eMusic » Book Collections

Discover: Scandinavian Murder Mysteries

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:18:19 +0000

What is it about Scandinavia that inspires so many tales of murder? Actual crime rates in Sweden, Denmark and Norway are historically low (not counting the Vikings, of course), but ever since Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo captivated U.S. readers, mysteries set in far northern Europe have become as ubiquitous as Harlequin romances back when Fabio was still in business. There is and forever will be only one Lizbeth Salander, but the fun of these other books is as clear as glacial runoff.

The detectives — from Jo Nesbo’s alcoholic but always remorseful Harry Hole to Rostlund and Hellestrom’s nostalgic and obsessive Ewert Grens — fall somewhere between Ingmar Bergman antiheroes and Dashiell Hammett private eyes. Like the best literary sleuths, they are brooding, hard-drinking and questioning of self and society, yet committed to justice and egalitarianism (you would never find a discussion of maternity leave in an American mystery). Settings and scenarios are foreign enough to feel exotic to American fans — victims turn up on fjord tour boats or amid fields of summer wheat; police detectives fiercely oppose the death penalty. It’s like a literary trip to Ikea, but these stories don’t require special light bulbs or funny wrenches. And with all that snow and ice, they’re perfect coolers for summer heat.

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Phantom

Jo Nesbo
2012 | Unabridged
Phantom feels like the final chapter of Nesbo's Harry Hole series, which is too bad, because Harry is pretty hot stuff. More psychological and less gory than Nesbo's previous books, Phantom is heartbreaking and pulse-quickening in equal measure. Hole is a recovering alcoholic perpetually falling off the wagon, handsome and difficult — a nice girl's bad boy. The star and scourge of Oslo's corruption-riddled police department, Hole has built his reputation on... catching serial killers. At the conclusion of the previous novel, the terrifying The Snowman, Hole fled Oslo for Hong Kong, hoping to give his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Rakel, and her troubled son ,Oleg, a chance at a normal life. Now Oleg is a teenage junkie who has possibly murdered his best friend in a drug deal gone sour. When Hole comes home to save Oleg, he finds the usual complications: the Russian mafia, tempting society ladies, and his own demons.
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The Stranger

Camilla Lackberg
2013 | Unabridged
Only in Sweden could a writer connect Hansel and Gretel with reality TV and come up with something more fun than either alone. Cutting between the mystery of two lost children and the murder of the heavy-partying reality show star Barbie, the novel follows detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has to find a killer whose motives could be anything from revenge to jealousy to panic. Set in the affluent tourist town of Fjällbacka,... his search takes him through Sweden even as his fiancée, Erica, plans their long-delayed nuptials and cares for their toddler daughter. In one of the more hilariously practical subplots, Erica searches for a wedding dress to suit her postpartum body, deciding that she and Patrik need to eat fewer buns (in every one of these books, the characters constantly eat sticky buns; it's very distracting). The Stranger's conclusion is both creepily satisfying and sentimental.
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Silenced

Kristina Ohlsson
2013 | Unabridged
Every culture has its own particular social issues. In historically homogenous Sweden, immigration rights and the plight of refugees are particularly current concerns. Silenced plays on this obsession, contrasting the story of a murdered liberal minister who hid illegals in his country home with that of his daughters, who have each had their lives and safety changed by their father's activities. Fredrika Bergman, heavily pregnant by her married boyfriend, a former concert... violinist, is one of the primary detectives on the case. As the bodies pile up and the moral questions multiply, Fredrika and the other members of her team struggle to find the truth. Ohlsson's characters are as strong as her plot twists, making Silenced particularly satisfying.
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Invisible Murder

Agnete Friis
2012 | Unabridged
Set in Copenhagen and Budapest, Invisible Murder is another book about the immigration issue. Nurse Nina Borg helps illegal immigrants who have fallen between the cracks of Sweden's refugee "problem." One night she is called to tend to a sick child in a hideaway on the far outskirts of town. Of course, the first child is only the beginning, and soon Nina risks her marriage, her already tenuous relationship with her teenage... daughter, and her professional status to help them. Meanwhile, a crew of homegrown criminals meets up with Tomas, a Hungarian Roma teenager. The fall of the Soviet Union has left him with some shady opportunities, and now he's trying to get that big score, the one that will pull his family out of poverty. When he steals his brother Sandor's passport, things start to go horribly wrong, as mistaken identities compound and more hidden Roma fall ill. Invisible Murder's plotting can be overly complicated, but the characters and detail pull the reader along.
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Cell 8

Börge Hellström
2013 | Unabridged
The members of Stockholm's police department have learned to both appreciate and ignore detective Ewert Grens. Morose, phlegmatic, obsessed with the singer Siw Malmkvist (Sweden's answer to Connie Francis), Ewert's emotional clock stopped the day he ran over his young wife's head with his car. Since then, he's become an excellent detective, but an intractable bastard, compulsively visiting his brain-damaged sweetheart at her convalescent home, defying criminals and prosecutors in equal measure.... Cell 8 is the third in the Grens series, and as in the others, the authors expand his purview to political and moral questions beyond Sweden's borders.

John Schwartz's case initially attracts Grens's attention because it involves a head injury — Schwartz, a musician, attacked a man whom he saw molesting a young woman on the dance floor. Soon, Schwartz's true identity becomes known: He was on death row in a U.S. prison and somehow escaped. Rostlund and Hellstrom present an interesting dilemma: Grens and his team must square their abhorrence of America's criminal justice system with their duties as sworn officers of the law.
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Martin Beck: Roseanna

Maj Sjöwall
2013 | Dramatization
Henning Mankell, author of the rightly acclaimed Wallander series, cites Sjöwall and Wahlöö as his literary progenitors, the first of the great Swedish crime writers. Roseanna was published in 1965, and is the first in a series starring detective Martin Beck. Beck's empty marriage and suburban malaise would fit in on Mad Men; he's post-war in an almost American way. The victim, a young American tourist and sexual libertine, is brutally raped... and murdered while on a cruise of Sweden's fjords. In spite (or perhaps because of) Beck's personal problems, he keeps pursuing the killer, doggedly refusing to declare Roseanna's murder cold. Beck also resists moralizing over her sexual freedom, reminding contemporary readers that Sweden was a land of sexual "health" while Americans languished in the prudish Eisenhower era. It's probably thanks to the current Nordic crime fiction trend that Sjöwall and Wahlöö's series has been reissued. Thanks, Dragon Tattoo fans!
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The Luck of the Fictional

eMusic Editorial Staff — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:43:38 +0000

We’ve all heard about the luck of the Irish, that mythological good fortune that clings to the Emerald Isle and all of its inhabitants. But we’d wager that the luckiest people around aren’t Irish at all…nor are they, technically, people. Fictional characters have the highest good luck-to-mishaps ratio around, finding themselves in the most impossible of impossible situations and then, just as unexpectedly, coming out unscathed (and maybe even enlightened) on the other end.
There’s something about good fortune that’s intensely appealing to writers, a notoriously down-on-their-luck group, and they can’t help but grant their creations with the deus ex machine they themselves could use so much. Here, we’ve gathered five of our favorite lucky characters, a disparate group connected by a common good fortune.

Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty

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On the Road

Jack Kerouac
2008 | Unabridged
When you’re 15 or 16 and you read On the Road for the first time, no one has ever been luckier than Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they careen from adventure to adventure, taking in women, drugs, and cities like so much fuel to be burned through and discarded. Depending on your own longings and inclinations, you either end up thinking that Sal’s the lucky one — the one with the... modicum of stability and skepticism, the one for whom the road is a choice, not a necessity — or Dean, who, for all the chaos of his life and his eventual descent into madness, bears the mythology of the True Prophet. To revisit Kerouac’s freewheeling epic as an adult is to realize the ways in which, as a kid, you were likely to equate luck with unaccountability, or recklessness, but also to remember how fiercely those old longings once burned. Even if you can no longer think of Sal or Dean as lucky creatures, you realize that you were lucky to have once thought of them that way. — Sara Jaffe
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Brian Robeson

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Hatchet

Gary Paulson
2011 | Unabridged
One might not think of a boy as terribly lucky when the plane he’s on (ferrying him between divorced parents) crashes in the wilderness. However, in many ways, 13-year-old Brian Roberson is lucky: Not only does he survive the crash (the pilot does not), he lands in a forest of plenty. During his 54 days in the wild, Brian learns how to create fire, make shelter, and hunt, all using the titular... hatchet that his mother had just happened to give him right before the trip—luckily, it took place before TSA restrictions went into effect. After a tornado hits Brian’s campsite, he’s able to access the crashed airplane and its survival kit, which includes an emergency transmitter that, happily for Brian, still works. Ultimately, he’s rescued and brought home. If you have to be stranded alone in the woods, having luck on your side certainly helps. — Claire Zulkey
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Piscine Molitor Patel

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Life of Pi

Yann Martel
2013 | Unabridged
First, how lucky is the little boy who has a zookeeper for a father? You always have playmates, you’ve always got something for show and tell, and you’re never bored. However, Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel’s luck momentarily runs out when the freighter that’s ferrying his family and their zoo animals from Japan to Canada sinks, taking his family with it. Lucky for Pi, he manages to escape the shipwreck, along with a... hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger. The animals aren’t terribly lucky— they all, save the tiger, kill each other.But Pi is fortunate enough to survive not just by fishing and obtaining fresh water but because of his experience with animals, as well, for he’s able to train the tiger to refrain from killing him or capsizing the boat. Ultimately, the boat washes up in Mexico and, luckily for them, both Pi and the tiger survive. — Claire Zulkey
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Raoul Duke

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Hell's Angels

Hunter S. Thompson
2012 | Unabridged
To call Hunter S. Thompson (or his fictional alter ego, Raoul Duke) a daredevil would be a gross understatement. The original gonzo journalist wrote exclusively about situations that would scare ordinary people; if they weren’t scary enough, he’d just add more drugs to the mix. In 1967, when Hell’s Angels was originally published, the eponymous motorcycle gang inspired fear and loathing throughout America. The intrepid Thompson decided to investigate their outlaw lifestyle... and hateful worldview by going to their parties, interviewing them, and getting intoxicated alongside them. This electrifying first-person narrative could have resulted in his incarceration or death, but it didn’t, and that alone made Thompson a very lucky man.

Thompson’s good fortune also came in another form: the creation of Raoul Duke. Toward the end of the book, Thompson names his alter ego as a true outlaw in the vein of Alexander King or Elizabeth Taylor. Duke later took Thompson’s luck and ran with it, emerging as the protagonist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which cemented his (and Thompson’s) status as American rebel icons. — Arianna Stern
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Clarissa Dalloway

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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf
2010 | Unabridged
Mrs. Dalloway, famously, begins with flowers and closes with the eponymous flower-getter entering, finally, the room in which her long-awaited party is being held, while all the loves of her life look upon her entrance with anticipation. Luck — blooming flowers, steadfast admirers — pervades Clarissa Dalloway’s life. But so does pain, and it is that struggle — how to acknowledge oneself as a lucky person in a world so rife with... pain that one has caused and felt and witnessed — that provides one of the book’s central conflicts. Clarissa is lucky to have experienced the love of Peter Walsh and Sally Seton and luckier still to have chosen the simpler, solid Richard over both of them. She is lucky to have experienced the horrors of World War I only indirectly. But one gets the sense throughout the book that Clarissa feels a deep guilt over the luck that has been afforded her. She is lucky is to be alive, but suffers, too, the guilt of living. — Sara Jaffe
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Scientology Showdown

Scott Esposito — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:13:20 +0000

South Park dissed them big time in a memorable episode. You’ve probably had them offer you a free e-meter audit at the mall. And maybe you were even one of those unlucky few who got snookered into watching Battlefield Earth. Yes, Scientology is nutty as hell — but it’s also undeniably fascinating, in the best tradition of American nuttery.

This winter, curious readers were blessed with the publication of two books on the infamously secretive (and litigious) religion. In Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, the New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner offers a comprehensive history of the religion, digging up plenty of dirty secrets in the best tradition of investigative reporting. Beyond Belief, written by Jenna Miscavige Hill — niece of Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige — is in many ways the opposite: It doesn’t have Wright’s historical breadth, but it does give the personal details of day-to-day life in one of the religion’s most high-profile enclaves that Wright’s book lacks.

While Going Clear hits harder than Beyond Belief, both make it clear that Scientology is a frighteningly repressive, conformist institution that has done all sorts of bizarre and nasty things, ranging from the merely immoral to the flagrantly criminal. Just as clear is the fascination that Scientology has held for (possibly) millions of adherents over the years, as well as its undeniable impact on the modern world. You’ll probably be shocked and disgusted after reading these books, but you’ll also come away with an understanding of how Scientology embodies much of the subconsciousness of postwar America, channeling our fascination with science fiction, authoritarianism, and self-help into a religion that represents many of our best and worst tendencies.

Arguably the Most Awful Thing L. Ron Hubbard Did, Out of Many Candidates

By the time you reach the end of Going Clear, you’re likely to think that there’s not a single awful thing that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t do. From adultery to kidnapping, theft, pathological lying and child abuse, it’s all here. It’s hard to choose the single most despicable deed, but this is my pick: With the publication of Dianetics in 1950, Hubbard’s career was finally beginning to take off after a series of failures, and he realized that in order to reach the next level it would be more advantageous if he were not married (at the time he was with his second wife, Sara Northrup Hollister). But he also realized that divorcing his wife would be a bad career move, so he found a simple solution: Hubbard asked Sara to commit suicide to further his career. When Sara, understandably, declined the offer, Hubbard then abducted both her and their child, attempted to have her committed to an insane asylum, and then claimed to the FBI that she was a communist, a serious allegation at the height of the Red Scare. Ultimately, Hubbard was given a divorce due to Sara’s “gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty.” Point: Going Clear.

Strangest Form of Child Abuse

Miscavige Hill was a church member from age seven, when she was asked to sign its infamous “billion-year contract.” (Since all Scientologists know that we live one lifetime after another, forever, just pledging one lifetime is hardly a sign of dedication.) She details all sorts of acts perpetrated on her by the church as a youngster, from brainwashing to hours of manual labor to being forced to stare for hours at Hubbard’s “policies” written on the wall. Here’s one of the oddest: Miscavige Hill attended one of the church’s schools, where classes featured an OCD-level focus on looking up words. As Hubbard explained, all failure to learn derives from not knowing the meaning of words, so it logically follows that students who are having trouble must look up every single word they don’t know. Because of this, Miscavige Hill and many of her fellow students came to dread school, which was essentially hours of searching through the dictionary that made it impossible for her to actually learn anything. Point: Beyond Belief.

Freakiest Tom Cruise Moment

You knew we couldn’t get through a feature on Scientology without mentioning Tom Cruise, right? As Wright reports in Going Clear, Cruise is an admirably dedicated member, even helping so-called pre-clears take the steps necessary to reach the status of “clear,” a major milestone in one’s progress through the church. Wright explains that on one such occasion, Cruise was unable to get a reading from a pre-clear on the church’s e-meter in order to begin a session. In a sweet-but-unseemly moment of personal generosity, he offered the pre-clear a snack from an array of goodies the church provides its Hollywood elite with. As the pre-clear sat in amazement, Cruise offered up all sorts of treats, not realizing that he had been given special treatment and that normal members of the church subsisted on barely adequate, tasteless offerings. The most bizarre of the special dispensations made for Cruise? The church planted a field of wildflowers in its rural California enclave so that he and then-wife Nicole Kidman could run through them, apparently a long-held fantasy for the couple. Point: Going Clear.

Most Heartbreaking Moment

Miscavige Hill makes being raised by the Scientologists sound like something out of 1984: The kids are encouraged to rat out one another; they get “chits” for minor infractions that quickly add up to draconian punishments (a mere three chits means you have to clean your room well enough to survive a white glove inspection); they are made to endure painfully hot saunas and drink cups of vegetable oil for bizarre health rationale; and their school, named “Chinese school” after Hubbard’s experience with the Chinese, was a not-so-subtle form of brainwashing. As she tells it, Miscavige Hill did her best to endure these trials, but she had it worse than most: Her parents were high-ranking functionaries, which meant that she was separated from them for months at a time, and when they did visit they received whitewashed reports of how she had been treated. This all adds up to the book’s saddest moment, when Miscavige Hill and a friend decided to run away. Trying to escape on tiny legs and with their pockets stuffed full of croissants, they have no chance whatsoever, but that still doesn’t stop the grown-ups from humiliating them by blaming the ruination of a song and dance show on the little girls. Maybe instead of pulling out all the stops to punish them, they might have wondered why the girls felt pushed to such a drastic step. Point: Beyond Belief.

Biggest WTF? Moment

In Scientology no one is too young to work, nor, apparently, is anyone too young to do jobs they’re ridiculously unsuited for. Case in point: As a child, Miscavige Hill was appointed to perform medical duties for her fellow Scientologists. Fortunately, Scientology’s cure for most ailments involves eradicating bad thoughts from one’s system and hiding oneself away behind closed doors, à la the 18th century, so there was only so much damage our young doctor could do. But, as Miscavige Hill points out, had one of her “patients” been seriously ill, there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have realized or would have known what to do. She might have had a death or a lifetime disability on her hands — thank God nothing happened. Point: Beyond Belief.

A Few Final Facts About L. Ron

Lawrence Wright has done his research, and it really shows. Among other revelations, he tells us that on numerous occasions Hubbard declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.” (Wright also explains that self-help is only so lucrative, because once you solve a person’s problem you lose their business — but with religion you can have them for their whole life, or a billion years.) He also informs us that upon hearing of the apparent suicide of his son Quentin, he exclaimed, “That little shit has done it to me again!” Even by the time Hubbard was becoming an infirm old man and Miscavige had taken over day-to-day operations of the church, he could still spend: ensconced in a mobile home in California, he reportedly received $1 million from Miscavige every week. Scientology may tell us the secrets of where all our bad thoughts come from, but it surely can’t tell us how an old man in a trailer can spend $1 million every week. Point: Going Clear.

Result: TIE. But there’s enough Scientology wackiness to fill a library, let alone these two books. Both are essential reading.

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Going Clear

Lawrence Wright
2013 | Unabridged
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Beyond Belief

Jenna Miscavige Hill
2013 | Unabridged

eMusic Welcomes Brilliance Audio

eMusic Editorial Staff — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:31:57 +0000

Over the past few months, our audiobooks ranks have been growing even more than usual. The reason? We’re thrilled to welcome our newest publishing partner, Brilliance Audio, who have been creating great audiobooks for nearly 30 years in all genres, from bestsellers like Dean Koontz and Lee Child to award-winning nonfiction and memoirs, classics, and more. The one thing they have in common is a focus on marrying the author’s voice with the narrator, creating a listening experience that’s thrilling or emotional, instructive or inspiring. We’ve rounded up some favorites from the first crop of Brilliance titles below for you to start exploring; there are many more to come.

And the Oscar Should Go To…

Regan Hofmann — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:50:30 +0000

We all know there are no new stories left in the world — hell, Shakespeare himself had trouble coming up with something original 400 years ago when he was writing Romeo and Juliet. But it’s a problem that is running particularly rampant over the movies today. There are the obvious: sequels, reboots, adaptations of the novel based on the Broadway play. But beyond those, every story we’re being told has been told before. Producers just dress them up in different clothes, or reverse the genders, or set it on the moon, and hope nobody notices. So while the Oscars have an official category to recognize adapted screenplays, we’re pulling back the curtain to recognize the debts all the other Oscar nominees owe to literature.

The Master / Going Clear

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Going Clear

Lawrence Wright
2013 | Unabridged
As director Paul Thomas Anderson and Best Supporting Actor nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman have said over and over again in interviews, The Master is not about Scientology. It's a fictional film about the 1950s founding of a cult-like religion by a charismatic writer, an organization based on a potent combination of supernatural backstory, atomic-age science and tight-fisted, often violent control that just happened to call a massive ocean liner home base for... tax evasion purposes. Nope, nothing at all like the Scientology Lawrence Wright describes in his expose, Going Clear. Wright's book is a brilliantly thorough look at the short, fascinating history of the religion, with stunning revelations about the early days of its pompous, fame-obsessed founder, L. Ron Hubbard, that could serve as blueprints for Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd. Was it the fictional character or the real-life leader who invented naval medals to claim he was a decorated war hero? Only one way to find out.
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Zero Dark Thirty / No Easy Day

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No Easy Day

Mark Owen
2012 | Unabridged
While the Kathryn Bigelow-directed Best Picture nominee is ostensibly based on a very well-known true story, its version of the CIA's hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the years after 9/11 has been criticized by everyone from the current CIA director to anti-torture journalists and Republican senator John McCain. Rather than wade into that moral morass, get your facts from one of the guys who was there on the day:... "Mark Owen," a member of the storied SEAL Team 6 who stormed bin Laden's compound in Pakistan and killed him. The book was published under a pseudonym without undergoing review by the Department of Defense in order for "Owen" to tell the full story without redaction; when the author's identity was revealed, a response written by a number of ex-SEALs criticized the author for fame-seeking, but not one of them questioned his version of the events.
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Django Unchained / The Count of Monte Cristo

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The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas
2009 | Unabridged
A man spends years unjustly imprisoned, gains his freedom, then embarks on the single-minded pursuit of the bad dude who stole his woman? Could be Quentin Tarantino's newest genre-skewing blockbuster, sure, but it could just as easily be Alexandre Dumas's classic tale of revenge. While Tarantino's slave Django is freed by Best Supporting Actor nominee Christoph Waltz's German bounty hunter, Dumas's Edmond Dantes is unfairly sentenced to 14 years in prison by... some conniving so-called friends and has to break out on his own. Both set in times of political turbulence, both stories follow our heroes on their epic quests for revenge. But while Django's hunt takes him into a couple of small-time gang fights, Dantes's full vengeance takes years of life under assumed names, accumulating a massive fortune, and ruining the lives of multiple conspirators, driving one to suicide. Even Waltz's character has to acknowledge their mirror-image stories in the film, during a conversation with main baddie Leonardo DiCaprio. Advantage: Dumas.
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No / To Sell Is Human

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To Sell Is Human

Daniel H. Pink
2012 | Unabridged
As Daniel Pink so convincingly explains in his book To Sell is Human, sales is not a distinct industry but a behavior that we all engage every single day. You sell your girlfriend on seeing the movie you want to see. You sell your boss on letting you take over the big project. You sell your kids on eating their broccoli. It's all a question of strategy — and Pink's book is... all about new strategies to go about the old business of selling, no matter what you do. In No, a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, ad exec Rene Saavedra is hired in 1980s Chile to use his marketing and sales savvy to run a referendum campaign against the ruling dictator Augusto Pincochet. His controversial ads focus on selling the public on the image of democratic freedom rather than relying on the soapbox rhetoric of the past, opening up a new world of political messaging we can see today. Looks like he could have taught Pink a thing or two about innovative selling.
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Frankenweenie / The Island of Dr. Moreau

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The Island of Doctor Moreau

H.G. Wells
2008 | Unabridged
Of course Tim Burton's Best Animated Feature-nominated stop-motion kids' romp is based on Mary Shelley's granddaddy of corpse-reanimating horror stories, Frankenstein. But take a step back and you'll see that this tale of a young boy whose success at reanimating his dearly departed dog, Sparky, leads the neighborhood kids to try their hand at playing god with their pets, creating a pack of mutated monsters who wreak havoc on the town,... owes a lot to H.G. Wells's early grotesquerie, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Rather than by accident, Moreau's half-animal, half-human monsters, the Beast Folk, are created in the cold name of science. But both tales have the same, powerful message: Don't mess with nature, or nature will mess you up. Unless it's to get your best friend back, that is.
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Youthful Fumblings: A Pre-Sexual Revolution Valentine’s Day

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:16:07 +0000

The late great British poet Philip Larkin once wrote: “Sexual intercourse began/ In 1963/ (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP.” In other words, before the ’60s really hit, sex between consenting, possibly madly in love young people, was furtive, fumbling and shameful — even if it was also hot. In this collection, listen up for cringeworthy boudoir scenes and the euphoria of new freedom. From premature ejaculation to creepy nicknames to diarrhea, happy Valentine’s Day.

