to determine how he can put his wife through these and other life-altering experiments—one of which involves public nudity.
Filled with humor and wisdom, My Life as an Experiment will immerse you in eye-opening situations and change the way you think about the big issues of our time—from love and work to national politics and breakfast cereal. -
My Life as an Experiment
- By: A. J. Jacobs
- Narrator: A. J. Jacobs
- Length: 6 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
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3.68(8715 ratings)
3.68(8715 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.95 USDA collection of A.J. Jacobs’s hilarious adventures as a human guinea pig, including “My Outsourced Life,” “The Truth About Nakedness,” and a never-before-published essay.One man. Ten extraordinary quests. BestsellingA collection of A.J. Jacobs’s hilarious adventures as a human guinea pig, including “My Outsourced Life,” “The Truth About Nakedness,” and a never-before-published essay.
... Read more
One man. Ten extraordinary quests.
Bestselling author and human guinea pig A.J. Jacobs puts his life to the test and reports on the surprising and entertaining results. He goes undercover as a woman, lives by George Washington’s moral code, and impersonates a movie star. He practices “radical honesty,” brushes his teeth with the world’s most rational toothpaste, and outsources every part of his life to India–including reading bedtime stories to his kids.
And in a new adventure, Jacobs undergoes scientific testing to determine how he can put his wife through these and other life-altering experiments–one of which involves public nudity.
Filled with humor and wisdom, My Life as an Experiment will immerse you in eye-opening situations and change the way you think about the big issues of our time–from love and work to national politics and breakfast cereal. -
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrator: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hours 7 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.66(692 ratings)
3.66(692 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDFrom the multiple award-winning author of The Master and Brooklyn, an illuminating look at Irish culture, history, and literature through the lives of the fathers of three of Ireland’s greatest writers–Oscar Wilde’s father, WilliamFrom the multiple award-winning author of The Master and Brooklyn, an illuminating look at Irish culture, history, and literature through the lives of the fathers of three of Ireland’s greatest writers–Oscar Wilde’s father, William Butler Yeats’s father, and James Joyce’s father–“Thrilling, wise, and resonant, this book aptly unites Toibin’s novelistic gifts for psychology and emotional nuance with his talents as a reader and critic, in incomparably elegant prose” (The New York Times Book Review).
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Colm Toibin begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university and where three Irish literary giants came of age. Oscar Wilde, writing about his relationship with his father stated: “Whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind…you loathed each other not because you were so different but because you were so alike.” W.B. Yeats wrote of his father, a painter: “It is this infirmity of will which has prevented him from finishing his pictures. The qualities I think necessary to success in art or life seemed to him egotism.” James’s father was perhaps the most quintessentially Irish, widely loved, garrulous, a singer, and drinker with a volatile temper, who drove his son from Ireland.
“An entertaining and revelatory book about the vexed relationships between these three pairs of difficult fathers and their difficult sons” (The Wall Street Journal), Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illustrates the surprising ways these fathers surface in the work of their sons. “As charming as [they are] illuminating, these stories of fathers and sons provide a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius” (Bookpage). Toibin recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors. “This immersive book holds literary scholarship to be a heartfelt, heavenly pursuit” (The Washington Post). -
All the Lives I Want
- By: Alana Massey
- Narrator: Alana Massey
- Length: 5 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 07, 2017
- Language: English
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3.65(482 ratings)
3.65(482 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.98 USD“Alana Massey’s prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she’s sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly–so powerfully and cannily–it’s hard to look“Alana Massey’s prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she’s sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly–so powerfully and cannily–it’s hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her.” — Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures–from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears–in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan. Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women–from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil’ Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women’s legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.
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The Bloody Crossroads
- By: Norman Podhoretz
- Narrator: Phillip J. Sawtelle
- Length: 6 hours 46 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
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3.64(8 ratings)
3.64(8 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0016.95 USDThis is a series of essays dealing with authors who stand at “the bloody crossroads: where literature and politics meet.” Why bloody? Because writers’ blood has often been shed when they boldly expressed their opinions, and theirThis is a series of essays dealing with authors who stand at “the bloody crossroads: where literature and politics meet.” Why bloody? Because writers’ blood has often been shed when they boldly expressed their opinions, and their opinions have often influenced political leaders to shed the blood of others.
In his analysis of contemporary writers such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Camus, Podhoretz examines the literary and cultural sweep of the conflict between totalitarianism and the democratic West. He traces the roots of widespread unfriendly attitudes toward the United States and suggests why such opinion holders are misguided and dangerous. He also shows why a peaceful coexistence with the communist regime is nonsense, but neither is war inevitable.
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Figure it Out
- By: Wayne Koestenbaum
- Narrator: Pete Cross
- Length: 6 hours 11 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: October 20, 2020
- Language: English
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3.62(175 ratings)
3.62(175 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.99 USDThrough a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic,Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger.” Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to listeners: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness…Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).
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Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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