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Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth
2008 | Unabridged
Before becoming the Grand Old Man of American literature, Philip Roth built his career on chronicling the sexual frustrations of the Jewish man (see Portnoy's Complaint — the protagonist infamously masturbates with a piece of liver!). Goodbye Columbus was his first book, including short stories as well as the title novella about Brenda Patimkin, the perfect Jewish princess and Neil Klugman, her swain from the wrong side of the (New Jersey) tracks.... Theirs is a doomed love, from the first mention of Brenda's nose job to silent lovemaking by the flickering shadows of her family's basement rec room TV to Neil's extravagantly loose bowels brought on by overconsumption of plums and cherries from the Patimkins' designated "fruit refrigerator." Romeo and Juliet they're not, but the tragedy is just as clear: Assimilation is stronger than passion. And too many unwashed nectarines can really catch up on a guy.
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The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis
2010 | Unabridged
Oh, Martin Amis, you are the only man in the world who can detail the sexual misadventures of British college kids in 1970 and make the reader feel dirty about Jane Austen. The Pregnant Widow's plot is classic love triangle: Lily loves Keith, who might love Lily but really wants to bed her busty best friend, Scheherazade. Then along comes Gloria Beautyman, whose proto-Kardashian "arse" is already legendary (her bikini bottoms were... "sucked off" in a Jacuzzi). The gang's summer in Tuscany is all very mad dogs and Englishmen, until Keith's obsessive lust becomes his undoing. As the now aging Keith recounts the '70s' downward spiral, Gloria — poor, misunderstood, spectacularly rear-ended — transforms from sexual consolation prize to…wife? Part comedy of manners, part dirty-birdy romp, The Pregnant Widow turns unexpectedly dark, much like the transforming decade it chronicles.
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On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan
2007 | Unabridged
If ever there was a book that argued the case for premarital sex, it is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. In 1962, Florence and Edward are newlyweds, both virgins, and their wedding night is…British. Perhaps that's an unfairly pejorative adjective, considering the Anglophone romps of other books in this group, but this wedding night is definitely of the "Close your eyes and think of England" variety. McEwan's writing is meticulous yet... florid — the candied cherry garnish atop the bride and groom's appetizer cantaloupe becomes a succulent symbol of Edward's desire and Florence's fear. When she gives him the fruit to suck off the tip of her finger, he assumes it indicates her lust, while in fact she is nervously ill with fear. It is a tribute to the writer that the reader feels equally touched by both characters.
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An Education

Lynn Barber
2010 | Unabridged
Lynn Barber was 16 when she met Simon Goldman, an older man of mysterious means and origins. For two years — those crucial pre-sexual revolution years, from 1960-62 — Simon squired Lynn to restaurants and plays, and took her for "dirty weekends" in Paris. Her parents, upright middle-class Brits, seemed not to mind their daughter's slow seduction. Instead, they welcomed Simon into their home and family, until the day all of his... tall stories finally fell apart. Barber's prose is both biting and self-deprecating. When Simon refers to himself as "Bubl" and to his schoolgirl paramour as "Minn," Barber wrings the full sexual ickiness out of the nicknames; deflowering her, she writes, he asks if "Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home." Ewww.
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Miss O'Dell

Chris O'Dell
2009 | Unabridged
On the other side of the decade — from the late '60s through the even more free-lovin'
'70s — is Miss O'Dell. Now 20 years sober, O'Dell recalls her days of working for the Beatles' Apple Records and "assisting" the Rolling Stones (finding girls for Mick to bed — herself included — and scoring drugs for Keith). Longtime best friends with Pattie Boyd, she was present when George Harrison lost Boyd to his... friend Eric Clapton. And O'Dell herself slept with Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and…Was she a groupie? Well, when it comes to the mores of Sexual Revolution (mis)behavior, is that even a relevant question? Unlike the fictional heroines of Amis, McEwan, and Roth, O'Dell is not overtly symbolic. Like Lynn Barber, she was just a girl —one who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right people: post 1963, after the Beatles' first LP.
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eMusic’s Best Audiobooks of 2012

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:05:37 +0000

A good book is a funny thing. Sometimes we know from page 1 that a book is going to be a classic, while others are a slow burn, and we’ve made it through to the end – perhaps a few times – before we realize we just can’t stop reliving that one climactic scene or fixating on a turn of phrase.

Over the course of 2012, this happened to us a lot. Most of our favorite books were slow-burn stunners, ones that woke us up in the middle of the night weeks later. There were a few showpieces and, for once, a few books that deserved every second of the publicity they received. By December we were walking around brimming with all of the fantastic books we’ve read – like burning sage, this list is a cleansing opportunity to let them all go and get ready for next year.

With only 40 slots to fill, it was inevitable that some great books got left off, and we hope you’ll fill in the gaps with your favorites in the comments. Here are our best books of 2012.

40. David Levithan, Every Day

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Every Day

David Levithan
2012 | Unabridged
David Levithan has spent the last 10 years writing about teenagers in love in many different forms — from the whirlwind angst of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist to the sensitive happy-go-lucky treatment of gay teen life in Boy Meets Boy. His most recent novel complicates the theme, following A, a character who wakes up inside a different person's body every morning and must learn to live their life... without disruption before starting over again the next day. Falling in love with Rhiannon upends all of A's coping mechanisms, as he foregoes normalcy to be with her every day. Meanwhile, her reciprocation questions both the characters' and our deep-seated beliefs about attraction, sexuality. The result is a beautifully crafted allegory for the confused, all-consuming, thrilling, baffling nature of first love.
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39. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon
2012 | Unabridged
After five long years, Michael Chabon came back with this sweeping novel of the collision between nostalgia and progress in the borderlands between historically black Oakland and hippie-white Berkeley. With a jazz-funk soundtrack, a cameo appearance from soon-to-be President Obama, and the creation of the greatest black action hero since Shaft, no novel has had such a deep respect for the way pop culture shapes our identities since High Fidelity.

38. Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Mark Leyner
2012 | Unabridged
It was the mid-’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.
In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher,... but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.
The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.
In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.
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37. Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint

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Salvation of a Saint

Keigo Higashino
2012 | Unabridged
It seems as if Japanese detective novels as a whole are more finely crafted than their American counterparts, with a flair for bone-dry absurdity and psychological twists that would seem forced in less skilled hands. Case in point: Keigo Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, the latest installment in the adventures of Detective Galileo, an erstwhile physics professor who made his first appearance in The Devotion of Suspect X. Galileo's calculations point... the police in ever-more-preposterous directions as they try to unravel the murder of a philandering CEO. The minutiae of modern Japanese urban life coupled with astonishing flights of logical speculation combine to make a truly gripping, original thriller.
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36. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Maria Semple
2012 | Unabridged
The story of a family of flawed geniuses, written as a semi-epistolary novel in diary entries, letters, fragments of conversations, and government reports, Where'd You Go, Bernadette could easily veer into uber-twee Wes Anderson territory; instead, it's a sharp, hilarious delight made even better by one of the best adult-playing-teenager narrations we've ever heard. It helps that author Maria Semple is a longtime comedy writer — most recently for the beloved Arrested... Development —and that the story is a searing satire of life in Seattle.
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35. Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

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Hope: A Tragedy

Shalom Auslander
2012 | Unabridged
The title of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is as tersely comic as the prose it contains. If a previous book of short stories (Beware of God) suggested that the author might deserve a place within the hallowed tradition of literary Jewish pessimists, his newest effort confirms it. Hope, a gutsy book with a gutsy premise – begins when a man named Solomon Kugel hears tapping noises coming from his attic. Kugel follows... the sounds and discovers a living, elderly Anne Frank residing in the uppermost reaches of his farmhouse in upstate New York. She’s working on a novel; what Kugel heard was the typewriter.
To this living arrangement, add one tyrannical hypochondriac of a mother, one semi-sympathetic wife and one toddler. Then stir. The result is a satire that transcends its clever conceit thanks to Auslander’s unmistakable voice. That voice, incidentally, is one that some listeners will recognize from This American Life, where the writer often pops up with stories that bridge the territory between soul-crumpling and hilarious. What make for a brilliant radio piece, it turns out – economy, rhythm, stylishness without frippery – make for an equally beguiling novel.
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34. Richard Zacks, Island of Vice

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Island of Vice

Richard Zacks
2012 | Unabridged
Island of Vice is like a greatest hits of the tropes of historical nonfiction; you've got a skeptical look at Victorian mores, an investigation of the seamy underbelly of a city, an age-old struggle that still echoes today, and a beloved historical figure playing an unexpected role. Like Rudy Giuliani a century later, it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt spent years attempting to clean up New York, which was apparently nothing but... brothels and opium dens in the 1890s. Roosevelt was New York police commissioner at the time, and his attempts were mostly thwarted by Byzantine regulations and double standards. A compelling portrait of a town at a turning point, the book moves quickly along, buoyed by anecdotes and letter excerpts that add levity and character to the essential plot.
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33. James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress

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The Cocktail Waitress

James Cain
2012 | Unabridged
OK, so this one's kind of a cheat. James M. Cain, the classic noir author, wrote The Cocktail Waitress in the 1970s, right before his death. But the novel languished in fragments for 30-plus years, and was only just assembled and published this year by intrepid editors, so we get to count it as one of the best books of 2012. While it's not Cain's best (with Mildred Pierce and ... href="http://www.emusic.com/book/james-m-cain/the-postman-always-rings-twice/10026306/">The Postman Always Rings Twice just a few of his many, it's a tough crowd to compete in), the master of dark, moody suspense still looms large over contemporary mystery authors.
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32. China Mieville, Railsea

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Railsea

China Mieville
2012 | Unabridged
Moby Dick has retained a particular hold on the global literary imagination in the century-and-a-half since its publishing. Some writers have been seized enough by Melville’s epic to spin off new stories based on its characters, while others have taken on the theme of Ahab’s suicidal single-mindedness to frame new tales of obsession. China Mieville’s Railsea is a new literary heir on the scene: fantastical, post-apocalyptic and, like its predecessor, packed with... equal parts exhilarating chase and incisive reflection on the nature of the chase itself. In this case, the one doing the reflecting is Sham ap Soorap, a bumbling young introvert who finds himself taken on as a doctor’s assistant aboard the Medes, a mole-hunting train on the railsea. In this never-stated, probably-future time, the earth (if it is the earth) is covered with mile after mile of snared and tangled rails, and, like the seamen of yore, those who ride the rails form a culture unto themselves. And, oh yes, I said “mole-hunting” – out of the ground on which rails are laid come all manner of vicious, burrowing creatures, from pesky carnivorous rabbits to vicious ferrets to the bounty of the Medes: the moldywarpe, a bad-tempered giant mole. One particular moldywarpe, an ivory-colored one, no less, has taken the arm of the Medes captain, and it has become the life’s aim – the “philosophy,” as Mieville puts it – of Captain Naphi to track down said moldywarpe and harpoon it to kingdom come. At heart not a hunter but a dreamer, a would-be salvor (salvager of ancient junk), Sham gains a quest of his own when he learns of a place that’s unsullied by the endless snarl and clatter of the rails. Railsea enchants by its language alone, and reader Jonathan Cowley proves expert with Mieville’s invented vocabulary and his rollicking, alliterative sentences. Intended for readers of all ages, Railsea will enchant any reader who understands what it’s like to want something and to burn with the dream to discover it.
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31. J.R. Moehringer, Sutton

30. Alice Munro, Dear Life

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Dear Life

Alice Munro
2012 | Unabridged
Alice Munro has been quietly, guilelessly dominating the field of the short story for nearly 50 years and shows no sign of slowing. Maybe it's her Canadian-ness that keeps her flying below the radar, even after having won PEN, O. Henry, National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker awards. Or maybe it's the finely drawn, intimate quality of her work – no showy flights of language, no mystical beings or tricksy maybe-real-maybe-imagined... characters, just people writ small living lives that are at once infinitely relatable and emotionally universal. This collection is no exception, which is to say that it is essential reading.
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29. Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Etgar Keret
2012 | Unabridged
It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret’s collection a delight; it’s 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there’s a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who’s who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci and Neal Stephenson, Keret’s stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely... different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions — where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.
Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation’s psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In “Healthy Start,” one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one’s lover? Keret’s stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.
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28. Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black

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How to Be Black

Baratunde Thurston
2012 | Unabridged
Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly... accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.
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27. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo
2012 | Unabridged
Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning work could be described as Slumdog Millionaire without the Bollywood flash, but that would be missing the point. Yes, it's an unblinking look at life in the Mumbai slums, but it's at once much bigger and much smaller than that. It's a piece of journalism that shows how the unfathomable economic disparity of modern India is complicated by a new myth of upward mobility, drawing into relief... the concept of the American Dream and its own devastating effects. It's also a personal story of a handful of people; some happy, some not, living mundane lives and affected by grand tragedy. Not just pawns in a reporter's chess game, they are allowed to exist on the page in all of their complicated, human nature — a rare feat, indeed.
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26. John Hodgman, That Is All

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That Is All

John Hodgman
2012 | Unabridged
John Hodgman, Daily Show Resident Expert and celebrity glasses-wearer, completes his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge with this compendium of fake facts about wine and sports, tips on being a deranged millionaire and how the world will end. More comedy album than straightforward audiobook, That Is All features celebrity cameos from Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Rachel Maddow and more, skits and original music. Fans of Hodgman’s highly formatted, stylized print books may... hesitate about listening to what is essentially a book of lists and trivia, but wonder no more — by the time you get to the audio wine tasting, you’ll be hooked.
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25. Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker
2012 | Unabridged
What if you woke up one morning to discover that the earth’s rotation had begun mysteriously slowing overnight? And what if you were also a sixth grader, unable to do anything but watch while your world changed around you? This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s compelling debut novel, in which 12-year-old Julia tries to navigate the difficulties of middle school in a world where tides, fault lines and magnetic fields... have all gone awry; days stretch into weeks; and animals and plants are dying en masse.
If The Age of Miracles were a standard-issue sci-fi yarn, the story would center on the race against time to save Earth from certain doom. Instead, Julia is stuck in her California suburb, the lengthening days and nights merely one more uncontrollable thing. So what if the slowing forewarns the end of all human existence? It’s exactly as incomprehensible and inevitable as adolescence itself. The earth is slowing down, and Julia’s best friend will barely speak to her anymore; the birds are falling dead from the skies and her parents’ marriage is falling apart; people are crazy and people are crazy.
The story is narrated not by adolescent Julia, but rather by a 20-something Julia, recalling the events of that pivotal summer. “I remember,” she says, often, and, “That was the last time.” She is prone to pensive, melancholic metaphor: After the slowing, she says, “We all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?” Hers is that wistful nostalgia earned only by time, one in which the meaning of small things is acquired in hindsight. Would you watch more closely the last bird you ever saw in flight? Would you say goodbye to the people you love?
Despite its dystopian urgencies, the book moves quietly, softly, driven by characters rather than plot: a state of affairs both odd and fascinating for a book whose central premise conflates adolescence and apocalypse. But then, how does adolescence end? There is no satisfying denouement. There is only the gradual slide of one self into another, and the matching realization that one’s world will never again be quite the same.
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24. Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

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Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

Timothy Egan
2012 | Unabridged
In the hierarchy of historical eras, turn-of-the-century America is about as low as it gets; it's all dusty frontiersmen and hoop skirts, long stretches of open country and stilted Victorian talk from politicians with ludicrous facial hair. Not so for Timothy Egan, the gutsiest, most balls-to-the-wall chronicler of the American experience writing today. Winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, Egan has a knack for... cutting through the flowered speech and dirt to craft page-turners from decades of bureaucratic red tape. Short Nights is a biography of a little-known photographer who set out to, grandiosely, document every Native American nation on the continent. Surprise, he failed, and his failures both professional and personal make for a compelling narrative of a country in flux.
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23. Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

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Shine Shine Shine

Lydia Netzer
2012 | Unabridged
Lydia Netzer creates a sci-fi folk tale with her debut novel, weaving together an epic love story that transcends (literal) space and time, vibrant characters, and, naturally, robots.
In Shine Shine Shine, Sunny, a congenitally bald little girl and Maxon, an autistic boy, fall in love and eventually get married. Flash-forward to the future, when Maxon becomes an astronaut on a risky, high-profile mission to the moon while Sunny remains at home, raising... their lovably robotic son, Bubber, gestating their second child, worrying about her dying mother and relinquishing her reliance on wigs as she struggles to maintain a normal life at home. Except that “normal” in this story is so not normal. There’s a recurring theme of learning how to be human and learning how to read emotions that applies sweetly to both the robots and the humans in the book.
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22. Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

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The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
2012 | Unabridged
We thought we were done with apocalypse novels too, really. But then along came Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which somehow manages to be full of hope and beauty in the midst of the hideous struggle for survival. After an epidemic wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors infected with a deadly virus, our hero Hig spends as much time remembering the good from his former life and admiring the... natural beauty that remains (and in fact flourishes) in civilization's absence as he does fighting off marauders and searching in vain for friends in a savage wasteland. It's a potent reminder to stop and smell the roses — even if you're not being chased.
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21. David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not

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Both Flesh and Not

David Foster Wallace
2012 | Unabridged
This posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays as published in various outlets over almost 20 years of his prolific career has its faults, as so many posthumous publications do. But while some of the 15 essays included have not aged well, when it works, it’s a reminder of the startling joy that truly great nonfiction The book draws its title from Wallace’s gorgeous essay on tennis phenomenon Roger Federer, which... opens the collection and which showcases his most dexterous moves as a writer — the breathtaking descriptive prose, the philosophically rigorous language interrupted by funny, humane, and surprising colloquialisms. It’s a rigorous and pleasing read, one that offers satisfactions and challenges both (as the title implies) material and abstract.
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20. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

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Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan
2012 | Unabridged
We’ll go on record as never having been particular Ian McEwan fans, especially when he writes female characters. Maybe that’s why Sweet Tooth’s Serena Frome is such a delight – her simultaneous arrogance and palpable need for guidance post-Cambridge will ring painfully true for anyone who was once a know-it-all college graduate. Tied up in her personal development is a labyrinth of a story about the crumbling British espionage system in the... 1970s, at the end of the empire, as the old boys’ methods lost favor and they scrambled to stay current. While the gimmick of the final chapter’s reveal is bold choice that, understandably, lost this book a lot of fans, it’s a charming twist that belies the book’s real strength: as a fairy tale of a young woman’s self-discovery.
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19. Zadie Smith, NW

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NW

Zadie Smith
2012 | Unabridged
The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (nee Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and... Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”
NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.
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18. Paul French, Midnight in Peking

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Midnight in Peking

Paul French
2012 | Unabridged
It’s very easy to write a decent true crime story, and very difficult to write a great one. Paul French’s Midnight in Peking should be required reading for all who plan on attempting the genre at some point; it’s a remarkably drawn tale of the end of the era of white decadence in the “exotic Orient” circling around the sensational murder of a young British woman in Peking (aka Beijing) in the... 1930s. Government officials from both sides confounded the investigation, which French details for the first time in 80 years. Overwrought and not entirely academic in places, the story is so gripping and evocative that factual vagaries go by unminded.
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17. Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

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How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran
2012 | Unabridged
Since the end of the Riot Grrrl glory days of the early ‘90s, the word “feminist” has somehow made its way back onto the list of slurs thrown like a hot potato at women who talk about gender equity, make uncommon personal grooming decisions or simply speak seriously about anything unpopular. Caitlin Moran, the British essayist who has been writing hilariously opinionated, outspoken, confessional criticism since the age of 16, takes this... regression to task, weaving an appeal for more strident feminists around her formative lessons on femininity. Moran describes it as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a bar stool” — while it is exactly as boozy and profane as that sounds, it’s also more touching, more hilarious and, ultimately, more convincing. Moran may singlehandedly haul feminism off of the scrapheap and back into the public discussion, where it belongs.
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16. Patrick Somerville, This Bright River

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This Bright River

Patrick Somerville
2012 | Unabridged
Patrick Somerville’s fourth book is one of those novels that’s both epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former... high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.
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15. Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

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Sorry Please Thank You

Charles Yu
2012 | Unabridged
Charles Yu is very smart. Some might argue too smart for his own good, but hiding under the formalist gymnastics and technical jargon in the stories in Sorry Please Thank You is a deep well of empathy and tenderness. Toying with sci-fi tropes, Yu turns the genre on its head with a deadpan stare into the heart of modern alienation as he effortlessly describes impossibilities like a machine designed to fulfill one's... greatest desires, a corporation that outsources the experience of pain, and the day-to-day realities of living inside a video game. Full of bleak humor and conceptual absurdities, Sorry Please Thank You is a delight that will surprise you with its ability to inspire some serious soul-searching.
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14. Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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Narcopolis

Jeet Thayil
2012 | Unabridged
If you aren't already convinced that Indian literature is more than tales of colonial bad behavior, languid tropical scenery and upward-striving urchins, stand back and let Jeet Thayil drive the final nail in that coffin. Narcopolis is about Mumbai, yes, but more importantly it's a narrative of addiction, masterfully told from a multitude of perspectives in a beautifully harsh, poetic language. The city's underworld shift from genteel opium dens to the rough... desperation of the heroin trade serves as a mirror for the protagonist's descent, riots in the street serving as a backdrop to his ruin and rebirth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this meticulously crafted book dazzles with its skill without ever feeling forced.
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13. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

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Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel
2012 | Unabridged
In two consecutive books, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, a feat neither Shakespeare nor Showtime could achieve: making the political machinations of the reign of Henry VIII as gripping as a Tom Clancy thriller without resorting to heaving bosoms and bloody murder scenes. Following Thomas Cromwell, Henry's personal fixer who dealt with everything from arranging that first fateful divorce to prosecuting would-be traitors, all the while avenging the murder... of his own mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the novels are relentlessly modern, told entirely in the present tense. Throughout, Mantel weaves in historical detail as effortlessly as she might mention Will & Kate. No wonder Bring Up the Bodies brought Mantel her second Man Booker Prize; we'd put money on the yet-to-be-published third part of the series taking the trifecta.
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12. Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

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A Hologram for the King

Dave Eggers
2012 | Unabridged
Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Eliot “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
The down-on-his-luck... businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.
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11. Louise Erdrich, The Round House

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The Round House

Louise Erdrich
2012 | Unabridged
Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning book is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.
In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe,... voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Couttses must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”
Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, while Farmer’s narration allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.
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10. Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Carol Rifka Brunt
2012 | Unabridged
Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her uncle's AIDS-related death in 1980s New York, is an unapologetic tearjerker. It's also a beautifully painted coming-of-age story and a nuanced, intimate portrait of the AIDS epidemic in its early, shadowed days. Protagonist June is caught up between taking care of her late uncle's partner, himself dying, and keeping peace with her family, whose rabid disapproval of their... relationship belies their fear and confusion about the disease. It's easier to blame one person for being the source of infection than to try to grasp the political magnitude of the epidemic's vicious spread and pernicious misinformation; as June uncovers these nuances, she finds herself further and further distanced from her parents, whom she once believed infallible, and from the childhood innocence we all enjoyed once upon a time.
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9. Moshe Kasher, Kasher in the Rye

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Kasher in the Rye

Moshe Kasher
2012 | Unabridged
Crammed into comedian Moshe Kasher's semi-preciously titled memoir are at least four separate, well-wrought memoirs: of being the hearing child of two deaf parents; of the parenting paradigm shift between his mother's secular liberalism and his father's deepening involvement in an orthodox Jewish sect; of growing up white in the predominantly black, relentlessly poor city of Oakland, proving ground for some of the '80s' most brutal, tell-it-like-it-is hip-hop; and of becoming an... addict at age 13, hitting rock bottom before his senior year of high school. Somehow Kasher manages to tell all of these stories well, with a hard self-awareness that leaves no room for the self-pity that could (rightfully) permeate the exposure of such painful experiences. Shot through with Kasher's dry wit and featuring some truly laugh-out-loud scenes, Kasher in the Rye is the disabled/religious/racial addiction memoir you didn't know the world needed.
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8. Cheryl Strayed, Wild

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Wild

Cheryl Strayed
2012 | Unabridged
At 26 years old, Cheryl Strayed was lost: A recent divorcee (and recent/former heroin user), she couldn't find her way out of a years-long funk after losing her mom to cancer. So she decided to do what very few 26-year-olds would think to do: got rid of all her things and with little hiking experience set off on a solo, 1,100-mile trek through the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In... Wild, Strayed beautifully tells the story of her adventure with Monster, her over-stuffed backpack, and the people she meets on the trail — most importantly, herself.
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7. Lauren Groff, Arcadia

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Arcadia

Lauren Groff
2012 | Unabridged
All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.
Still, for little Bit Stone, the first... kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.
Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.
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6. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

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Mortality

Christopher Hitchens
2012 | Unabridged
Originally published as a series of extended essays in Vanity Fair, the seven chapters that make up the meat of Mortality are vintage Christopher Hitchens: robustly philosophical, witty, blunt. The astonishing part is that their subject is Hitchens' own impending death. Begun shortly after his diagnosis with esophageal cancer and ending with a chapter of fragments left unfinished on his deathbed 18 months later, Mortality is mostly memoir, a clear-eyed self-assessment threaded... through with the stubborn refusal to resort to exceptionalism or fatalism. While dying with dignity has long been upheld as the ideal way to go, Mortality shows there's an even more desirable end: death with honesty.
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5. Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

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The Middlesteins

Jami Attenberg
2012 | Unabridged
In the depths of the obesity crisis, beset on all sides as we are by first ladies urging healthy habits and celebrity chefs revealing the hidden costs of fast food, it takes serious bravery to write about eating as lovingly as Jami Attenberg does in The Middlesteins. At the center of this family drama/black comedy is Edie Middlestein, whose relationship with food has been bringing her unequivocal joy from the liverwurst of... her childhood to the suburban Chinese food of her present. Diabetic, under strict orders to change her habits or die, Edie continues to eat in a noble, grandiose way. With her waffling, doubting husband gone and her grown children dealing with their own unhappinesses, Edie is free to draw a future for herself we're taught to believe is pitiable – until you see how happy it makes her. An entertaining portrait of suburban Jewish life and an eater's rhapsody, The Middlesteins' Edie may just be the most heroic character of the year.
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4. Anthony Shadid, House of Stone

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House of Stone

Anthony Shadid
2012 | Unabridged
It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone; strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent,... Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.
House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.
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3. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

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The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver
2012 | Unabridged
There's no question about it: Nate Silver is this year's big winner. With the possibility of a sophomore slump gleefully held over his second presidential election at the helm of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, by pundits from both sides of the spectrum, Silver had a lot riding on his math. Thankfully, as he elaborates in his book, The Signal and the Noise, that math is basically foolproof. While the book is... not the victory lap he so richly deserves, it's just like Silver to give us something better, a measured call for continued logic in all arenas of speculation, from weather to finance to, yes, politics. As public debate becomes less about fact than about manufacturing drama, this call for open-eyed analysis may be our last hope for sanity.
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2. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz
2012 | Unabridged
Some books, like some songs and movies, can be so achingly sad they’re pleasurable, and that’s the perfect balance Junot Diaz strikes with This Is How You Lose Her. The melancholy and pain of the displacement, romantic breakups and losses of loved ones in Diaz’s collection of loosely connected short love stories is balanced out perfectly by the writing’s snappy dialogue, dark wit and frank sexuality.
Diaz fans will recognize Yunior, the subject... of several of the stories, from Diaz’s first collection, Drown, as well as from parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz reads his own work in the audiobook, lending an even more distinctive tone to some already memorable narrative voices. Latin idioms are sprinkled throughout the stories with only context in the way of explanation, making the listener feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on a hyper-intelligent, vulgar person telling a really good story – to interrupt for clarification would throw things off entirely.
This Is How You Lose Her will make listeners appreciate the simple joys of friends, lovers, work and the home, as well as the poetry that can be found when any of those can fall into discord.
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1. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn
2012 | Unabridged
We will confess to reading the print version of Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, before listening to the audio version, tearing through it hungrily one lost weekend, feeling resentful of all interruptions, staying up later than usual to read just one more chapter. It is a book of twists and turns — page after page keeps the reader enthralled — but at the end of the book, when all is revealed... in this tale of a marriage gone awry with the wife gone missing, there’s a sensation of finally knowing everything at last. All the mysteries were revealed — why would one need to listen to the audiobook?
And yet Gone Girl — a New York Times bestseller that has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company — is so engaging and funny, and the narrators Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne do such a knock-out job with the quick-witted prose, that it was simple to get sucked right back into the story all over again. Time flies with this audiobook, just as it did with the novel. Start listening, and suddenly it will be two days later.
As for the plot, well, this is one of those books the less said, the better, so as to not reveal too much to the reader. But if we must: It is about Nick and Amy Dunne, two writers, late of New York, who move to North Carthage, Missouri, when the money runs out. Nick says of himself, “I have a face you want to punch.” Amy used to make up quizzes for women’s magazines, and is the child of two famous children’s book authors who made a fortune off writing about her. Gone Girl alternates between their perspectives. And whether you love them or hate them (and you will likely feel all kinds of emotions with this book), you will not stop listening until you get to the very end.
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2012′s Overlooked Books

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:24:45 +0000

When you read as much as we do, it’s inevitable that some of our favorite books will come and go without so much as a whimper of recognition, much less the great bang they deserve. Critical praise is never a great predictor of public success — and public success doesn’t always bode well for a book’s critical reception, either. Then there are those books that don’t get much of either, books that might be a little weird, or of a genre that never gets much respect, or that just came out on the wrong day. Whatever the reason, even though the rest of the world passed these books by on the first go-round (frankly, sometimes we did, too), we just can’t stop singing their praises. Here are our favorite unsung gems of 2012, each personally vouched for by one of our writers. It’s always a good time to discover your next favorite book; we’re willing to bet yours will be one of these five.

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Immobility

Brian Evenson
2012 | Unabridged
Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.

Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.

Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito
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Office Girl

Joe Meno
2012 | Unabridged
A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver
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I Am an Executioner

Rajesh Parameswaran
2012 | Unabridged
Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?

"Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson
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When I Was a Child I Read Books

Marilynne Robinson
2012 | Unabridged
Marilynne Robinson's essay collection illuminates what matters to the author about philosophy, literary criticism, U.S. history, and religion. These may sound like heady matters and, indeed, this is not an audiobook for bopping around town doing errands. Read by Robinson herself (in exactly the voice devotees of Housekeeping and Gilead would expect her to have — considered, warm, a tinge of prairie) this is the audiobook to savor on a long solo... car trip, preferably through some wide open spaces, when you've got the time and headspace to contemplate the big questions.

When I Was a Child garnered critical praise upon its release, but I was one of many, I think, who were interested but ultimately turned off by the extent to which the book is informed by Robinson's Christianity. Wrongly so; it turns out that for Robinson, religious belief is not mere dogma. To her, it is an opening up of thought, rather than a circumscribing, and the essays in this volume provide ample evidence to support her belief that religion, like literature and like America itself, is about generosity, wonder, and possibility. — Sara Jaffe
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Zoo

James Patterson
2012 | Unabridged
I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.

The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa
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Five Debut Novelists to Watch in 2013

Scott Esposito — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:23:45 +0000

As we slide gracefully into 2013, here are five first-time novelists who made impressive debuts in 2012. Fitting for the year the Mayans prophesied the world would end, two of these novels deal with the apocalypse, though both are more concerned with our reactions than with the mechanics of destruction. Another one of these debuts is quite magical — what else would you call a child made out of snow? — but reigns it in with beautiful evocations of day-to-day life in a harsh Alaskan setting. And the last two deal with tragedies as American as apple pie: In one, a tour of duty in the Iraq War forever changes a young man, and in the other a wealthy East Coast family slowly unravels in the best tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Liza Klaussmann

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Tigers in Red Weather

Liza Klaussmann
2012 | Unabridged
Perhaps great writing runs in the family: Liza Klaussmann, whose first novel Tigers in Red Weather has been winning raves for its innovative structuring and subtle narration, is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville. Though Klaussmann, like her legendary ancestor, found literary inspiration in Martha's Vineyard, this debut novel is much more reminiscent of another American giant: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather than write a novel about the epic exploits of an insane... whaler, Klaussmann has instead told a riveting, insightful story of a gin-soaked, upper-crust brood crumbling beneath the pressure of forging a family narrative. In order to embody how competing truths pull this family apart, Klaussmann narrates the novel in five sections, each from the perspective of a different family member. The result is a complex narrative that artfully embodies the totality of family life.

Klaussmann, a longtime New York Times journalist, moved to London in 2008 to pursue a creative writing degree, and this is the first fruit of that labor. With the accolades Tigers has been racking up, it's hardly going to be her last — after an eight-way bidding war for the book, Klaussmann was reportedly offered a six-figure contract for two novels, of which Tigers is the first. The second is said to deal with artists in 1920s France and will also owe a debt to Fitzgerald, whom Klaussmann has recognized as a major influence.
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Peter Heller

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The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
2012 | Unabridged
As a longtime contributor to NPR, Outside Magazine, and Men's Journal, Peter Heller is used to describing some of the most amazing things on Earth. He's explored Tsangpo Gorge in China (three times as deep as the Grand Canyon) and interdicted Japanese whalers with an eco-pirate ship in Antarctica. Now, with The Dog Stars, Heller enters the realm of fiction in order to write about something not even an adventurer like him... can see firsthand: a post-apocalyptic world in which a killer flu has eliminated 99 percent of humanity and climate change has utterly transformed the environment.

No doubt Heller would relish the challenge of going it alone after the apocalypse, but hopefully he wouldn't be quite as gruff as his protagonist, Hig, who feeds human carcasses to his pet dog and commits murder from time to time. Hig flies a small airplane, and one day receives a signal from far away – farther away, in fact, than he could fly with enough gas for the return trip. He is thus faced with a decision: live out his years in relative solitude or risk seeing what's left (if anything) of humanity.

With an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop and two books of poetry on the way, The Dog Stars won't be Heller's last venture outside the realm of nonfiction. He told the Denver Post that he's halfway through a second novel, adding, "Once you start making it up, there's no going back." And with raves from everyone from Oprah to Junot Diaz, how could a thrill-seeker like Heller turn down the challenge of exceeding his fiction debut?
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Eowyn Ivey

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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey
2012 | Unabridged
With a first name inspired by a character from Lord of the Rings, it's hardly surprising that Eowyn Ivey tends toward the fantastical; the seed for her first novel was planted by a Russian fairy tale. That book has since topped bestseller lists, been translated into more than 20 languages and was a Washington Post Notable Book for 2012. Ivey here uses her decade as a journalist for the Frontiersman, as well... as her experiences shooting moose and raising turkeys in Alaska's wilds, to imbue The Snow Child with an intimate understanding of life in cold climates. These gritty details ground a sometimes magical story of parents who try to construct a daughter out of snow. Ivey's descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness — equal parts beautiful and deadly — set this book apart, as does her carefully balanced plot, which skips over sentimentality in favor of pathos and subtle surrealism.

Ivey's already at work on a second novel, concerning three men who attempt to travel up Alaska's Copper River in the 19th century. She's said that it will be "more adventurous and more epic," than The Snow Child. That's easy to believe: She and her husband traveled 100 miles of the river — the United States's tenth largest — in an inflatable raft in order to research the forbidding terrain. It's that kind of deep, personal knowledge of the land that will likely make Ivey's second book stand out as much as her first.
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Kevin Powers

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The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers
2012 | Unabridged
Garnering a National Book Award nomination and a fat advance from David Foster Wallace's legendary editor, Michael Pietsch, isn't too bad for a first novel. Drawing on Kevin Powers's 2004-05 tour of duty in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is an in-your-face account of the war that centers around a young man who's just trying to keep up with the chaos. It's a tall order for a soldier who got beat up in... high school for reading poetry, and here Powers makes it into a lyrical, singular coming-of-age in the most demanding crucible imaginable. Though his next book likely won't draw so directly on his war experience, look to Powers, who was a Michener Fellow in Poetry while earning his MFA at the University of Texas at Austin, to again utilize his capacity for language and shifting narration to great effect. With Pietsch on the editorial duties and Powers just 32 years old, the sky's the limit.
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Karen Thompson Walker

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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker
2012 | Unabridged
Random House reportedly paid $1 million for this debut from Simon and Schuster editor-turned-novelist Karen Walker, who plugged away at The Age of Miracles in the morning before work for three years. In this spare, well-observed novel, the rotation of the Earth is slowing, forcing massive changes to humanity's way of life. Walker here steps confidently into the decade-old trend of American authors writing novels about the apocalypse, yet, like Tom Perrotta's... The Leftovers, Walker is less concerned with the fire and brimstone of the end times than with how such a fundamental event would impact daily life; the voice of her 11-year-old narrator casually blends observations about the trials of growing up with ones about dealing with much more cosmic happenings.

In interviews, Walker has admitted to being hard at work on a follow-up to her bestselling debut, but she's reticent to give details out of superstition. Regardless of just what she's up to (Walker has said it will, like Miracles, deal with "people facing an extreme situation" and will feature "science fiction elements"), with a husband enrolled in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she'll be in the right environment to produce a fitting follow-up.
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Discover: The Books We’re Giving Thanks For

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:58:55 +0000

The whole “giving thanks” part of Thanksgiving rarely gets the attention it deserves. Too often it’s wedged into an already overlong family meal by your aunt Maude, who insists on putting everyone around the table on the spot, or it’s co-opted by jewelry commercials that are prematurely, maddeningly, already hustling Christmas gifts. Under those circumstances, it can be hard to get into the thankful spirit. But in a holiday based on a questionable colonial history and a remarkably unhealthy binge-and-gorge cycle, the reminder to take full stock of all you’ve got going for you is pretty special, and worth observing.

Books are something we are always, always thankful for. Over the years, we have found books that have changed our worldview, opened doors and reminded us that no matter what we’re going through, we’re not alone. When you have a moment to yourself this week, maybe while traveling to the aforementioned family meal or while reveling in the quiet afterward, queue up a book and try exercising some gratitude. Need some inspiration? This year, we’re giving thanks for:

A New Silver Age of Reason

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The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver
2012 | Unabridged
The age-old struggle between brainiac fact-huggers and go-wit-yer-gut soothsayers rages on, but I'm grateful to find that, at least right now, the good guys appear to be winning. Pundits who, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, predicted a Romney landslide are still licking their wounds after on-air meltdowns, while author/New York Times blogger/sabermetric poll interpreter Nate Silver is taking his best-selling The Signal and the Noise on a victory book tour. He... deserves it, and we deserve him, after keeping our heads as elderly frat-boy candidates lined up to volunteer dubious factoids about reproduction, climate change, and other indisputable points of science. I'm not saying we're definitely in a new age of enlightenment, but Silver's entertaining dissections – of punditry, yes, but also of chess, poker, earthquake analysis, et al. – have given me hope that logic is making some real headway. Of course, I might be deluding myself. People keep on letting me down. But not you, statistics. You've always got my back. â€”Pat Rapa
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Ambitious Parents

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Little Women

Louisa May Alcott
2012 | Unabridged
My mother tried to read me Louisa May Alcott's Little Women when I was two. I remember it, vaguely. Her edition was from her girlhood, one of those volumes nestled in a cardboard slipcover, color plates each lined with a translucent sheet. I was too little then for a chapter book, let alone the story of the four March sisters and their patient Marmee. But I eventually read Little Women, then repeatedly... read it through the years – even in a college Women's Studies seminar; my shaven-headed classmates were surprised by how much they liked it.

Did Alcott inspire my love of reading, my desire to be a writer? Probably. What about having a mother who thought her toddler needed Little Women? That pushed me over the edge. Now I have my own two-year-old daughter. She'll sit patiently enough for Where the Wild Things Are, but I can't imagine making it through a page of Alcott. I have my mother's old edition on my shelf, though. I'll try soon. â€”Elizabeth Isadora Gold
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Happy Endings

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Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories

Patricia Highsmith
2011 | Unabridged
On the one hand, Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (first published pseudonymously in 1952) has all the trappings of a pre-Stonewall lesbian pulp novel. There's plenty of abjection, discrimination, and closeted identity to go around, as ingenue shopgirl Therese falls head over heels for wealthy, married Carol. Twenty-first-century queer readers can be grateful that, today, we can assign names to our desires and speak those names out loud, and that coming... out might not result in being spurned (or worse) by our loved ones. Here's the other thing, though, and it comes with a spoiler alert: The Price of Salt actually has a happy ending. At a time when the gay protagonists in most novels ended up alone or dead, Highsmith's choice to end her novel with Therese and Carol together and in love was a brave and radical act. And that's something to be really grateful for. â€”Sara Jaffe
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Heroines Without Borders

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Dealing with Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede
2008 | Unabridged
The year I was nine, I stumbled upon a copy of Dealing with Dragons at the local library. I started reading it that afternoon and didn't stop until I'd hit the last page. The story was wry, charming and hilarious: a delightful, rollicking adventure about a beautiful princess who is totally exasperated by being a beautiful princess – she'd rather learn Latin and magic and cook cherries jubilee. So she runs away... and arranges to become the official cook and librarian for a local dragon; an arrangement that would have worked out perfectly if only she didn't keep getting bothered by princes determined to "rescue" her, and if only there didn't also seem to be evil, oily wizards wreaking havoc everywhere with nefarious plansâ€¦Before I had the words to know why I was grateful, I was relieved to be able to spend hours lost in a fantasy adventure land where the princess was no distressed damsel, but rather a smart, strong, kickass heroine. Twenty-plus years and hundreds of re-reads later, I'm still thankful. â€”Jess Wilson
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Quiet Acts of Humanity

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Middlemarch

George Eliot
2008 | Unabridged
Whenever I read George Eliot, I come away feeling refreshed and improved as a person. She has helped me reckon with issues that have loomed large in my life, as well as spiritual quandaries that I scarcely recognized before her penetrating insights brought them into view. Give this outstanding audio recording of her most complete, accessible book an hour of your time and you will be hooked by the naive, youthful Dorothea's... foolish decision to marry the aging Casaubon. Contrasting this ill-fated marriage, Eliot gives us the upwardly mobile Lydgate and his attempt to make a wife out of the beautiful but utterly materialistic Rosamond. Rounding out the cast of main characters is the plucky Will Ladislaw, whose maturation over the course of the book must be one of the most satisfying coming-of-age stories ever told.
What Middlemarch makes me most grateful for is its willingness to find the value in the most prosaic of lives – the title isn't Middlemarchfor nothing. Eliot's ability to make their reckonings feel substantial despite the smallness of their town and the anonymity of their struggles drives home the book's core insight: that the battle to live a good life is important, no matter who wages it. â€”Scott Esposito
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Families, Real and Adopted

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I Feel Bad About My Neck

Nora Ephron
2007 | Unabridged
When Nora Ephron passed away in June, her friends spoke of her romantic view of life, as inspirational as her storied career. Among her essay collections (all worth seeking out, as well as her novel, Heartburn), I Feel Bad About My Neck boasts enough bon mots to fill a Zabar's shopping cart. She exults in favorite cookbooks, apartment living, the light on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (better than the West... Side, she says). Like many, I first discovered Nora through her films – autumnal postcards to New York City – and in my years spent living there, I thought of Nora when visiting little Village bakeries or passing the landmark Apthorp condominium building, which she writes about in "Moving On." Listening to Nora narrate, with her warm, knowing voice, she reminds me of a beloved aunt visiting for the holiday, who can't wait to tell you about a great book or delicious new dish. Every conversation with her is a gift. â€”Kate Silver
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Social Distortion

Scott Esposito — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:58:45 +0000

Politics these days can be downright depressing. Congress regularly scores an approval rating in the low teens, and whether you backed Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for the presidency, their prescriptions for what ails us all seemed grim. But whether you think today’s solutions are ineffective or are even worse than the problems, let the truly abominable answers offered in these dystopian novels give you some perspective.

These books will make you cherish what you have as you realize the awful truth: Bad as things can seem, it’s nothing compared to what they might be.

Health Care

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro
2007 | Unabridged
Yes, rising health care costs have left the American worker with declining services and less take-home pay. But consider the truly horrific alternative in Ishiguro's masterful Never Let Me Go. Here, he has conjured a future where human clones are created, raised and tended to as second-class citizens all for the purposes of having their organs harvested to keep the "real" humans healthy. In a twist few novelists could pull off, Ishiguro... narrates this novel from a clone's perspective, giving us a singular, dramatic coming-of-age story that speaks to far more than the evils of genetic engineering run amok. This gripping novel is one of Ishiguro's best, a tragic tale of an impossible search for one's future.
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The War on Women

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Lightning Rods

Helen DeWitt
2011 | Unabridged
DeWitt's novel about a terrible "solution" to sexual harassment is just what satire should be: a madcap premise managed with perfect aplomb that makes sharp commentaries on our society. A down-on-his-luck salesman decides to outfit every office in America with what amounts to a bathroom glory hole, where high-powered men who Get Things Done can sate their sexual desires in lieu of hitting on their secretaries and risking expensive lawsuits. This awful... idea catches on like wildfire, with DeWitt imagining a world where this solution has become an institution. Ably playing both sides of the gender divide, DeWitt spares no one, showing how opportunistic women eagerly abuse this opportunity for empowerment. Lightning Rods' hilarious prose and giddy inventions are not to be missed.
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Agricultural Policy

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Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood
2007 | Unabridged
In this sci-fi novel from the queen of Canadian letters, massive, quasi-governmental corporations with their own militaries have solved problems like malnutrition and medicine by engineering Frankenstein-like critters. (Atwood's ChickieNobs Nubbins – made from "chickens" that grow like potatoes – are a truly disgusting, not far-off extrapolation of the current factory-farm model.) Of particular appeal here is that Atwood bases all of her creations on things corporate scientists are currently working on,... creating an out-of-control adspeak reality that feels eerily appropriate to our own hyper-capitalist, technology-ridden society. In typical fashion, Atwood bitterly lambasts and punishes society's excesses, taking her vision all the way through the apocalypse, where humankind's creations gain the upper hand.
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Crime Reduction

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The Minority Report and Other Stories

Philip K. Dick
2009 | Unabridged
Dick's dreadful solution to crime makes our current overcrowded prisons and high recidivism rates look good by comparison. Taking a cue from George Orwell, he blends thoughtcrime with mad science and throws in a little fantasy, creating a strangely prescient future where mutant seers punish ordinary people for crimes they have yet to commit. When the police commissioner himself comes under suspicion for a predicted murder, things get dicey. Dick's riveting plot... questions our ideas of past, present and future while contemplating the question of free will. With the U.S. government currently assassinating would-be terrorists without trial via unmanned aerial drones, this particular vision of our future is uncomfortably close already.
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Insider Politics

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It Can't Happen Here

Sinclair Lewis
2008 | Unabridged
Promising to end partisan strife, bulldoze gridlock and solve America's economic depression, Sen. Buzz Windrip is elected president in celebrated progressive Sinclair's defining work – then promptly dissolves Congress and becomes a dictator. Published in 1935, before Hitler's regime had completely demolished the political ideal of a fascist government and when many Americans advocated exactly those radical solutions, Sinclair's novel remains just as fresh today as it was when it was published....

Modeling Windrip on Sen. Huey Long, a real-life politician of the time who flirted dangerously with fascism, Sinclair's depiction of American politics and its inflamed rhetoric feels completely applicable to our election season, giving us sobering proof why we should always be wary of politicians promising fixes that sound too good to be true.
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Education

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Gun, with Occasional Music

Jonathan Lethem
2009 | Unabridged
With Americans consistently ranking behind other nations in math and science skills, you might think the education system is a mess, but the genetically rigged "evolving" in Lethem's first novel leaves much to be desired. Blending William Gibson with Dashiell Hammett, Lethem delivers a remarkably well-imagined, pitch-black future where genetic engineering has given us an underclass of hyper-intelligent babies that perform menial tasks and have their own bars, as well as animals... that walk upright and talk – just a few of the "improvements" that have scrambled society beyond all recognition. (No wonder Lethem's people take "forgettol.") Over-the-hill detective Conrad Metcalf runs into all kinds of absurd trouble (his girlfriend, for instance, ran off with his genitals) as he tries to solve an inordinately complex case in Lethem's quirky dystopia, but ends up just trying to survive. This exceedingly bizarre take on the noir detective novel (don't miss the mafia's kangaroo sharpshooter!) is Lethem at his rawest and strangest.
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The Whole Damn Thing

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Infinite Jest (Part I)

David Foster Wallace
2012 | Unabridged
For a massive collection of awful solutions to a panoply of American problems, try Wallace's inordinately entertaining Infinite Jest. This comprehensive look at U.S. dysfunction tackles everything from terrorism to boredom to the deficit and even waste management, offering ingeniously awful solutions to each. This masterpiece pulls no punches in showing us just how bad we can be, but Wallace's over-the-top satires have a purpose – first to make us laugh at... our foibles, then to offer us reasons for redemption.
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Fiction’s Greatest Monsters

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:48:15 +0000

Halloween means a lot of different things to people: coming up with the perfect Sexy Donald Trump costume, gorging on candy corn, trying to raise the ghost of Andy Warhol with a thrift-store Ouija board. But for us, Halloween means just one thing: scary stories. The problem with most horror stories is that, unless you’re huddled around a flickering campfire, the frights are safe and short-lived, a mild chill rather than a true spine-tingler. Let’s be real: You’re less likely to run into a ghost or ghoul in your day-to-day life than you are to be asked to join the next Real Housewives cast – a much scarier proposition, anyway.

But monsters do exist, and they can be found in every corner of society, they’re just not advertising it, which makes them all the more terrifying. Anyone can be hiding a truly dark, twisted nature, as these characters from classic non-horror fiction show. We’d take on an army of the undead over running into any of these people in a dark alley any day.

Bertha Dorset, The House of Mirth

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The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton
2007 | Unabridged
If you can muster even an iota of sympathy for Lily Bart, the fallen beauty in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, you'll surely have it out for Bertha Dorset. Sure, Bertha's husband, George, is a snooze, and it's almost admirably ballsy the way she gallivants around with a younger man right under George's nose. But to deflect attention from her affair by accusing Lily of having unbecoming relations with George? And... to then sabotage Lily's attempts to make a living for herself after the accusations cause her social status to plummet? Bertha, burning with jealousy over Lily's beauty, intelligence and general wit, will stop at nothing to humiliate her. Enlightened readers of today may see in Bertha's actions a way of acting out against the oppression of the day, but until Bertha has her feminist awakening and realizes that the patriarchy's the real doozy, I'd suggest you steer clear.
â€” Sara Jaffe
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Captain Ahab , Moby Dick

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Moby Dick

Herman Melville
2009 | Unabridged
I'm no psychologist, but I'm going to bet that singled-minded obsession and sociopathic behavior are deeply linked. When someone wants one thing so badly that it takes over his entire brain and being, the desire takes on a corrosive quality. I picture a sort of walking-dead Ahab, eyes wild, skull half-eaten away by the obsession to avenge himself on Moby Dick. In other words: sucks if you're stuck on a boat with... him.

The horror and the marvel of Ahab is, in part, the singularity of his fixation, but it's also the realization that we run into versions of Ahab every day: the greedy Ã¼ber-capitalist, the kid who won't stop screaming until he gets his ice cream, the country so bent on revenge it attacks the wrong target. The real horror of Ahab, perhaps, is that there are Ahabs all around usâ€”and maybe even versions of him within ourselves.
â€” Sara Jaffe
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Veda Pierce, Mildred Pierce

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Mildred Pierce

James M. Cain
2007 | Unabridged
Forget Kate Winslet. Forget, even, Joan Crawford's Oscar-winning 1945 turn. All dramatizations of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce play up the titular character's craven, desperate nature, but daughter Veda is the real monster here. As the dark, twisted mother-daughter relationship evolves, Veda grows from ungrateful brat to scheming, lying sociopath. Divorced, penniless Mildred takes the only job she can find during the Depression as a waitress, but is terrified of her snobbish... daughter's judgment. As she builds a successful pie empire, Mildred thinks she'll finally win Veda's approval, but her daughter scorns her for having to work for a living. She idolizes flashy, "sophisticated" men with no substance, so Mildred marries one who drives them to ruin. She fakes a pregnancy to blackmail a rich family. She becomes – literally – a diva (singing opera, that is). By the time you get to the book's climactic confrontation, you'll find yourself rooting for child abuse.
â€” Regan Hofmann
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Johnnie Walker, Kafka on the Shore

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Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami
2011 | Unabridged
Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is full of oddities – talking cats, men whose shadows only appear at half strength, clouds full of mackerel – and yet the twin appearances of walking, talking versions of brand icons Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker rank among the strangest. Sanders, for his part, says he's just a metaphysical concept, but Johnnie Walker claims to be the physical embodiment of the whiskey shill, and lovingly explains... that in order to make his otherworldly, soul-stealing flute, he must saw the heads off cats and eat their hearts.
Not content to act alone, Walker forces an old, sweet, childlike Mr. Nakata to assist in his sanguine project. With one of the most subtly brutal and straightforward lines in the entire novel, he commands Nakata keep his eyes open while another cat is decapitated: "Closing your eyes isn't going to change anythingâ€¦In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes."
â€” Leah Friedman
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Cathy Ames, East of Eden

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East of Eden

John Steinbeck
2011 | Unabridged
She frames two schoolboys for rape after bringing them the rope and convincing them to tie her up with it. She seduces a schoolteacher and drives him to suicide. She sets her house aflame with her parents still in it, her pockets laden with stolen money. Later, in the wake of her years of lies and manipulations, and after a dirty tryst with her brother-in-law, she shoots her husband with a pistol... and abandons her children. She poisons a local madam, takes over her brothel, and transforms it into a den of sadism. And she does it all – all the lying and conniving and manipulating – with little rosebud lips, a tiny, perfect, doll-like frame and gold hair as lustrous as autumn wheat. By offering not a hint of the moral cesspool beneath that luminous surface, she's elevated from reprehensible to terrifying. Ugly monsters are easy, quotidian, identifiable. The true stuff of nightmares is Cathy Ames's own pristine, immaculate filth.
â€”Jess Wilson
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Judge Holden, Blood Meridian

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Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy
2008 | Unabridged
Killer. Pedophile. Legal professional. Massively tall but hairless and pale as a worm – if worms could lift cannons singlehandedly and appear, eerily, creepily, in more than one place at the same time. He is always there; brutality and evil personified.

He is there, falsely accusing a revival preacher of raping young girls and goats, provoking the crowd to riot and murder. Enticing children with sweets, playing games with them, raping them, scalping... them, making them disappear. Pitching puppies off stone bridges into swollen rivers to drown. Glorifying warfare. Inciting others to violence. And maneuvering incessantly, relentlessly to obtain more and greater knowledge and power. "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge," he says, chillingly, "exists without my consent."
â€” Jess Wilson
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Continuing Education

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:09:23 +0000

For many of us, autumn brings back vivid sense memories: the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, the feel of a new backpack’s sticky zipper, the sound of an alarm clock ringing in the dark for the first time in months. But the best thing about back-to-school? New books. That stack of unbroken spines, pages clean of overenthusiastic underlining and highlightsâ€¦Of course, now that we’re all fully educated (yeah, right), we’re free to audit those interesting-sounding classes, the ones that never fit our schedule. And while reading may be fundamental, listening counts – especially with these too-cool-for-school works.

Biochemistry

A science class for those who couldn’t make it through Physics for Poets, covering material from uppers to downers and every illicit substance in between.

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Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone
2009 | Unabridged
The Vietnam War is almost over, and things have gone way beyond heavy. Stone is one of the great chroniclers of the post '60s expulsion from hippie Eden, and antihero John Converse is one of his darkest characters. Expect to learn about pharmaceuticals, jungle warfare, and heat exhaustion. Don't look for a happy ending; we lost the war.
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Stone Arabia

Dana Spiotta
2011 | Unabridged
A generation younger than Robert Stone, Spiotta's take on the post-revolutionary counter culture is more nuanced and less immersive. Growing up in L.A. at the tail end of the Baby Boom, siblings Nik and Denise are Beatlemaniacs-turned-proto-punk rockers – then they get kind of old. If Dog Soldiers introduces us to grizzled survivors, Stone Arabia is about the hopelessness of unfulfilled promise.

Herstory

Oh, for the heady days of the early ’90s! Women’s Studies felt so relevant, what with politicians threatening our bodies and choices and those creepy heroin-chic magazine ads. Wait a minute…

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The Mistress's Daughter

A. M. Homes
2007 | Unabridged
In her novels, Homes has dealt with hot-button subjects from child sexual abuse (The End of Alice) to school shootings (Music for Torching) – clichÃ©-free. Her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, goes to the root of these obsessions. Adopted as a newborn, Homes never knew the story of her birth parents. Then, in her mid 40s, they contacted her, drawing her into their failed and tragic relationship. Homes' prose is clear as an... unpocked mirror and complex as that mirror's true reflection.
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Veronica

Mary Gaitskill
2008 | Unabridged
Bad Behavior, Gaitskill's debut collection, was shocking. Ostensibly dealing with sexual kinks, the book's true revelations were about the relationships between female friends. In Veronica, Gaitskill revisits this ground, examining the lives of two former “beautiful people.” We all know that even perfect faces eventually grow haggard and lined, and even the purest souls won't resist temptation. The question is, what happens after the inevitable?

Health Class

Get out your pedometers, we’re going on a runâ€¦to the most delectable Buffalo wings in town.

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Master Your Metabolism

Mariska van Aalst
2010 | Abridged
Admit it: If Michaels can scare 500-pound Biggest Losers into sit-ups and turkey burgers, she's probably worth a listen. Even if you don't agree, she's coming for you anyway. Be ready.
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Tales from the Tummy Trilogy

Calvin Trillin
2009 | Abridged
New Yorker raconteur and consummate gourmand Trillin is here to tell you everything you've always wanted to know about Chinese food. Don't listen to this when you're already hungry, or – heaven forbid – as you're walking around the grocery store; you won't make it out alive. Especially if you bump into Jillian Michaels while you're there.

Speech Class

Round your vowels and speak from your diaphragm. Otherwise, we won’t win the varsity championship this year!

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Judy Dench and Michael Williams: With Great Pleasure

BBC Radio 4
2010
What can't British actors make sound cool? Seriously, could Dench and Williams please read aloud the results of that Google search I just did on the best place to get hot dogs in Cleveland? (I'm still thinking of Calvin Trillin). Fortunately, the great Shakespearean actors have chosen better stuff: Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, along with explanations of their own histories with the works.
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Lake Wobegon Days

Garrison Keillor
2010 | Abridged
Warm, folksy, and so much smarter than you think it'll be, Lake Wobegon Days fits neatly into the American humor tradition of James Thurber and Mark Twain. If you're planning any kind of career in broadcasting, you couldn't do better than to listen to Keillor's deceptively down-home enunciation.

Current Events

In this age of up-to-the-millisecond news cycles and blogging bloviators, sometimes it’s good to take the long view.

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The Bridge

David Remnick
2010 | Unabridged
Remnick has been editor-in-chief of the New Yorker since 1998 – arguably the most tumultuous and terrifying time in American history. In his biography of Barack Obama, Remnick displays both a journalist's instinct for story and an editor's eye for detail. Yes, it's long (at just over 24 hours, it's perfect for a cross-country road trip), but it's the truth.
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Hey Rube

Hunter S. Thompson
2012 | Unabridged
Hunter S. Thompson: inventor of gonzo journalism, the greatest of Tricky Dick Nixon's print antagonists, consumer of grapefruits by the crate and acid by the sheet. Hey Rube is one of his last collections, a meanderingly vicious set of short pieces about Thompson's two favorite Great American pastimes: sports and politics (only the Good Doctor himself could get away with writing about 9/11 for espn.com). As he once said, “When the going... gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
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Classics

Sometimes, when you’ve had enough of postmodern theory and the dialectic of whatever, you just want to delve into an old-fashioned good book.

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The Secret History

Donna Tartt
2009 | Unabridged
A deliciously weird novel. The characters: a group of college classics scholars. The story: after an ancient Greece-inspired bacchanal, these fresh-faced undergrads murder one of their own. The twist: the whole damn thing. Tartt is aptly named – her narrative voice is at once crisp, biting and complex. In examining the roots of cruelty, she makes us all feel as if we, too, could be guilty.
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Life

Keith Richards
2010 | Unabridged
Just listen. More than just sex, drugs and rock & roll, Life is a musician's story. Learn just how much practice it takes to play the opening riff of “Start Me Up” and how little it took to write “Satisfaction.” The moral of the story: put in the hours, then go to sleep with your guitar under your pillow. And whatever you do, don't mess with Keef's shepherd's pie.

Subway Listening

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:20:35 +0000

Plug in your earbuds and hide the cover – the best books you’d rather not get caught reading in public.

There are some books that just shouldn’t see the light of day; books we love in spite of ourselves that we’d rather not be seen reading in polite company These aren’t the YA phenom a few generations below our reading level or the slightly naughty bestseller – everybody’s reading those proudly. No, these are more decidedly uncool; self-help titles for problems we don’t want to admit we have, warm and fuzzy feel-good fiction, unabashed celebrity voyeurism. Still, there’s something about them that keeps bringing us back.

Once upon a time, we would have sought out a brown paper wrapper to hide these guilty pleasures. But now, thanks to the wonders of technology, we can load up on audiobooks, plug in the earbuds, and read in perfect anonymity no matter where we are. Nobody on the subway needs to know your little secret – and we promise, we’ll never tell.

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Palo Alto

James Franco
2010 | Unabridged
Feelings be damned – if it's this good, there can't be anything wrong with reading a book written by a famous actor. Sure, many people will assume that, because Palo Alto is written by a gorgeous Hollywood star, it's going to, well, suck. Let them. Franco's won the favor of editors from McSweeney's to Esquire, and it's easy to see why in this refreshingly gritty depiction of a community normally known as... a crown jewel of Silicon Valley. These stories of delinquent teens succeed because Franco's stripped-back, spare voice conveys the violence of the narrators' lives without becoming unnecessarily showy. Franco is clearly fascinated by adolescence – how we traverse it, what it does to us, and what lasting impressions it leaves – and this fascination is what makes his take on suburban estrangement feel all his own. You may be drawn in to Palo Alto by curiosity and a pretty face, but you'll end up staying for the remarkable writing and lapidary, memorable stories.
â€” Scott Esposito
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig
2012 | Dramatization
Just because you're embarrassed to be seen reading a book doesn't mean it can't change your life, right? Reportedly rejected by more publishers than any other bestseller in publishing history, Robert M. Pirsig's very personal, very philosophical hybrid is a must for all seekers. It starts innocently enough, with his grad student inquiry into what exactly distinguishes "quality" art from poor art, but this question soon leads Pirsig down a rabbit hole... into a very personal story of losing his sanity in the quest to know how to live a good life. It's a classic tale of finding much peril in an effort to attain prized knowledge, and Pirsig here turns it into a riveting read, as well as a platform for investigating some deep questions. Blending Plato's philosophy with electroshock therapy, motorbike riding and ancient Greek ideals, this is the book you come to for a satisfying look at life's big questions. Before you know it, you'll be thinking about your own answers.
â€” Scott Esposito
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Mary Poppins

P. L. Travers
2008 | Unabridged
It's normal to fondly recall the movie version of Mary Poppins. It may seem a bit creepy, though, to be an adult in public waving around P.L. Travers' novel on which the movie was based. The truth is, though, that it's actually a really good novel, and it's not just for kids. Travers' M.P. has a pretty complex personality; she's magical and all that, but also vain and harsh, and her flirtation... with good ol' Bert is downright charming. The book contains some familiar episodes from the movie – the chalk-drawing idyll, the laughing tea party on the ceiling – as well as additional adventures, including a trip to the North Pole and an outing to a candy store where the spinster owner breaks off bits of her peppermint-stick fingers to share with the kids. It's scenes like these that make the original Mary Poppins more strangely compelling than nostalgically sweet.
â€” Sara Jaffe
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The Secret

Rhonda Byrne
2009 | Unabridged
Though creative visualization is well-worn territory for self-help books, The Secret tries something new. The book claims that people's thoughts are the only cause of the events in their lives, meaning that rich people must think wealthy thoughts, fat people must think fat thoughts, and so on.

The theory may seem unbelievably overstated, but that's part of The Secret's allure. Just when Byrne and her team of spurious "experts" seem to have said... the craziest thing possible, they go on to say something even nuttier. On the topic of losing weight, Byrne suggests, "Write out your perfect weight and place it over the readout of your scale, or don't weigh yourself at all." In the book, self-delusion is a tool, not a problem.

For better or worse, Byrne's theory of human history attributes nothing to circumstances and everything to the individual, which is problematic in cases like ethnic cleansing or child abuse. But in spite of the book's sometimes hilarious broadness, it does a great job of reminding readers to live life with confidence and intention.
â€” Arianna Stern
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uncharted terriTORI

Tori Spelling
2010 | Unabridged
Back in the days of Beverly Hills 90210, Tori Spelling was the underdog, and we both pitied and rooted for her. Then, in the late 2000s, Tori resurfaced with her reality show, Tori & Dean. She was all over the tabloids, and we wrote off whatever underdog cred we'd once assigned her. So here's the good news about Uncharted TerriTORI, and why, should your indier-than-thou friends make fun of you for downloading... it, you can set them in their place: Tori actually is an underdog. Or, at least, kind of. She's totally stressed out all the time. She and Dean are "struggling" to pay the mortgage. Her kids throw tantrums, she had a miscreant pet pig, and the press calls her "too thin." Oh, and she thinks of herself as basically a gay man. Plus she reads the audiobook herself, seems to have a decent sense of humor, and says "shit" a lot. Back off, naysayers: this is still the Tori we knew and (sort of) loved.
â€” Sara Jaffe
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The Pickup Artist

Mystery (2)
2012 | Unabridged
Even if pickup master Mystery's occasionally crass step-by-step guide to romance isn't something you want to be seen reading, the fact is, you probably want to know how his tried-and-tested tools actually work. This breezily written memoir-cum-game-plan dishes all the goods while giving you a look at the life of a true 21st-century Don Juan. From comfort-building and lock-in props to sealing the deal, catchy tips like "bullshit baffles brains," and, oh... yeah, his crazy friend Matador, Mystery gives a stunningly thorough account of dating psychology, all told in his enjoyably confident – and occasionally fatuous – tone. Whether you're the ice-cold operator who can bag a phone number before the drink's even hit the cocktail napkin or the sweet guy who wants help taking charge of the local dating scene, you will learn things from Mystery. Play on, player, just remember to follow the rules.
â€” Scott Esposito
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Songs for Telegraph Avenue

Sam Adams — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:03:32 +0000

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the central characters in Michael Chabon’s sprawling Telegraph Avenue, love nothing more than records; listening to them, talking about them, savoring the whisper of an LP as it slides out of its sleeve. But for all the music it name-checks the novel, which revolves around the two owners of Oakland’s rapidly obsolescing Brokeland Records, lacks its own soundtrack. So eMusic has thoughtfully provided one, syncing an album to each of the novel’s major characters (and a few minor ones).

Telegraph Avenue casts a wide net, encompassing cultural and generational shifts, the blurry line between urban renewal and gentrification, the politics of home birthing and the struggles of new (and not-so-new) fatherhood, so our musical choices are equally diverse.

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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon
2012 | Unabridged

Archy Stallings

AH UM - 50th Anniversary (Legacy Edition)

Charles Mingus
2009 | Columbia/Legacy

On several occasions, Chabon likens Brokeland Records' co-proprietor to the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, a resemblance that does not escape the character who calls him a "beret-wearing, soul-patch dee-vo-tay of Negritude, Charles Mingus-impersonating motherfucker." Mingus's 1959 album includes "Fables of Faubus," a protest against the Arkansas governor who attempted to thwart the integration of public schools in Little Rock, a struggle whose fruits are evident in the culturally mixed – but... emphatically not post-racial – neighborhoods of Telegraph Avenue. The elegiac "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," a tribute to Mingus's late mentor, Lester Young, reflects Archy's relationship with his own surrogate father, jazz organist Cochise Jones, as well as the novel's preoccupation with the way memories are passed on through music.
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Nat Jaffe

Songs In The Key Of Life

Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

Like Archy, Brokeland partner Nat Jaffe is a music maker as well as seller, but where Archy is devoted to his bass, steadily keeping the beat as the world moves on, Nat's talents are more diffuse, proficient at many instruments but wedded to none. As a Jewish man steeped in African-American culture – he even cooks some mean collard greens – he's never quite certain of where he stands, especially as father... to a 14-year-old son he's beginning to suspect may be gay. So he might find inspiration in "Isn't She Lovely," the cornerstone of Stevie Wonder's crowning masterwork, Songs in the Key of Life. Like Nat, Wonder is a musical polymath, evoked by another of the book's characters as an exemplar of the days when black musicians created rather than remixed. ("Now, black kid halfway to a genius comes along? Like RZA? Can't even play a motherfucking kazoo.") As you might expect from a novel by the author of Manhood for Amateurs, fatherhood in Telegraph Avenue is a messy business, but the sheer joy of Wonder's song, a contrast to the singer's own messy personal life, could serve as a lodestar for the conflicted dad.
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Gwen Shanks

Betty Davis

Betty Davis
2008 | Light In The Attic / The Orchard

Archy's wife, Gwen, who owns a boutique midwifery clinic with Nat's wife, Aviva, has been tolerating her husband's wayward tendencies for a long time. But observing an encounter between Archy and a woman she correctly guesses to be his current mistress pushes her to the edge, and a confrontation with a condescending obstetrician sends her over it. Her overpowering anger, fueled by a deep sense of anger and confusion, finds an unlikely... counterpart in the on-the-warpath funk of Betty Davis, whose solo career began not long after her marriage to Miles Davis ended. As a wronged woman she's all fury and no regret, making the kind of music Gwen might use to rile herself up before making a hot-headed decision she'll quickly come to rue.
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Aviva Roth-Jaffe

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell
1975 | Rhino

Joni Mitchell is more associated with Los Angeles than the Bay Area, but the combination of earthiness and whimsy in her music seems like the right fit for Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who, as Telegraph Avenue's conflicts intensify, finds herself putting out several fires at once. Gwen's outburst threatens to cost the midwives their privileges at the only hospital that will let them in the door, and her husband and his partner are troubled... by the planned arrival of a massive shopping mall that threatens to obliterate their old-fashioned business. Through it all, Aviva holds onto idealism of the kind so succinctly expressed in Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris," even when it threatens to cost her dearly.
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Gibson “G-Bad” Goode

The Blueprint

Jay-Z
2007 | Roc-A-Fella / Def Jam

Wrong coast, we know. But you have to cross the country to find a pop-cultural figure with the impact Chabon envisions for his football-star-turned-entrepreneur – at least, one who makes music worth listening to. (Sorry, Shaq.) Gibson Goode, who takes meetings in his own private zeppelin, embodies Jay-Z's classic boast, "I'm not a businessman – I'm a business, man," and the omnivorous sounds of his classic album embody the pancultural mixture to... which Telegraph Avenue aspires. G-Bad's own taste may run more to Minnie Ripperton than Hova, but the novel's lack of hip-hop reference points had to be addressed somehow.
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Luther Stallings

Trouble Man

Marvin Gaye
1998 | Motown

Like the absentee father that he is, Luther Stalling floats in and out of Telegraph Avenue, all but disappearing for much of the book's middle section. Archy's rarely seen dad is a washed-up black action star who's been on and off drugs for decades and is now in the process of purportedly cleaning up his act – the fact that said cleanup involves blackmailing an old acquaintance for money to fund his... planned comeback film is a regrettable compromise. Trouble Man isn't one of blaxploitation's crown jewels, but Marvin Gaye's theme is a stone classic. Gaye's relationship with his own father ended in tragedy, but Luther and Archy have at least a slim chance of settling their differences.
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Cochise Jones

Melting Pot

Booker T. And The M.G.'s
2007 | Stax

With closets full of eye-searing leisure suits, Brokeland regular and de facto father figure to Archy Cochise Jones is a living relic, a link to an earlier age who is literally crushed by his devotion to his music. His funeral marks a rare coming together of Telegraph Avenue's scattered characters, whose varied agendas are set aside just long enough to lay a legendary player to rest. Booker T. Jones shares a surname... with Cochise as well as legendary proficiency on the Hammond B-3 organ, and the sweaty, gritty soul the former made with the M.G.'s stands as an exemplar of the benefits of cultural collision. Half-black and half-white at a time (and in a place) where racially integrated bands met with fierce and sometimes violent opposition, the quartet's four members were trained and untrained, poor and middle-class, bound by common understanding and a willingness to let their music speak for them. Melting Pot, which Nat drops on Brokeland's turntable at a pivotal moment, was their most ambitious album, fueled by the collegiate music studies Jones had pursued on his days off, and the strain of recording it broke up the band (whose home base, Stax Records, was located not far from the motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated). Jones, seeking a change, left Memphis for California, where perhaps he met up with a long-lost uncle who shared his love of the Hammond.
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Discover: The Best of Banned Books Week

Regan Hofmann — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:33:48 +0000

This week marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, officially an annual celebration of the freedom of expression and recognition of the ongoing fight against censorship. In a year when a state representative was barred from debate in Michigan for uttering the word “vagina,” it seems all the more fitting to take a moment to consider the power of literature to speak real truths, no matter how uncomfortable, and the importance of protecting that speech.

But we’ll come out and admit it: Our reason for celebrating Banned Books Week is a lot less noble and a lot more fun. For us, it’s a handy guide to all the racy, sexy, outrageous bits in the otherwise respectable works of classic literature we’ve been overlooking since we didn’t read them in first-year lit class. Everybody knows about Tropic of Cancer, but we had no idea A Separate Peace was once called a “filthy, trashy sex novel” – we’re sold. Below, our crib sheet on some Very Important formerly banned books and why they’re still a lot of fun today.

Banned for: Sex

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An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser
2011 | Unabridged
Based on an notorious criminal case of the 1900s, Dreiser's epic class-struggle tragedy went from being banned in Boston for being "obscene, indecent, and impure" – a ruling that held up in the state Supreme Court – to inspiring the Montgomery Clift-Liz Taylor classic movie A Place in the Sun. Fun fact: The Nazis threw this one on bonfires because it featured "low love affairs." If it was good enough to piss... Hitler off, it's good enough for us.
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Rabbit, Run

John Updike
2009 | Unabridged
It should come as no surprise that John "Ladies Gettin' Seduced by the Devil" Updike has come under fire for featuring some pretty explicit sex in his books. The surprise is that Rabbit, Run, the first in his critically acclaimed, double-Pulitzer-winner series about the life and trials of Harry "Rabbit" Engstrom, was the one to be banned in multiple countries upon its publication. Ireland wanted nothing to do with it, while parents... had to sign permission slips in for Maine high schoolers to get their hands on a copy. By the time Couples rolled around, we guess the censors just couldn't be bothered anymore.
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Banned for: Historical Accuracy

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain
2007 | Unabridged
Or, the case of the infamous N-word. Twain's free and unabashed use of the word – as someone's name! – brings into stark resolution the role of race in America and highlights how attitudes have evolved over the past century or so. No matter how post-racial you think you are, it will turn your blood cold to hear the word casually dropped in polite speech the way it is here. It's what... parenting books like to call a "teachable moment" – so why do they want to keep people from teaching about it?
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Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck
2011 | Unabridged
Steinbeck's classic novella is a brilliant character study, both an exercise in symbolism and a faithful painting of the hardships of the migrant worker's life. Apparently a little too faithful – this quiet masterpiece has been banned in schools for its depiction of the treatment of the mentally challenged (what do people think spurred the Americans With Disabilities Act?) and its "morbid and depressing themes." You know, in the Depression.

Banned for: Sacrilege

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Brave New World

Aldous Huxley
2009 | Unabridged
Because people just can't wrap their heads around the idea of a dystopia – you know, a society not to be emulated? – they have objected to the book's depiction of an openly sexual, religion-free society where industrial logic and cold, hard science reign supreme. We'd like to challenge them to find a single reader who put this one down and said, "Now that's the life for me!"
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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut
2011 | Unabridged
Vonnegut, bless his soul, has pissed off, confused, unsettled and freaked out many a square in his day. His penchant for creating new, fantastically irreverent religions (see Bokononism in Cat's Cradle) has never made him popular with the Sunday set. But parents in Drake, North Dakota, were so upset by the phrase "The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty'' in this work that they... actually held bonfires to rid themselves of copies of the offending material. Well played, sir.
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Banned for: Making People Uncomfortable

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky
2012 | Unabridged
Otherwise known as the book given to every gay teen by his cool older brother/aunt/drama club pal, which hasn't won it any fans among parents hoping to keep their kids in the dark, this MTV Books publication has been challenged for its discussions of drug use, bestiality and, oh yeah, that gay thing. While most attempts to ban it from schools have been successfully rebuffed, kids in Portage, Indiana, schools will have... to wait to see the upcoming movie adaptation in theaters – unless it gets banned there, too.
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair
2007 | Unabridged
This scathing expose of the exploitative practices of the meat packing industry in the early 20th century was expectedly unpopular in Chicago and Boston at the time of its publication. Ironically, though, its sympathetic view of socialism (the main character becomes a socialist in protest of the capitalist system that has created the injustices he sees) also led to its ban during the Cold War from a number of communist countries, including... Yugoslavia and East Germany. We guess you're banned if you do, banned if you don't.
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Discover: Historical Fiction

Elisa Ludwig — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:30:23 +0000

Why read historical fiction? For one thing, you can gain new insight on familiar events when seen through the eyes of made-up characters — the easiest and cheapest sort of time machine. Whether the protagonist of a novel goes out to fight a war or manages the rationed goods of the household, their point of view conjures an emotional reality that will never be available in a textbook. What’s more, historical fiction can give us an alternative narrative, with access to previously silenced perspectives — the poor, the oppressed, racial and ethnic minorities, or as in all of the books that follow, women.

Reaching us here in the present, memorable historical novels like these allow us to go back, revisit well-documented events and rethink our assumptions. Dive into these earlier worlds and you might find yourself reluctant to come back to this one.

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The Book Thief

Markus Zusak
2008 | Unabridged
Death narrates this now-iconic young adult novel about an illiterate young girl whose hunger for reading incites her to steal books, beginning with the gravedigger's manual she finds at the cemetery where her younger brother is buried. When the war begins, Liesel Meminger is sent to live with a foster family in the town of Molching. Her foster father teachers her to read and her new best friend (and would-be paramour) Rudy... Steiner assists her on her thieving missions – some designed to help themselves in wartime poverty, others to rebel against the atrocities of Nazism. In the meantime, Liesel's foster parents take in a Jew, hiding him in their basement from the S.S. As his relationship with Liesel warms, Max writes new books especially for her, painting over pages of Mein Kampf with his own illustrations. With Death as the storyteller and the Holocaust as the historical backdrop, the plot has a certain inevitability – we all know how this will end. Nevertheless, Zusak illuminates the humanity of his foul-mouthed, mostly well-meaning characters in their efforts to both resist and survive, and his lyrical writing gives new form to well-trodden subject matter.
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The Paris Wife

Paula McLain
2011 | Unabridged
This fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson from 1921-27, is a companion of sorts to his memoir A Moveable Feast. Only, McLain's book is told through the scorned wife's point of view. After meeting in Chicago through mutual friends, Hadley becomes Mrs. Hemingway and follows the aspiring author to Paris where they fall in with a coterie of bohemians, flappers, and artists, including Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ezra... Pound, and others – the epicenter of Parisian artistic culture. The hard-drinking couple who call each other "Tatie" soon meet conflict in the form of Hemingway's temper, his frustrations with his career, and an ambivalence toward the arrival of their first child. But it's the machinations of a seductive fashion editor named Pauline Pfeiffer who tests their loyalty to one another. As Papa entrenches himself in the publishing firmament, Hadley – sweet and dignified to the last – loses her hold on her Paris husband. Strewn with clever references to Hemingway's and his friends' work, The Paris Wife is a fresh spin on literary history, giving the missus the last word.
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Away

Amy Bloom
2010 | Unabridged
After surviving the pogroms that killed her parents, husband, and child, 22-year-old Lillian Leyb has left Turov, Russia, for Ellis Island. The year is 1924, and a young woman on her own has to beg, borrow and steal to survive – or occasionally take well-to-do lovers. But Lillian's plans of assimilating into American life are complicated when a visiting cousin arrives and informs her that her daughter is still alive in Russia.... Lillian knows she must go back but without enough money to book a ship, she has no option but to head west to Alaska and then Siberia. Hiding in the locked closets of trains takes her to Seattle, where she meets a black prostitute who takes her in only to involve her in the murder of a pimp, and then to Canada, where she ends up in a correctional facility. From there it's onward into the frozen tundra. A psychotherapist, Bloom is brilliant at capturing the obscure and winding thoughts of her characters and their subtext-laden dialogue as well as the exacting detail that brings her heroine's unlikely journey into believable focus. What begins as a familiar immigrant story becomes something wholly unexpected – a smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory.
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The Dovekeepers

Alice Hoffman
2011 | Unabridged
Reaching back to the first century, Hoffman offers a feminist retelling of the Roman siege of Masada – a grisly event that was documented by a single contemporary source. Each section of the novel is told by one of her four narrators, all women who are part of the band of religious zealots led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir that take up residence in Herod's old fortress. There's Yael, daughter of an assassin,... who has an affair with a soldier and gives birth out of wedlock in the desert. There's the "witch" of Moab, Shirah, a medicine woman who is romantically involved with ben Ya'ir, although he's married to someone else. Shirah's daughter Aziza poses as a man so she can take her brother's place in the war. Finally, there's Revka, who has lost her daughter to Roman soldiers and is now raising her two mute grandchildren. The women's stories eventually interlock as they each work in the fortress dovecote, producing fertilizer for the desert soil. As the final act of the battle with its dramatic mass suicide draws near, each must fight her individual struggle for independence and self-definition. Hoffman's novel is skillfully researched, poetically imagined, and epic in scope.
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Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls
2009 | Unabridged
Following up Walls' excellent family memoir The Glass Castle is a "true-life novel" that explores the story of her feisty maternal grandmother. Lily Casey was born in Texas in 1901 to an ex-convict and a God-fearing mother. As a child, she was taught how to break mustangs on her family ranch; later, the frontier woman with an adventurous streak would drive a taxi, play poker, sell bootleg hooch, and fly bush planes... when she wasn't raising two kids and teaching school. Casey's life is told here through her own words, with Walls enlisting a folksy-tough narrative voice drawn from oral history. She leaves Chicago after a disastrous marriage to a "crumb bum" and talks her way into a wartime teaching job in Arizona, despite having no real experience. But though Casey's hardscrabble journey takes place through the Depression and two World Wars, she is largely untouched by these forces, at least directly – in her desolate, tumbleweed-strewn landscape, the concerns of most Americans are less important to her than finding a good source of water to keep the ranch going. Self-reliant, thrifty, and fearless, Casey is an endearing proto-feminist heroine, ahead of her time yet nevertheless a product of her moment in history.
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The Girls of Slender Means

Muriel Spark
2008 | Unabridged
In this slim tale centered around a London ladies' hostel at the end of World War II, the titular girls are under thirty, working for a living, and waiting for their lives to start. The residents of the May of Teck Club include Selina Redwood, the local beauty with a heart of ice; Jane Martin, a brainy but overweight publishing professional who sells authors' letters on the black market; Joanna Childe, the... daughter of the country rector who now gives elocution lessons; and Pauline Fox, who dresses up in evening gowns and (delusionally) claims to have dinner with a famous actor every night. Times are tight: The girls share rationed soap and chocolate and pass around a single Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Years later, when a former hanger-on, the anarchist author Nicholas Farringdon, is discovered dead in Haiti, it is Jane who reconnects with her fellow residents to find out more about him and the incidents that lead to his death. With her minimal, playful, unsentimental writing style, Spark dances over the characters and their shared tenuous moment in time before a tragedy changes everything. Girls is filled with nostalgia for young unmarried women in a strange but hopeful era.
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Best Audiobooks of 2012 So Far

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:58:05 +0000

Summer is upon us. Whether the new season finds you looking for a beach read, some brain food, or something to listen to on a road trip, we’re sure you’ll agree that it’s already been a good year for audiobooks. Our favorites from the first half of 2012 include some stand-out debuts, a few old favorite authors back with new tricks, and definitely a little something for everyone.

MEMOIRS, POLITICS, & OTHER NON-FICTION

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Wild

Cheryl Strayed
2012 | Unabridged
An affecting memoir that voids the temptation for wholesale epiphany

There's a point in Wild, Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, when she feels herself torn between two identities. Is she, as her trail mates have suggested, the Hapless Hiker, plagued by a series of misfortunes (too-heavy pack, shoes too small, incidents involving an iced-over tent and hundreds of tiny black frogs), or is she the "hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen"... that she believes herself to be in more triumphant moments? Strayed realizes, in that moment, that she is neither of them, and both of them, too, and it is this kind of complex realization that is at the heart of this inspiring book.

Strayed, a backpacking novice, decided at age 26 to take on a large chunk of the mammoth Mexican-to-Canadian-border-spanning PCT, all by herself. She'd spent several years in a downward spiral precipitated by her mother's sudden death from cancer, a spiral that took her through affairs, divorce, and substance abuse. When she happened upon a PCT guidebook at camping and hiking store, she was ready for something to transform her. The trail does, ultimately, live up to its transformative potential, both physically and mentally, but part of what makes her memoir so strong is that Strayed avoids the temptation for wholesale epiphany. The trail provides many high and low points, but it's not as clear cut as all that. When you're trying to change your life, you may not recognize one exact moment that changed you. You just look around and realize that at some point you've changed. It happens when you're doing your best to soothe your blisters after a long day of hiking, or when the sweat on your back is freezing as you hike upwards through a snow field, or when you finally get to quench that strange obsession you've developed for Snapple lemonade. Healing happens when you're waiting at a nowheresville post office for that resupply box with a fresh T-shirt in it. By the end of the book, we feel as much joy and relief in the notion of pulling on that clean T-shirt as we do with the knowledge that the trail has, indeed, allowed Strayed to gracefully lay down her pain and continue with the business of living.
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Drift

Rachel Maddow
2012 | Unabridged
There's a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds

"It's not a conspiracy, there aren't rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It's been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that."

For the better part of a decade, pols, pundits and wingnuts have all but held sÃ©ances to make it look like their side was the one our infallible founding fathers had... in mind back in the day. It's been more truthiness than truth, which is a shame because a lot of this stuff can be put to rest with solid research and a little perspective. For Drift, Rachel Maddow - a Rhodes scholar best known for her lefty news shows on MSNBC and Air America - did her homework, dropping James Madison quotes the way Skrillex drops the bass.

This carefully researched and unimpeachably reasonable book examines the way this country has lost control of its military. It's sometimes funny. It's often funny-sad. In the beginning, the United States had no use for a standing army, and everybody liked it that way. "America's structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something's gone wrong. It's not a bug in the system. It is the system," Maddow writes (and reads; hooray for author-narrators).

Or it was the system. But, after two-centuries-plus of warfare, we've somehow become a country proud of its standing army and military-industrial culture. Drift is about how we got here, how we allowed each mile marker (Vietnam, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan) to steer us off the path. How we became a nation more eager to go to war even as our distaste for it was growing. How the legislative branch has demurred to the executive. How we've managed to tune out the wars our country is involved in today.

Maddow's approach is a bit drier than Sarah Vowell's, but she has Bill Bryson's skill for making the complicated feel accessible. Above all, although Maddow makes no bones about her liberal predilections, there's a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds. The Ron Paul people are down with it, as is Roger Ailes, president of Fox News.
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Girl Walks into a Bar...

Rachel Dratch
2012 | Unabridged
Laugh-out-loud wit and plenty of self-deprecation

"Where have you been?" is the question former Saturday Night Live funnywoman Rachel Dratch is most frequently asked, and with her humorous memoir Girl Walks into a Bar, now we know. With stories of her struggle to find an identity at Dartmouth, a "that's show biz" dismissal from 30 Rock, the insulting roles offered to her (obese ugly old lesbians) and misadventures in romance along the way,... Dratch's tale occasionally threatens to lurch into the territory of the actress' famous SNL character Debbie Downer. But Dratch always rescues these tales from a "woe is me" vibe with laugh-out-loud wit and self-deprecation. Dratch's love of comedy, from her funny family to her days playing with her friends at Chicago's Second City, trumps every anecdote. Dratch's story is left open-ended, as a surprise pregnancy (the actress originally mistook the symptoms of pregnancy for early-onset menopause) shook up her life and threw a burgeoning relationship into a to-this-day ill-defined state. For an entertainer who has come to make the most of the curveballs life has thrown her way, Dratch's story is best left as it is, without a neatly wrapped finale, letting readers know that the lack of a definitive 'happily ever after" isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Quiet

Susan Cain
2012 | Unabridged
A rallying call for introverts everywhere toâ€¦be quiet

America, argues author Susan Cain, is a land of extroverts. This will not be news to anyone who has had a teacher or boss badger them to "come out of your shell" and "seize the day," but what might be surprising is Cain's unabashed support for the introvert lifestyle. We've been socially conditioned to equate outgoing with good, and Quiet is Cain's largely successful defense... of anyone who ever just wanted to be left alone. Cain makes a good case that America evolved into an extrovert paradise right around the beginning of the 20th century, when Carl Jung invented the personality types "introvert" and "extrovert" and Dale Carnegie built an empire teaching people how to release their inner chatterbox. Once these values became entrenched in the culture - and enshrined at the top of the corporate ladder - says Cain, they became synonymous with success and virtue, forcing introverts like herself to change their ways. Relying on everyone from Warren Buffett to Rosa Parks to make her case, Cain here points out the virtues of introversion, even going so far as to argue that our economy might not be in the pits if there were a few more introverts in the board rooms. Though Cain can occasionally overreach - by the end of the book it seems that all the good people in the world are introverts - this passionate, earnest defense of quiet people is a necessary antidote to the triumph of extroversion in American daily life.
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How to Be Black

Baratunde Thurston
2012 | Unabridged
An attempt to re-complicate blackness

Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston - author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion - knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He's got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He's heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the... diluted history lessons and popularly accepted narratives. And he's not buying them.

"In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness," he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. "In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness."

From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a "black power boot camp," cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like "How to Be the Black Friend," "How to Be the Black Employee," and "How to Speak for All Black People." Along the way he solicits input from a "Black Panel" of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black - race is serious business in America, after all - but the book is also funny as hell.
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Going Solo

Eric Klinenberg
2012 | Unabridged
Explores America's biggest demographic shift since the baby boomers

"Human societies," Eric Klinenberg writes, "at all times and places, have organized themselves around the will to live with others, not alone." Until now, that is. People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S.households, and the numbers are even higher in countries like Sweden and Japan. Contemporary solo dwellers are the subject of the NYU sociology professor's Going Solo, which argues... that this particular class of people constitutes the nation's biggest demographic shift since the baby boomers. It's not exactly a modest claim.

So who are these solo dwellers? Mostly women, mostly middle-aged and mostly clustered in metropolitan areas. But numbers tell only a part of the story. People live alone for many reasons, and they don't always live alone voluntarily. Klinenberg gives a smart historical overview of a trend that begins with 18th-century rooming houses and sweeps forward to include milestones like the feminist movement and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, which glamorized solo living as a must for young women on the make. ("Roommates," Brown told her readers in 1962, "are for sorority girls. You need an apartment alone, even if it's over a garage.")

Brown herself acknowledged that living alone required fortitude - and indeed, Klinenberg takes a look at the emotional and financial tolls of solo dwelling: the risks of isolation, the difficulties of aging alone and the lack of a domestic safety net. It's not all Carrie-Bradshaw-and-her-closet-of-Manolos out there. Klinenberg does an adroit job of convincing us that there's a real cultural shift underway, and that it has consequences we've only begun to imagine.
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You're Not Doing It Right

Michael Ian Black
2012 | Unabridged
Full of inventive insults, but undoubtedly a tribute

In his new memoir, Michael Ian Black passes out in Amsterdam, fantasizes about telling his kids that Santa is fake, and calls his wife an unprintable word that begins with the letter "c." And still, after reading the book's 19 essays, you're convinced that he's a great guy: devoted husband, generous father, moral compass.

Black, known for more than a decade now as a stand-up comic,... screenwriter, pop-culture pundit, and even serious poker player, deftly weaves in and out of his past and present, giving us a memoir-in-essays that's as funny as it is heartfelt. We learn about his father's death, his mother's lesbianism, his wife's ex-boyfriend, and his kids' ceaseless cries. We follow Black from suburban New Jersey to the NYU dorms to first city apartment to Westchester homestead - a trajectory that makes him more than a little self-loathing. As a bohemian-turned-family man, Black spends a lot of time asking himself, "How did I get here?" (the book's epigraph is Talking Heads lyrics). His answers are never definite and always shrewd. Dedicated to his wife, Martha, You're Not Doing It Right, full of inventive insults and backhanded compliments, is undoubtedly a tribute to her. Behind every funny guy, after all, is a great woman: ready to laugh and more than ready to put him in his place.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo
2012 | Unabridged
Combats one-dimensional depictions of life in Indian slums

The "Indian slum" has become a trope in the popular Western imagination, often portrayed as an annoyance or eyesore, or else as a site of unspeakable misery and abjection. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo combats these one-dimensional depictions with her empathic story of Annawadi, a slum on the outskirts of Mumbai's international airport. Boo spent four years in Annawadi, getting... to know its residents and their routines, their jobs, their money troubles, their inter-familial tensions and their hopes for the future. We meet Abdul, a seasoned teenage trash-sorter to whom young trash-pickers come to sell their scavenged goods; Manju, the first girl in Annawadi to go to college; and Fatima, a promiscuous, disabled woman known as the "one leg." As Boo explains in her erudite afterword, in the current state of global capitalism, the very poor frequently view themselves in competition with their neighbors for limited resources and for the elusive means to "get ahead." We see this play out in Annawadi, as Manju's mother, Asha, strives to ingratiate herself to corrupt slumlords in order to become a corrupt slumlord herself, and as Fatima's jealousy of Abdul's family's relative wealth leads to a tragedy that irremediably affects them all. We also see moments of friendship, of collaboration, of celebration, and of quiet contemplation. Read expertly by Sunil Malhotra, Boo's nonfiction account of the lives of Annawadians reads like a novel. And, as in the best novels, Boo dignifies her "characters" with the opportunity to be as complex, multidimensional, and ever-changing as they are in real life.
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This Is How

Augusten Burroughs
2012 | Unabridged
Life lessons from a best-selling screw-up

Who does Augusten Burroughs think he is, writing a how-to guide to life? I mean, after devouring a short-stack of his harrowingly brilliantly hilariously harrowing memoirs like Running with Scissors and A Wolf at the Table, we're well aware of his messed-up past: drugs, alcohol, suicide attempts, all kinds of family issues.

It's true, he's not your average guru. But he is a survivor, and an eloquent (if... unrepentantly blunt) truth-teller. "I am a complete and total fuckup," he writes in the early pages of This Is How, "which is exactly why I'm equipped to write this book and tell you how to live." Chapters include "How to Feel Like Shit," "How to Remain Unhealed," "How to Be a Good Mental Patient," "How to Lose Someone You Love," and a ton more.

While the advice is occasionally abstract, this isn't a book of go-get-'em, hang-in-there aphorisms and time-worn witticisms. Burroughs has no patience for pithy affirmations, willpower or AA. There are some things you get over, and some things you don't, but there's almost nothing you won't get past, he says with the confident, sympathetic countenance of a man who knows a little something about life. "If you hate it, you haven't seen enough of it."
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House of Stone

Anthony Shadid
2012 | Unabridged
A reporter's eye and a son's heart converge in war-torn Lebanon

It's a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone - strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn't have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if... death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent, Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death's stead and gives it meaning.

House of Stone's narrative concerns the reporter's efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather's house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house's water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid's trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself ("Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact," he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid's keen reporter's eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.
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NOVELS & SHORT STORIES

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The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller
2012 | Unabridged
A lyrical, charming and sexy recasting of the fall of Troy

Even those who have never read Homer's Iliad are probably familiar with the broad strokes of the Trojan War: Beautiful woman leaves her husband for a foreigner; husband rallies his neighbors to go get her back; fast-forward through 10 years of war, siege and a giant wooden horse; et voila, the Greeks triumph. But it's Achilles, the nearly invincible golden boy of... the Greek army, who is the real star of the show. His famously boundless rage begins the saga, and his vengeful murder of the Trojan prince Hector ends it. Why so angry? Well, it's Hector who kills Patroclus, Achilles' dearest friend, and - as debut novelist Madeline Miller and many other classicists over the years have posited - his lover.

The Song of Achilles, narrated by Patroclus himself, is a very human love story, woven into the greatest military saga of the Western canon. To call it Homeric slash fiction undersells the beauty of Miller's prose and the timeless tragedy of a wartime romance. But that's what it is: a lyrical, charming and, yes, sexy recasting of the fall of Troy. It makes modern sense of the archaic weirdness of the original text, and transforms god-like legends into approachable characters. Helen and Paris, Odysseus and Agamemnon, and even the gods are just side players, watching from the wings as these two young men fall in love. The first-person narration, voiced skillfully by British actor Frazer Douglas, brings these ancient heroes to life in a way that honors the performative tradition of Homer's epic.
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Angelmaker

Nick Harkaway
2012 | Unabridged
Humor, intrigue and the secret life of mechanical bees

Nick Harkaway is a master of wordy, straight-faced silliness. If you want a hint at what you're in for with his marvelous second novel, look no further than the first appearance of the mysterious Rodney Titwhistle and Arvin Cummerbund. "Those are our actual names, I'm afraid. Life is capricious. If you should feel the urge at any time to chuckle, we're both quite big... enough to share the joke." The man they're addressing is our accidental hero Joe Spork, a person who knows a thing or two about name baggage. Being the son of notorious London gangster Matthew Spork doesn't help. (Harkaway, meanwhile, is John Le Carre's kid; read into that what you like.) Joe's attempt at a quiet life - he fixes clocks and other intricate mechanical doodads - gets a spanner in the works when the comically spooky Titwhistle and Cummerbund drop by in search of clues as to the whereabouts of the Angelmaker, a doomsday device of the highest craftsmanship. (You know, the type of rare antiquity that turns up in sleepy London clock shops.)

Suffice it to say this is where the ball gets rolling, with Joe always pursuing one set of enigmatic men while barely dodging another. Soon we've got secret societies, spies, automatons, a swarm of steampunk bees, a Bond-worthy supervillain and one of the funniest, nerdiest and most awkward sex scenes in literary history.

Following up 2008's post apocalyptic The Gone-Away World, Harkaway proves he's just as adept at moving his chess pieces around a still-here world. Thick with deadpan British humor, inventive plot twists and memorable visuals, Angelmaker is a smart, wild, calculated joyride.
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The Vanishers

Heidi Julavits
2012 | Unabridged
Julavits has a facility with words that makes every detail enchanting
Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers begins with a brief, ingenious riff on the campus novel, borrowing that genre's best elements – dry humor, oddball characters, an enclosed habitat – and reimagining them in the context of a rural institute for parapsychology. Parapsychology, in Julavits-land, means telepathy, communications with the dead and other dark arts, all formally taught at the Institute's campus in rural... New Hampshire.
At the Institute we meet our narrator, a 26-year-old student named Julia Severn who serves as an apprentice to a bewitching, perilous professor named Madame Ackermann. And from there, the novel spins a web that goes far beyond the halls of academia. Over the course of her study, Julia makes a discomfiting (and common) discovery: the fact that her mentor, Madame Ackermann, is not all she's cracked up to be. "There was nothing special about this woman I'd idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired," she finds; "It was even possible that practically anybody - maybe even I - was more gifted than she." Sensing the defection, Madame Ackerman inflicts a psychic injury on the younger woman, resulting in Julia's falling ill with a rainbow of unsolvable ailments. Julia takes a leave of absence from the Institute and packs her bags for Manhattan, where she is swiftly entangled in a spooky plot involving snuff porn, a disfigured skincare heiress, and a Viennese sanatorium."“Spellbinding" is an appropriate word for the plot.
Julavits has a facility with words that makes every detail enchanting, and even dry topics like the weather (a "slushy gruel") and office rugs ("worn of coconut shell fibers and resembling, because of its swirled weave, the hair that collects over a shower drain") become suffused with spookiness, eroticism, or anxiety. As a narrator, Julia Severn is both a complete weirdo and intensely sympathetic, which is both a testament to the author's talents and a reminder that fiction - great fiction - can perform magical feats. Listeners who enjoy carefully-plotted, atmospheric novels (think Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City or Nathaniel Rich's The Mayor's Tongue) will be equally enamored of The Vanishers.
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In One Person

John Irving
2012 | Unabridged
A magical kind of origin story; ultimately one of acceptance

"We are formed by what we desire," writes John Irving on the first page of In One Person, his latest contribution to a lifetime of novels - including The World According to Garp and Cider House Rules - about people with slippery, supercharged sexuality. And thus we spend a good portion of the book learning what formed the desires of the narrator, bisexual... novelist William - known as Billy in his youth - Abbott.

It begins with a flat-chested small-town Vermont librarian who thrusts Dickens on Billy, as well as a cross-dressing grandfather, his youthful, theatrical stepfather, and an intimidating but desirable wrestler private school classmate. Add in an absent father and a stolen bra or two, swirl it in a cauldron with Shakespeare references, and we've got ourselves one magical kind of origin story. And it is one ultimately of acceptance, both from Billy himself and the people around him. That past holds through the rest of the book, especially when we are thrust into a devastating look at the impact of AIDS in the 1980s. In the middle of some truly sad moments, it helps to know that the narrator doesn't loathe himself. His own self-respect guides the reader.

This is, of course, heavy, dense stuff on the page. Irving works every sentence rigorously. But as voiced by the absurdly talented Broadway veteran John Benjamin Hickey (The Big C), this fiercely constructed book goes down smoother. And Hickey's take on an Austrian accent is worth the price of the audiobook alone.
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Arcadia

Lauren Groff
2012 | Unabridged
A hippie heaven goes to hell

All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff's fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It's a hot mess.

Still, for... little Bit Stone, the first kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It's also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it's devastating - for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol' bohemians and new-age types who'd worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who'd half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.

Groff, who turned heads with 2008's wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it's tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.
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Why We Broke Up

Maira Kalman
2012 | Unabridged
Depicts adolescence as an everyday battle of self-doubt, without moralizing or oversimplifying

Having long ago shown that he's among the most astute children's (as Lemony Snicket) and adult (as himself) writers around, Daniel Handler's 2011 novel is a step between, landing in Young Adult territory. He gets this one right, too: Why We Broke Up - illustrated in the print edition with art by Maira Kalman - depicts adolescence as an everyday battle... of self-doubt and dawning self-knowledge, without moralizing or oversimplifying the emotional guts at its mismatched-just-so characters' hearts. Every new emotion is huge, something Handler renders without hyperbole. (The audiobook is narrated by Khristine Hvam, who nails its tone - jumpy and snotty and cautious all at once.)

Handler's narrator is Min Green, an outsider suburban teenager who valorizes silent film and plans to direct movies herself. (There are a lot of film references, all delightful - "The party surged around us like the panic in Last Train Leaving, the coaches starting off the festivities with their fat, dumpy dance to 'I'm the Biggest Man'" - and all made up.) Her boyfriend is Ed Slaterton, eligible high-school basketball star and math virtuoso, to whom Why We Broke Up is addressed. It's a letter, or series of them, explaining each of the objects in a box she's returned to him to signal their breakup after less than two months together. He's casually cruel; she and her crew are far more highfalutin than his teammates in a game in which Min has absolutely no interest. And as happens to adolescents no less than adults, their hormones overtake them anyway - for a while.
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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Mark Leyner
2012 | Unabridged
The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised.

For a certain subset of readers, call them the proto-bloggers, the long wait for The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has felt excruciating. It was the mid-'90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the... sort of Internet culture we're all now accustomed to.

In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher, but also the story of the universe's very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike's fate.

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story - your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack - has been predetermined.

In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.
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Other People We Married

Emma Straub
2012 | Unabridged
A promising collection from a bold new writer

Take Lorrie Moore's wit and combine with Annie Proulx's sparseness, add a dash of Maile Meloy's melancholy, and the result is Emma Straub's captivating debut collection. Though it's a short listen that manages to pack 12 stories into five and a half hours, Straub's characters are fully realized as smart though oftentimes heartbreakingly vulnerable people in search of true connection.
Opening story "Some People Must Really... Fall in Love" sets the tone for the rest of the collection. It concerns a Victorian literature professor with a crush on her 18-year-old student. Franny Gold, whose recurring appearances in the book portray her first as the object of her Barnard roommate's affections, and later, one-half of a dysfunctional marriage, focuses Straub's work around the eternal themes of loneliness, loss and unrequited love. In standout piece "Fly-Over State," Sophie and James move from New York to Madison, Wisconsin, only to find there's too much space, and too much has been forgotten. Sophie, in a line that sounds like it might have been written by Emily Dickinson, thinks about "how each time you moved, you left behind more and more: the antique furniture; the soft, faded T-shirts; the garbage and then the garbage cans themselves, until maybe one day you were left with only what you could carry on your back, and what was packed inside your own skin."
While the Siri-esque quality of Collen Marlo's narration can occasionally offset the humanity of the characters in Other People We Married, it can't hide them completely. It's a beautiful and promising collection by a bold new American writer.
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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Etgar Keret
2012 | Unabridged
Stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death in worlds of magical realism

It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret's collection Suddenly, a Knock at the Door a delight. It's 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there's a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who's who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci... and Neal Stephenson, Keret's stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions - where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.

Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation's psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In "Healthy Start," one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one's lover? Keret's stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.
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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson (2)
2012 | Unabridged
A visceral tale of abandonment and loss in North Korea

As his name might suggest, Pak Jun Do - literally "John Doe" - has a way of slipping in and out of situations with some anonymity. Whether abducting Japanese citizens on a ship or navigating Texas on a diplomatic mission, the recent North Korean military enlistee is given some sobering responsibilities. Jun Do is the son of the director of Long Tomorrows, an... orphan labor camp outside Pyongyang. When Jun Do isn't choosing which boys will eat first, he dreams of his mother, an opera singer who was also stolen away. In his second novel, Adam Johnson skillfully describes a nation we mostly know from newswires. His everyman, Jun Do, is equal parts hero and bystander in a visceral tale of abandonment and loss. But in addition to the horror, there's a hint of the romantic: Jun Do defeats Commander Ga, a rival of Kim Jong-Il, and squires his wife, the beautiful actress Sun Moon.

It comes as a surprise that this painstakingly detailed novel, which was published shortly after Dear Leader's death in December 2011, is written by an American with limited firsthand knowledge of the country's dark landscape. Narrated artfully by the author, with Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee and James Kyson Lee, The Orphan Master's Son is a nail-biting listen.
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Editors’ Picks: The Books We’re Listening To Right Now

eMusic Editorial Staff — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:17:33 +0000

If there’s one thing we’ve always loved about stepping into our friendly neighborhood bookstore, it’s perusing the staff picks that line the walls and end caps. That’s what we hope to replicate with our audiobook editors’ picks – a feeling of genuine discovery as you glance through our personal favorites.

Have a look down below, and feel free to take advantage of our new comments system to share some recent must-listens of your ownâ€¦

J. EDWARD KEYES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht
2011 | Unabridged
The lines separating fact and fable blur in The Tiger's Wife, the first novel by Tea Olbreht. On the surface, it's the story of narrator Natalia Stefanovic's attempt to unravel the mysterious death of her grandfather some years earlier while travelling through the Balkans providing medical assistance to those hit hardest by the ongoing wars. But as the story progresses, things get stranger — the fables her grandfather told her as a... young girl, particularly one about an unsettling "deathless man" — seem to have roots in reality. Ancient curses have real-life consequences and characters that seemed too fantastic to be believed — including one about the titular Tiger's Wife — are discovered to have a dark ring of truth. Moments of The Tiger's Wife recall the creeping dread of the best Haruki Murakami books, but Olbreht's concerns are more historical than supernatural. As the book progresses, it's clear she's telling not only the story of her heroine, but also of her own fractured homeland. It's opaque, unnerving conclusion is its most powerful metaphor.
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Freedom

Jonathan Franzen
2011 | Unabridged
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Look at Me

Jennifer Egan
2012 | Unabridged
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Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami
2011 | Unabridged
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz
2008 | Unabridged

ANDREW PARKS, DIRECTOR OF MERCHANDISING

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Zone One

Colson Whitehead
2011 | Unabridged
While The Walking Dead regained its questionable creative footing in the second half of its sophomore season, the hit show's stilted dialogue is often more horrifying than its screen-splattering zombie hordes. Anyone looking for a more balanced ratio of body counts and believable plot developments should check out Zone One. Despite what some critics have claimed, it isn't Colson Whitehead's stab at a slumming-it genre novel so much as a celebration of... his B-movie roots, a well the acclaimed novelist recently tapped in a lengthy essay for The New Yorker's special sci-fi issue. As he admits in its opening graph, "Growing up on the Upper East Side in the 1970s, I was a bit of a shut-inâ€¦Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies." All of those late night VHS viewings propel every last page of Zone One, proving that Whitehead would much rather hang out with George Romero or John Carpenter than the high-minded literati that helped launch his career.
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A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
2010 | Unabridged
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Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon
2009 | Unabridged
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Life

Keith Richards
2010 | Unabridged

MARIS KREIZMAN, AUDIOBOOKS EDITOR

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The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller
2012 | Unabridged
Greek mythology has always bored me. It should be fascinatingâ€”it's full of fantastical stories of men and gods, all of whom are fundamentally flawed or heartsick or doomedâ€”but for me it's always been a list of confusing names. Which one was turned into a sunflower? Who was the lady who was seduced by that swan who wasn't a swan? How many dudes died in the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad?
So, thank... you to Madeline Miller's debut novel for changing my mind. The Song of Achilles does the one thing I needed it to do in order to turn me into a fan of Greek myth: in retelling a central story of the Iliad it manages to fully humanize a man who was part-god. I cared so deeply about Achilles, who nearly glows with golden godliness on every page, because he is fallible, petulant, charming, heroic and desperately in love. That's the other thing The Song of Achilles does so well: it makes a hero out of Achilles' "companion", a man who had been a mere footnote in history. I put the word "companion" in quotes because Patroclus is not a mere bro who's on Team Achilles, he's a soul mate. And by soul mate I mean that this book contains numerous hot sex scenes, and also many tender momentsâ€”it's as much a love story as it is a tale of the battlefield (clearly they're related, Pat Benatar-style). Two things that don't get a mention in the novel at all are Achilles' famous heelsâ€”vulnerability, it seems, is too amorphous to be pinpointed to a particular place on the human body. It is everywhere, from the bloody siege of Troy to the tent where two men tend to each other after battle.
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Leaving the Atocha Station

Ben Lerner
2011 | Unabridged
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How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu
2012 | Unabridged
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Bright-sided

Barbara Ehrenreich
2011 | Unabridged
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers
2009 | Unabridged

JAYSON GREENE, INTERNATIONAL EDITOR

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Another Country

James Baldwin
2009 | Unabridged
Many critics don't consider Another Country to be James Baldwin's best book, or even a very good one. There is a dodgy character who essentially functions as bisexual saint healer, for instance, curing the other characters of their ailments. And any narrative that kills a major character less than halfway in is bound to be a point of some contention. But Another Country is so smart, sad, and empathetic — about... homosexuality, about sexuality in general, about the way marriages deflate, about stifled writerly ambitions and the litany of minor indignities that come with Bohemian city life — that I can never see its flaws clearly. Set in 1962 Greenwich Village, it makes an ideal companion to a season-by-season trawl through Mad Men, drawing out the same internal and external conflicts with a similar sorrowful, all-seeing eye.
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Chronic City

Jonathan Lethem
2009 | Unabridged
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Live from New York

James Andrew Miller
2009 | Unabridged
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Underworld

Don DeLillo
2010 | Abridged
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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling
2011 | Unabridged

LAURA LEEBOVE, PRODUCTION EDITOR

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Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer
2010 | Unabridged
I stopped eating meat in 2006 when I was a sophomore in college living mostly off of dorm cafeteria food. My decision was a combination of health reasons (I didn't like not knowing exactly what was in my food or where it came from) and the awful environmental impact of feeding animals that would later become food (which I had recently learned about in one of my classes). I'm happy to talk... about why I choose to eat the way I do, but I'll never try to force it on anyone, and what I love about Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals is that he does essentially the same thing. It's an incredibly well researched journalistic exploration into the farming industry, both factory and family-owned, but it's not a straight argument for vegetarianism. Because of Foer's conversational narrative style, it doesn't read like a textbook, but still exposes the often-disturbing details of the path an animal takes to get to a grocery store. Even if Eating Animals doesn't convert everyone who's not already a vegetarian, I hope it will at least make readers think before they eat.
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A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
2010 | Unabridged
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Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Judy Blume
2010 | Unabridged
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Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri
2009 | Abridged
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Bossypants

Tina Fey
2011 | Unabridged

eMusic Loves McSweeney’s

Maris Kreizman — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:03:34 +0000

McSweeney’s is an indie publisher known for championing emerging literary voices, so how thrilling it is to actually hear what these voices sound like. These four wonderful collections of readings created specifically for eMusic are culled from pieces from McSweeney’s quarterly literary journal and humor website – all are narrated by their authors in a truly intimate way, using a simple portable microphone rather than a professional recording studio. The result is a collection of stories that feel personal, immediate and, most of all, entertaining.

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McSweeney's Field Recordings Volume 1

McSweeney's
2008 | Unabridged
On a McSweeney's audiobook, it's totally fine if a narrator takes a moment to grab a glass of water or pauses mid-reading to be sure that no children are in the vicinity before he lets loose a torrent of naughty words. These idiosyncrasies lend personality, like the sighs and throat-clears that pepper this excellent collection created specifically for eMusic. Creativity and intimacy rightly outweigh professional polish, the traditional rules of mainstream publishing... disregarded with a distinctively McSweeney's attitude. Appropriately enough for an audacious first-time audio foray, danger pervades this collection - gruesome, bloody deaths narrated via adventure, sci-fi and noir tales. McSweeney's is known for championing emerging literary voices, so it's thrilling to actually hear what these voices sound like. For nearly a decade, the publisher has embraced a scrappy, renegade spirit that has translated into the creation of a highly influential indie publishing empire encompassing an incredible literary journal, books, magazines and DVDs. McSweeney's has come to represent a very specific outsider literary voice - one that's witty, knowingly ironic and, yes, hip. Most important for you, however, is that the five stories that comprise Notes From the Field are excellent, varied and, above all, entertaining. In "The Death of Mustango Salvaje," Jessica Anthony deftly takes on the persona of a female bullfighting sensation. The beleaguered matadora must decide which are more hazardous to her health: angry 800-kilo bulls, or the exploitative people around her. Claire Light's "Pigs in Space" is your typical girl-meets-evil-swine story, set on a spaceship in an alternate universe. Light's narration imbues her piece with an undeniably creepy tone, whereas Jack Pendarvis's mellow drawl belies the hijinks to come in his story, "The Big Dud." Dud is an Alabaman widow whose misguided intellectual aspirations are on par with Ignatius Reilly's, the bumbling hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. Dud's self-described fatal flaw is that he has too many brilliant ideas; his decision to accompany an aspiring P.I. on a stakeout is definitely not one of them. Interspersed throughout the collection are segments of Keith Pille's hilarious journal of an eager young COBRA recruit who is in training to fight GI Joes. His numbing daily routines in service of Destro are absurd, and also bizarrely touching: while he prepares for battle, an internal war rages between endless enthusiasm and disheartening ennui. He also shouts "COBRAAAAAA!" a lot. But the collection's high point comes when Jonathan Ames narrates "Bored to Death," his modern day, New York-spanning detective noir. In a performance as commanding as his prose, Ames explains how Craigslist turns out to be the perfect venue for a self-loathing, Raymond Chandler-obsessed recovering addict to offer his amateur investigative services. The tropes familiar to all Hammett fans are well played, and Ames' voice - guttural, beleaguered and resigned - brings an alarming authenticity worthy of 1,000 Bogarts. And you can't get much more dangerous than that.
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McSweeney's Field Recordings Volume 2

McSweeney's
2008 | Unabridged
Pucker up, all you hopeless romantics. Prepare to share a big wet kiss with the folks from McSweeney's. For this second installment of Field Recordings, created exclusively for eMusic, the venerated indie book and magazine publisher has combed its archives to create a seductive story collection subtitled Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams. So think of this audiobook as a literary mixtape, one that strikes the perfect balance of tender, brainy and... lusty tracks, a combination designed to make both the mind and the pulse race. McSweeney's creates an intimate mood by delving outside the impersonal confines of a studio: the five storytellers record their pieces in locations of their own choosing, an effect that allows them to inject their own personalities into their readings. Sheila Heti takes narrative freedom to new heights, bringing a fresh perspective to two of her jarring fairytales. From her New York City apartment, Heti first makes a gleefully NC-17 proposal to read while engaging in other more, um, athletic activities with her boyfriend. Her plan, however, quickly devolves into something totally different, making for the first time in audiobook history that a narrator interrupts her reading in order to bicker with her significant other. What better way to frame a pair of stories that challenge the concept of happily-ever-after than by catching a slice of the author's own romantic travails on tape? Pia Erhardt also uses setting to great effect, recounting her heartwrenching story from the Katrina-wracked shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The sound of the lake lapping beneath Erhardt's confessional narration could almost be an ambient nature effect on a meditation record. But the water carries a threatening undercurrent; the story, titled "How It Floods," details the efforts of a woman to prepare for an approaching hurricane even as she tries to navigate her own tumultuous love life.nn The collection's most romantic piece is Tony D'Souza's "The Man Who Married a Tree." The story is just as the title implies: a pseudo-oral history documenting the intense connection between a plant and the man who loved her. D'Souza's astounding performance finds him assuming the roles townspeople, animals, inanimate objects, even God. Try not to sob when the title character's sister reveals, "I loved an elm. Loved him my whole life." To narrate "After the Disaster," Ben Ehrenreich sits in the relative calm (with the exception of a passing helicopter) of Elysian Park in Los Angeles. His peaceful location provides a sharp contrast to his post-apocalyptic tale of two lost souls and the giant squid they rescue from the Museum of Natural History. After carrying the mollusk through the ruined streets of Manhattan, Bruno and Mildred's fates and bodies soon become as entwined in each other as they are in the squid's tentacles.nn Be sure to stick around for comic relief from Chris Bachelder, who reads his epistolary story perched near a mailbox. "My Son, There Exists Another World Alongside Our Own" is a hilarious missive from a father who attempts to teach his sexually curious son a valuable lesson beyond birds and bees: "there exists a parallel universe precisely identical to ours, but for the fact that its inhabitants engage in frequent, vigorous and thrillingly filthy congress." His advice? Go forth into this other world where people are actually engaging in sexual activity rather than just imagining it: "Enter it. Penetrate it... Seek asylum, citizenship on the other side." The second volume of Field Recordings echoes that advice, encouraging immersion and citizenship in the amorous, and offering a hint of what might happen when that occurs.
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McSweeney's Field Recordings Volume 3

McSweeney's
2009 | Unabridged
Cigarettes are cool. Bullies are petrifying. Adults just don't get it. The third installment of McSweeney's Field Recordings features young protagonists who subscribe to these perennial pubescent tropes. But for some kids, there comes a time when your worldview expands beyond pop quizzes and school dances and football games. A particular incident or decision or maybe even a simple conversation can somehow determine what kind of person you'll grow to become. Narrated... from various outdoor locations by authors who deftly channel their inner adolescents, these six stories - all of which originally appeared in McSweeney's literary magazine - capture these life-defining moments with an intensity and candor that would make Judy Blume blush. The collection kicks off with K. Kvashay Boyle's sweet portrayal of a self-proclaimed "brainy dweeb" who desperately wants to fit in. In "St. Chola," the bubbly but insecure teenager must reconcile how to wear American staples like scrunchies and Bongo jeans along with a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Stephen Elliott's story follows with a jolt of ferocity and fury: "Forefathers" takes place in a claustrophobic juvenile hall visiting room, as a former inmate returns to talk some sense into a cocky 13-year-old who's on a similarly destructive path. The most squirm-inducing story of the bunch is "The Neutered Bulldog," Rachel Sherman's creepily intimate depiction of a charismatic teacher whose relationship with her two prize pupils crosses all kinds of boundaries and wreaks havoc on their young lives. Peter Orner also takes on the loss of innocence in "Pampkin's Lament," in which a boy overhears his father consoling a baffled politician who has just found out that his wife is in love with another man. The story is funny and devastating at the same time, just like adolescence itself. It's the perfect conclusion for this gut-wrenching collection that captures both the magic and brutality of coming of age.
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McSweeney's Field Recordings Volume 4

McSweeney's
2011 | Unabridged
A body of water that looks like "a case of pink eye inflamed to geological scale." Smart phones that dictate your entire destiny based on probability. Packs of abandoned pit bulls that wander through vast, lawless cannabis farms. The fourth installment of McSweeney's Field Recordings is filled with these kinds of nightmarish images, the kinds that are revolting and compelling all at once. The twist, in this collection of recent writings from... McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, is that some of these horrific scenarios come from provocatively imagined fictional pieces, while others are culled from true stories. From hard-hitting investigative journalism to contemporary literature at its sharpest, the latest gem from McSweeney's spans genres to straddle the line between fact and fiction. What will our world be like in 2024? That's the question McSweeney's posed to writers for its 32nd issue, resulting in a swath of speculative fiction that brushes up along the swampy shores of dystopia. In "Raw Water", short story master Wells Tower captures the depravity of life in the desert alongside America's first inland ocean, where the oysters are as freakishly large as the characters' appetites. Sheila Heti imagines the near future as a place where technology trumps free will in her wistful story "There Is No Time in Waterloo." The 2024 Salvatore Plascencia imagines in his exceedingly witty "The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic" is nothing if not recognizable - it involves the great American bureaucracy, where misunderstandings and misinformation reign. Complementing these short stories are two foreboding reports from the Panorama, a one-off daily newspaper centered around McSweeney's home city of San Francisco. The landscapes that Jesse Nathan and Lisa Hamilton describe in their NPR news-style reports sound like they should be science fiction: poverty-stricken fallow towns, dusty and brown and dull due to lack of water, the stench of rot and abandon. Nathan exposes how massive marijuana farms are destroying the environment, and how government regulation resources are as tapped out as their natural resources. Hamilton talks to citizens of California's Central Valley, where inequality in water rights means that one side of the valley is lush and green, while the other side that irrigation doesn't reach slowly circles the drain. These pieces serve as an incisive warning - we must act now to preserve the land, so that further environmental devastation can remain safely in the realm of fiction.
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Resolution Road

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:10:47 +0000

It’s that time of year again — time to make some changes, to aspire to be a better version of yourself. Your New Year’s resolutions may be kaput by February, but here are a few books that may just help you stick to your goals.

GET HAPPY

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Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert
2008 | Unabridged
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The How of Happiness

Sonja Lyubomirsky
2008 | Abridged
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The Essence of Happiness

Dalai Lama
2010 | Unabridged
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Change Your Brain, Change Your Body

Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
2010 | Unabridged
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The Happiness Project

Gretchen Rubin
2009 | Unabridged
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Learned Optimism

Martin E.P. Seligman
2010 | Abridged

GET AHEAD AT WORK

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The 4-Hour Workweek (Expanded and Updated)

Timothy Ferriss
2010 | Unabridged
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Ultimate Sales Success

George Walther
2009 | Unabridged
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Getting to Yes

William Ury
2011 | Unabridged
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Talent is Overrated

Geoff Colvin
2009 | Unabridged
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The No Complaining Rule

Jon Gordon (2)
2009 | Unabridged
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Good to Great

James C. Collins
2010 | Unabridged
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Rework

Jason Fried
2010 | Unabridged
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Start with Why

Simon Sinek
2010 | Unabridged

GET RICH (OR, GET OUT OF DEBT)

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Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill
2008 | Abridged
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Peace and Plenty

Sarah Ban Breathnach
2011 | Unabridged
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Debt Free for Life

David Bach
2010 | Unabridged
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The New Frugality

Chris Farrell
2009 | Unabridged

GET MOTIVATED

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Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson (2)
2010 | Unabridged
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The Now Habit

Neil Fiore
2008 | Unabridged
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Awaken the Giant Within

Anthony Robbins
2009 | Abridged
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Get Off Your "But"

Sean Stephenson
2009

GET HEALTHY

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Hungry Girl: The Official Survival Guides

Lisa Lillien
2009 | Unabridged
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Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, New Edition, Updated and Expanded

Andrew Weil, M.D.
2007 | Abridged
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The Body Fat Solution

Tom Venuto
2009 | Unabridged
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Why We Get Fat

Gary Taubes
2010 | Unabridged

GET SMART

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The Intellectual Devotional

David S. Kidder
2009 | Unabridged
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Starting Out in Spanish

Living Language
2008 | Unabridged
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Shakespeare

Harold Bloom
2009 | Unabridged
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The History of Classical Music

Richard Fawkes
2007 | Unabridged

GET SPIRITUAL

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Sacred Contracts

Caroline Myss
2008 | Abridged
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Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Karen Armstrong
2010 | Unabridged
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The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

Deepak Chopra
2008 | Unabridged
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The Art of Mindful Living

Thich Nhat Hanh
2008 | Unabridged

GET CAUGHT UP ON THE CLASSICS

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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens
2008 | Abridged
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Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte
2008 | Abridged
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Middlemarch

George Eliot
2008 | Unabridged
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain
2008 | Unabridged

Best Books of 2011

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:20:58 +0000

From auspicious debuts to long-awaited returns from literary stalwarts, from funny celebrities to seriously great histories, eMusic’s favorite audiobooks of 2011 has something for everyone.

#40 ALBERT BROOKS, 2030

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2030

Albert Brooks
2011 | Unabridged
Writing a novel, Albert Brooks has said in interviews, was a freeing experience, one unhindered by the usual practical limitations. The guy's been a mostly successful filmmaker for going on three decades, but never had the sort of budget that would allow him to, say, destroy Los Angeles on the big screen. The blank page, essentially, is a blank check, and it's actually pretty refreshing to see what he does with it... in 2030.

Indeed, L.A. gets leveled by a mega-earthquake in the early passages of Brooks' dystopian literary debut, and in the prose-projected big screen of the mind, it's impressive and horrific. But he doesn't linger there, because the year 2030 is a tumultuous time in America on all fronts, especially when it comes to health and debt issues: Cancer, obesity and bone depletion are a thing of the past, and people are routinely living past the century mark. Yay! But the young and youngish now have to pay for this new elderly but undying generation, so everybody's going broke. Boo! Things can get funny and schticky, and there's a healthy dose of satire, as you might expect (for instance, the AARP is the most powerful lobby in Washington, and wait till you see how the U.S. finances the rebuilding of the West Coast), but Brooks doesn't shy away from tough, gut-twisting human drama, either.

Told from a number of diverse and likeable perspectives - a lapsed idealist president with a mom on life support (bad for approval ratings), a sad old dad living on a cramped retirement cruise ship, a millionaire self-styled freedom fighter leading an uprising against the elderly, and so on - 2030 is surprising and classically stylish. Brooks seems to have created a perfectly unworkable version of the future that's just ridiculous enough to laugh at, just brutal enough to make you worry.-Patrick Rapa
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#39 BRIAN GREENE, THE HIDDEN REALITY

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The Hidden Reality

Brian Greene
2011 | Unabridged
Physicist Brian Greene is without a doubt our leading, most articulate proponent of string theory: science's best guess of how reality functions. In two previous, widely lauded books he's put forth the idea that the holy grail of physics - a theory that could be applied to anything from a flying airplane to an atom smashed in a black hole - comes down to vibrating strings and a universe of more than... 10 dimensions.

In this, Greene's third book, he takes us farther than ever into the bizarre, frequently outlandish world that string theory says we live in, mixing the hard fact of generally-accepted science with Greene's passionate, honest advocacy for theories that are at the forefront of our understanding of the cosmos. Many (including Greene himself) have rightly pointed out that string theory is untestable, and Greene readily admits that some of these ideas may one day be seen as nothing more than misguided guesses. Still, for anyone who's interested, The Hidden Reality delivers a lucid, compelling narrative that explains the most advanced theories from the smartest physicists the scientific community has to offer.

Their ideas are amazing to behold. Take "inflationary cosmology," which uses the available evidence to theorize that a moment after the universe began, it suddenly expanded by an amount equal to "a region of space the size of a pea" being "stretched larger than the observable universe in a time interval so short that the blink of an eye would overestimate it by a factor larger than a million billion billion billion." Or then there's the idea that our universe might only be a hologram of another universe - one shot through with black holes at that! Smart readers will take all this with a grain of salt, but, still, no other author delivers such clear, accessible explanations of science's answers to the big questions. The Hidden Reality is candy for minds that want to know where science is headed in this 21st century. -Scott Esposito
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#38 DIANE KEATON, Then Again

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Then Again

Diane Keaton
2011 | Unabridged
In the three decades since Diane Keaton seduced America with her sweetly stammering Annie Hall, she's beguiled a number of "unattainable greats" as well: Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, even Steve Jobs. "Talent is just so damn attractive," she offers as an organizing principle to her love life. But Then Again, her new memoir, is much more than a catalog of her Hollywood affairs. Though Keaton does disclose fun... tidbits about her former paramours (she loved Woody Allen's body and taught Al Pacino how to drive), the book is less about her romantic life than her family life.

It might be necessary even to qualify the term "memoir." Then Again requires some hyphenated descriptions: "half-posthumous" perhaps, and maybe even "co-written." Keaton's writing partner is Dorothy Hall, her ever-encouraging and optimistic mother, who died in 2008 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's. As she pores over decades of her mother's journals - 85 in all - Keaton comes to know a familiar but still-strange figure: "Mom," surely, but also a woman of creative temperament and thwarted ambition, a housewife with internal conflicts she never allowed herself to betray, and a darker sense of humor than Keaton ever suspected. "Those pictures are just as I expected - awful." Dorothy writes in a letter. "Diane looks kind of funny. I'm not going to send them 'cause you'll think I've been kidding you about how cute she is." Such personal gems aren't few and far between, either; they're embedded throughout the book. Part-paean, part-autobiography, Then Again - read by Keaton herself - is intimate but sprightly and utterly all-consuming.-Alice Gregory
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#37 MICHAEL LEWIS, BOOMERANG

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Boomerang

Michael Lewis
2011 | Unabridged
Michael Lewis is not always a simple writer, but no matter his subject, he promises a fun, eye-opening ride in exchange for the reader's undivided attention. The fascinating Boomerang arose out of Lewis's previous book, The Big Short, a study of the 2008 global financial crisis. The new book picks up where the previous one left off, examining what the crisis looked like in five very different places: Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany... and California.
Lewis likes people, and as such, Boomerang largely consists of the author's observations and theories, generated with the help of financial experts, politicians, city workers, and even some enterprising Greek monks, on the cultural reasons behind the predicaments these countries (and a state the size of some countries) got themselves into. For instance, Lewis finds that while highly educated in fields they're passionate about, such as fishing or literature, not many Icelanders involved in the country's financial system at the start of this century seemed to actually know anything about finance. And in Greece, he learns that tax evasion is so rampant that tax collectors are just as likely to join the nonchalant evaders, not try to beat them.

It may sound like a cavalier American's tour through the pile of dominoes left in 2008's wake, but Boomerang is focused and detailed in spite of its brevity and Lewis's frequent flashes of humor. The book is also a close look at what these four European nations thought of the U.S. crisis and how their banking systems connected to it. For his final flourish, Lewis comes home to California (he currently teaches at Berkeley). In a standout section of the book, he goes on a hair-raising bike ride through Santa Monica with former Governor Schwarzenegger to try to find out how the state wound up so spectacularly broke.

Throughout his travels, there's one valuable conclusion Lewis keeps arriving at: that there were far too few women operating in the financial sector in the lead-up to the global financial crisis, and those who were seldom listened to. Some people seem to have learned their lesson. Lewis tells us that one women-run investment firm opened in Iceland 2006 is now one of the country's most profitable businesses. As one of its clients put it when he came knocking on the founder's door, fed up: "I just want some women to take care of my money." -Liz Colville
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#36 TEA OBREHT, THE TIGER’S WIFE

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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht
2011 | Unabridged
In Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, family history and Balkan myth are woven together with exquisite lyrical skill. The youngest of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Obreht, who had not yet even published a book when the magazine ran her story last summer, was already poised for critical acclaim. In her debut novel, Natalia Stefanovi, a young doctor living and practicing in an unnamed Balkan country, is vaccinating orphans when she... hears of the death of her grandfather, a fellow doctor, who had been secretly and seriously ill. When she learns that the body has been stripped of all belongings, Natalia journeys into the remote countryside to learn what exactly happened. Her quixotic quest is interrupted with sprawling magical realism - the folktales peopled with spiritedly imagined figures - a deathless man, a talking parrot, a deaf-mute tiger's wife - that her grandfather told her as a little girl. In Obreht's masterful spinning of disparate narratives, she attends with equal devotion to the fantastical, collective past of legends and to the stark reality of Natalia's own dilemmas: Her work with the orphans and her scattered family's attempt to suture a long-raw wound. By way of an intensely imaginative fiction, Obreht renders the war-ravaged history of her native Yugoslavia with a singular sense of depth. Indeed, she is wise beyond her years. - Alice Gregory
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#35 LILY TUCK, I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS

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I Married You for Happiness

Lily Tuck
2011 | Unabridged
An unexpected death can throw the living world off its axis. At one moment, there are the expectations of a life proceeding normally: the dinner to be eaten, the vacation to be taken, the argument to be had, had again, and, finally, to be resolved or forgotten; at the next, all expectation is rendered obsolete. What do we do when struck with that equilibrium-obliterating force?

In Lily Tuck's I Married You For Happiness... Nina's husband of 30-some years goes upstairs for a nap before dinner and never wakes up. Nina sets up an overnight vigil during which her life with her husband, Philip, unfolds: all the countries they traveled to, the birth of their daughter, their sweetest and sexiest times, and also the infidelities, the lies, the regrets. The stuff of their life floats past in beautiful vignettes that feel as fragmented and ethereal as memory itself; the listener's understanding of Philip, and of Nina, deepens as the vignettes dovetail and repeat. Because Philip was a mathematician who specialized in probability, larger questions about human agency in the face of the knowable or unknowable universe loom throughout the narrative. The listener feels Nina wondering: could knowing Philip was going to die like this have saved her from the shock of its suddenness?

For all its huge themes - death, betrayal, love, loss - this is an amazingly subtlr book, and that subtelty, ultimately, is the novel's strength. In spare, measured prose, Tuck shows how death resounds in the life of one individual. The listener is intimately close to Nina, in her thoughts and memories, as she mourns, reflects, and, finally, moves toward healing. -Sara Jaffe

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#34 MITCHELL ZUCKOFF, LOST IN SHANGRI-LA

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Lost in Shangri-La

Mitchell Zuckoff
2011 | Unabridged
Mitchell Zuckoff's wild and harrowing adventure/survival story is the kind of thing you'll want to recount in casual conversation, but be warned: I tried, but nobody believed it could be nonfiction. The plot may be too preposterous for Hollywood, with so many terrible and enlightening and befuddling moments you kinda can't believe it. Spoilers would do you a great disservice, but here's the gist: A U.S. Army plane crash lands in a... remote jungle in Papua, New Guinea, during the fading days of World War II. Many die right away, and more succumb to their wounds and burns during that first terrible night. But three lucky, bruised souls - two soldiers and a WAC (a member of the Women's Army Corps) - miraculously limp away and into the arms of a tribe of people who'd never before laid eyes on a Westerner. The soldiers mistake them for savages. The tribesmen mistake them for ghosts. What follows is a comedy of errors and a triumph of human nature, as the two groups with little in common culture shock each other all over the jungle. And just wait till you hear about the rescue plan. Part of what makes Lost in Shangri-La so effective is Zuckoff's straight-laced sense of journalistic fairness. There's little embellishment, and very little unnecessary drama heightening. He lets the facts and the historical record tell the story. Plus: How many white man-meets-natives yarns actually include interviews with the natives?-Patrick Rapa
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#33 TAYARI JONES, SILVER SPARROW

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Silver Sparrow

Tayari Jones
2011 | Unabridged
Familial roots are exposed and tangled in Tayari Jones's spirited coming-of-age tale, set in mid-'80s Atlanta. Teenagers Dana Yarboro and Chaurisse Witherspoon may be raised on pop music and television, but even a "modern" family like the Bradys can't prepare them for a harsh reality. When the girls meet in a drugstore and bond over faux hair and handbags, Dana knows Chaurisse is her sister. This is no Parent Trap-style farce, however.... James Witherspoon, a car service owner and driver, has kept Dana and her mother out of his daily life for years. James has worked hard to keep the girls apart - he forbids Dana from taking a coveted summer job at Six Flags when Chaurisse applies, and discourages them from choosing the same college. While sweet Chaurisse sees her father at the dinner table every night, the younger Dana is used to feeling slighted. "When most people think of bigamy," she says in the novel's opening passage, "if they think of it at all, they imagine some primitive practice on the pages of National Geographic." Far from a foreign landscape or scripted dramedy, Silver Sparrow tells the story of two working families. Divided into two narratives (told by Heather Alicia Simms and Rosalyn Coleman Williams), the novel offers a funny and affecting glance at haves and have-nots. From Dana's need for a father's love ("Who doesn't want to be loved? Anyone who has been cast off knows the pain of it"), to Chaurisse's mother's Scarlett O'Hara fantasies and a desire to run a successful hair salon, the women are feisty and filled with desire. Their stories are fresh and nostalgic as an icy Coca-Cola from the bottle.-Kate Silver
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#32 WALTER ISAACSON, STEVE JOBS

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Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
2011 | Unabridged
It seems strangely fitting that you can now listen to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs on one of the latter's inventions. It's a powerful reminder of the ubiquity of the man whom Isaacson boldly proclaims an American innovator of the caliber of Thomas Edison. What comes across most clearly in Steve Jobs isn't that Jobs invented any one particular gadget, but rather the way he raised existing ideas to perfection, making... products people rushed to with a religious fervor.

Isaacson, who conducted countless interviews with Jobs and his immense network of rich, powerful and incredibly smart friends and lovers, offers us an unprecedentedly close portrait of the man. He starts from the very beginning, with strong portraits of Jobs's biological parents as well as the adoptive ones who took him in after he was abandoned. He follows Jobs through adolescence, eventually offering a fresh take on the now-familiar saga of his fall from grace with Apple. Some of the most revealing stretches in this book come in the final act, where Isaacson charts out Jobs' personal and private life as he helmed Pixar, NeXT, and, ultimately, took Apple to the top of the world's corporate entities.

The book is a treasure trove of Jobs's mantra-like sayings ("Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do") as well as revealing stories, like the 67 nurses Jobs ran through while being treated for cancer until he found the perfect ones, and the oxygen mask he rips off because it was poorly designed. Although Isaacson doesn't cover up what a difficult and demeaning person Jobs could be, this is clearly a sympathetic portrait meant to enshrine Jobs more than deconstruct him. That's fine for a first draft of history, as there will surely be scores of books to offer the critical opinions that Isaacson largely eschews in favor of showing us the man behind the technology virtually all of us are now hooked on.-Scott Esposito
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#31 SIMON PEGG, NERD DO WELL

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Nerd Do Well

Simon Pegg
2011 | Abridged
Actor, writer, director and comedian Simon Pegg is much too modest to write a memoir, so what the Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star publishes instead in Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy's Journey to Becoming a Big Kid, which is half-autobiography, half fan-fiction. The irony is that despite the crime-fighting, robots and sex in the fictional portion of Pegg's book, the true story is more interesting. Pegg, a self-admitted... fanboy of sci-fi, horror and humor, is a role model to anyone who ever dreamed of actually making their fantasies a reality. Several times throughout the book, Pegg ponders what would happen if he could take a time machine back to his boyhood and tell, for instance, the young Star Trek fan within that he would one day play Scotty in a future film version of the series. What's especially charming about the memoir is how much homage Pegg plays to the positive influences in his life - teachers, parents, mentors - who encouraged his drive and creativity. The audiobook is read by the author, who makes you think he must be a whiz at doing voices when it comes to reading bedtime stories to his children.-Claire Zulkey
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#30 MINDY KALING, IS EVERYONE HANGING OUT WITHOUT ME? (AND OTHER CONCERNS)

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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling
2011 | Unabridged
To the casual viewer, Mindy Kaling is the actress who plays Kelly Kapoor, the materialistic, vapid, occasionally psychopathic young employee at Dunder Mifflin on The Office. To many comedy fans, however, Kaling is a hero; one of the few non-white, non-male comedy writers to write and direct episodes of a long-running prime-time comedy. (And maintain an entertaining shopping blog, "Things I Bought That I Love," at the same time.) Kaling has the... same fun, girlfriendly personality traits as Kapoor but she's both more intelligent and sweetly traditional than her television character. The pieces in her book that reflect those qualities are the strongest, particularly her revelation that she wants a marriage like her parents', whose dynamic she likens to "pals." Some sections are a little more lightweight than others (such as when Kaling discusses the exact level of fame she wants), but they're not unpleasant. They just reveal less than when Kaling discusses the behind-the-scenes information about how a girl goes from a glasses-wearing dork to a writer for a beloved show who occasionally gets to play dress-up for People magazine. New and old fans of Kaling will feel close to the writer and may wish to Tweet her after certain passages of the book, to say "OMG me too!"-Claire Zulkey
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#29 JO ANN BEARD, In ZANESVILLE

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In Zanesville

Jo Ann Beard
2011 | Unabridged
Some readers adore juicy coming-of-age novels, while others are just glad to have survived their own adolescence - no need to revisit. So here's a test. If the following sentence makes you nod with recognition rather than roll your eyes, keep reading: "I'm sick of being a teenager. Being a teenager so far hasn't gotten me anything beyond period cramps and nameless yearning, which I had as a kid too, but this... is a new kind of nameless yearning that has boys attached to it." Still with me? Good. In Zanseville is filled with these kinds of poignant meditations on the trappings of puberty, from the delicious agony of a first crush to the thorny politics of high school cliques. Such topics are far from revolutionary, but they're undeniably affecting all the same. Hormone-fueled angst is universal, after all.

Which isn't to say that Jo Ann Beard's first novel (after her acclaimed autobiographical essay collection The Boys of My Youth) simply retreads Judy Blume tampons-and-slumber-parties territory - far from it. In Zanesville brilliantly captures a particular time and place - a working class Illinois suburb in the early 1970s - back when lunches of banana and mayonnaise were eaten at soda fountains and children were regularly enlisted to fetch their mothers' cigarettes. In retrospect this era seems both simpler and more dangerous than the present, and Beard's precocious 14-year-old heroine is at the center of this dichotomy. Her nuclear family is almost sitcom-worthy - a tough-but-loving mom, an older sister who's equal parts friend and tormenter - until we get to her father, an alcoholic who disappears on benders for days at a time. A palpable sense of dread underlies the narrator's more frivolous anxieties: In between worrying about whether her best friend will snag a real boyfriend before she does, there's the niggling fear that when she's sent down to the basement to get a jar of yams for her mother, she'll find her father's shotgun on the ground, her father's body close by.

Where to find redemption in the midst of these challenges? One of the book's greatest charms is its depiction of the narrator's intellectual awakening, from her discoveries about art ("The thing is, once you start thinking about surrealism, everything starts to seem both relevant and absurd. A pencil? A piece of twine? A fork? Air?") to her avid consumption of literature. If you're the kind of teenager who stays after school to page through your art teacher's coffee table books, and if the boys you have the strongest opinions about are Charles Dickens, Thomas Wolfe and Stephen Crane, then the world is so much bigger than your small town, your family, your hormones. It's enormous.-Maris Kreizman

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#28 BOB MOULD, SEE A LITTLE LIGHT

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See a Little Light

Bob Mould
2011 | Unabridged
Save the occasional trip to a clothing-optional resort, the autobiography of Hüsker Dü and Sugar frontman Bob Mould is almost completely devoid of the hedonistic tales that peppered recent tomes by Keith Richards and Nikki Sixx, collectively part of the profitable "rocker tell-all" genre. Instead, in the spirit of the punk rock and alternative movements he fostered, Mould digs much deeper and gets more confessional and granular, baring all about his obsessive... work habits, the slowly decaying relationships between his bandmates, and the troubled romances that wouldn't die. By going heroically personal in every sentence, Mould even makes quitting smoking seem like a harrowing tempest of emotion.

His honesty is most affecting when he talks about his sexuality, detailing the complicated feelings when his preferences were an "open secret" in the world of '80s punk, all the way through his life as a 39-year-old adult finally "getting a crash course in how the gay world turns." Mould is assisted by Michael Azerrad, whose Our Band Could Be Your Life already established him as indie rock's greatest storyteller. Together they offer not only a revealing peek inside Mould's ecstasy and agony, but also a first-hand look at the American punk revolution, the major label alternative implosion and (thanks to Mould's brief career writing wrestling storylines) the rise of Chris Benoit. The book's conversational tone is amplified in the audiobook, read by Mould himself in a warm, matter-of-fact pace.-Christopher Weingarten
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#27 DAN SAVAGE & TERRY MILLER, IT GETS BETTER

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It Gets Better

Dan Savage
2011 | Unabridged
Distressed and dismayed by the suicides of several bullied LGBTQ teens, Dan Savage and husband Terry Miller launched the It Gets Better project with an online video in which they promised gay youth a hopeful future if only they would stick around to live it. It didn't take long before the campaign received thousands of videos from people around the world, all willing to share personal stories of how they'd overcome adolescent... harassment to lead happy, fulfilling adult lives. A fraction of those stories have been transcribed and included in this audiobook, which is meant to accompany the hugely successful online video campaign. The result is a candid, touching, moving and - at moments - surprisingly funny compilation.

Savage should be given kudos for including such a diverse array of voices. Contributors are drawn from across racial, religious, lingual, international and socioeconomic lines; there's even a piece from a reformed bully among these tales of the formerly harassed. The diversity of the authors - among them, everyday people, celebrities and heads of state - is reflected in both their accounts of their experiences and the messages they convey. Randy Roberts Potts, grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts, reflects on the suicide of his gay uncle, and the decision to come out in a deeply homophobic community. Michelle Faid discusses the pitfalls of being openly bisexual in high school and the unexpected backlash that followed her decision to bring a female date to prom. And Gabrielle Rivera writes, "As a gay woman of color...it doesn't get better, but what does happen is this: You get stronger."

For the most part, pieces from high profile contributors - and there are many, including President Barack Obama, Ellen Degeneres, and Prime Minister David Cameron - fail to connect as deeply as those from their lesser known counterparts. And though the narration of the audiobook can sometimes be flat, it's wonderful to hear the voices in the book brought to life. It Gets Better can and should serve as an indispensable resource to parents, educators and youth, and will resonate with anyone who has ever felt different or out of place. Here's hoping every young person, gay or not, gets a chance to listen.-Kali Holloway

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#26 DEBORAH HARKNESS, A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES

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A Discovery of Witches

Deborah Harkness
2011 | Unabridged
Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches is not exactly Twlight for grownups - it's better. Comparisons to that blockbuster series are hard to ignore; yes, there are vampires, and yes, there are star-crossed lovers and a ruling cabal that wants to keep them apart, but Witches also throws in Oxford University, genetic crossbreeding, demons, alchemy, and, well... witches.

Harkness's protagonist, Diana Bishop, is a powerful witch through her mother's genealogy, but her interests... are in academia. She shuns her powers until she's presented with an ancient alchemical manuscript that responds to her touch. Mere possession of the book opens her up to scrutiny by the vampires who inhabit Oxford's Bodleian Library. One in particular, Matthew Clairmont, a tall, handsome, 1500-year-old neuroscientist and biochemist (who, it must be said, bears more than a passing resemblance to Twilight's Edward Cullen), takes a liking to Diana. However, relations between witches and vampires are strictly forbidden by an international cabal of supernatural beings, and Diana's newfound ownership of the manuscript puts a price on her head, leading to an all-out sprint for answers that can only be found somewhere between Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and magic spells.

With the world hanging in the balance, Harkness doesn't skimp on levity. Her demons are thoroughly modern. They drop the odd reference to pop culture - albeit the kind of pop culture the History Channel specializes in ("Didn't we watch a television program about the Crusades that had an order of knights in it?" is a typical girls-night conversation here), and they're also yoga nuts. They just happen to be yoga nuts who can levitate.-Leah Friedman

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#25 STEVE EARLE, I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE

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I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Steve Earle
2011 | Unabridged
Mix one part Raymond Chandler with two parts Charles Bukowski and you'd wind up with something like Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. Doc Ebersole is a down-and-out physician with a morphine habit who's eking out a pathetic existence in San Antonio's skid row. The year is 1963, and the disgraced doctor is reduced - has reduced himself - to patching gunshot wounds, repairing broken ribs, and performing... abortions for poor souls even worse off than he.
Into this grim picture enter two figures: one is the ghost of Hank Williams, who visits Doc to float eerily and accuse him of administering the shot of morphine that did Williams in. ("There are some things about being haunted that Doc will never get used to.") The other is a more beatific character. Eighteen year-old Graciela speaks little English when she comes to Doc in dire straits. After performing the necessary procedure, Ebersole takes a liking to the young woman, and she returns the sentiment. Beautiful Graciela - "finely chiseled features more Indian than mestiza, glossy black hair contrasting against her bare shoulders" - turns out to have powers of her own, including the ability to heal everyone who crosses her path. The ghost of Hank Williams, however, is not pleased to cede his share of Doc's attention, and it is this uncommon conflict that brings a listener into Earle's gritty, boozy, sin-riddled world. The author is a Grammy-winning performer whom viewers might recognize from roles in The Wire and Treme. The audio version of his book is read, most fittingly, by Earle himself.-Molly Young
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#24 STEPHEN KING, 11/22/63

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11/22/63

Stephen King
2011 | Unabridged
Jake Epping is a high-school English teacher with a crumbling personal life and a taste for greasy food. Both are normal enough traits, and Epping is a typically likable Everyman. What's abnormal - and so very Stephen King - is how the Everyman's everyman-ness leads him into a tangled ball of bizarre and unsettling events. In the case of 11/22/63, those events constitute an alternate history of mid-20th-century America. Yep, that's right:... Jake Epping is the hero of a time-travel novel.

Here's how it works. Left alone by his wife, Jake eats occasional suppers at a local diner that his teaching peers avoid, and it so happens that a time portal has opened up inside the greasy spoon's pantry. Don't ask how - the mechanics of the rabbit-hole go mercifully unexplained. What matters is where it leads, and what might be accomplished by returning to that era. After revealing his secret and explaining that the portal leads back to1958, the diner's proprietor urges Jake to make the journey. "If you ever wanted to change the world," he pleads, "this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe."

How can Jake say no? He steps through the portal and finds himself whisked back to the tail end of the fifties - a time of Eisenhower, rabbit-eared televisions, Viceroy cigarettes and 95 cent meatloaf dinners. The problem, of course, is that Jake doesn't know what happened on the day of the Kennedy assassination, and neither, really, do we. The fog of uncertainty around that day complicates the novel's question of whether it is possible to change the past. If Jake doesn't know what happened, how on earth is he supposed to circumvent it?

The struggle to answer that question is what drives 11/22/63, and what comes through most powerfully is the author's joy at working a new muscle. King's enthusiasm is infectious.-Molly Young
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#23 ERNEST CLINE, READY PLAYER ONE

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Ready Player One

Ernest Cline
2011 | Unabridged
Not sure what's more impressive about Ernie Cline's debut novel: that he managed to pack it with so many pop-nerd-culture references or that he created such a fresh and memorable story while doing so. Okay, here's the situation: It's 2044, and America, if not the world, is a bleak, dystopian craphole where the poor are just as likely to live in trailers stacked 10-high as they are to be owned outright by... some predatory megacorporation. In contrast we have OASIS, the gigantic virtual universe where pretty much everybody - like Wade, our poor as dirt street urchin/hacker/hero (a 21st Century Charlie Bucket) and the best friends he's never met - spends their time working, playing, going to school, and pretending things don't suck as bad as they do. Then uber-rich reclusive tech magnate James Halliday dies and leaves the keys to his empire to whoever can solve the 1980s-themed puzzles he's hidden all over OASIS. After that, it's on like Donkey Kong: scrappy, chubby, sunlight deprived Wade vs. megacorp thugs, battling to see who can beat this old arcade game or decipher this Reagan-era reference first. There are '80s namechecks on just about every page, but you don't actually need to know Rush lyrics, Atari cheat codes or Matthew Broderick quotes to navigate Ready Player One. Like Wade, you just gotta plug in. It is your density.-Patrick Rapa
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#22 ELISSA SCHAPPELL, BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS

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Blueprints for Building Better Girls

Elissa Schappell
2011 | Unabridged
The title of Elissa Schappell's short story collection comes from a vintage '60s etiquette guide that B, the playwright-protagonist of "Aren't You Dead Yet?", scores at a flea market. B finds the guide quaint, convinced that those blueprint-building days are firmly in the past. The irony, of course, is that women continue to live, resist and question the blueprints the world hands them, and Schappell's collection masterfully illustrates this timeless dance.

Schappell's gang... of once-and-future "better girls" run from teenaged to middle-aged, from sheltered small-town Southerners to worldly New Yorkers. They have a multitude of strategies and defenses, too, for living female: In "Monsters of the Deep," the opening story and the collection's strongest, teenage Heather, an aspiring oceanographer, suffers taunts of "Slut!" at school, and does her best to both resist and inhabit the rumors that fly about her; in "Elephant," two young mothers broach the taboo subject of whether having kids was, after all, worth it. In "Joy of Cooking," a mother instructs her anorexic adult daughter on how to cook a chicken, the deeply dependent daughter clinging to and rejecting her mother with equal force. A number of these stories are linked by shared characters, and it's a pleasure to recognize Charlotte, or Paige, or Bender as she reappears.

To an extent, Schappell is presenting us with tropes of womanhood that are familiar in popular culture, and the stories are at their strongest when the characters are the least self-aware of the roles they inhabit: we know that Bender, the narrator of "Out of the Blue and Into the Black," is pushing away the boy who loves her because she can't stand the idea of being loved, even though she views her rejections of him as casual, accidental. Moments like the one where we see Bender grappling with emotions she can't understand are so powerful not because they illuminate for us the blueprints of one girl; rather, they illuminate the ways that our society hands girls these blueprints, and then leaves them to flounder through them on their own.-Sara Jaffe
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#21 TOM PERROTTA, THE LEFTOVERS

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The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta
2011 | Unabridged
What would happen if the apocalypse did occur now, but not in the way anybody predicted? Tom Perrotta tackles a tantalizing and thought-provoking premise wherein the Rapture occurs but very little answers are left behind. Seemingly random adults and children disappear without a trace and without any indication of why some were chosen and others left behind. Those who are left behind struggle with their new reality, some by choosing strange new... religions and cults like the Guilty Remnant, a silent robed sect that smokes in order to demonstrate that health is no matter when the world is about to end. Listeners looking for an apocalyptic sci-fi novel may be disappointed, as Perrotta somehow turns the end of the world into an everyday affair, but the author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher is an expert at turning the little moments of middle-aged upper-middle-class suburbia into graceful and intriguing scenes. The Leftovers has a large cast of characters and so listeners with short attention spans, especially those who listen to the story in bursts, may have a few moments where it's difficult to remember which character is which. However, it all comes together in the end, all except the whys, hows and whats of the Rapture, but that turns out to be surprisingly irrelevant.-Claire Zulkey

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#20 DANIEL KAHNEMAN, THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman
2011 | Unabridged
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman wouldn't go so far as to say that we, as humans, are inherently stupid or lazy, but he's just being polite. There's really no other conclusion to come to as you work your way through his fascinating (and humiliating) dissection of our species' psychological profile. Human beings are easily tricked, routinely irrational and prejudiced on multiple levels. We are so often confused, distracted and lazy in our personal... and professional lives that we're always looking for easy answers to make our zombie-walk through the day's decisions even easier. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Dr. Kahneman lays out all the ways we fool ourselves: jumping to conclusions, mistaking talent for luck, defending poor decisions, and so on. Along the way, he teaches some fine pop-psych terms you can drop at parties like the mere exposure effect (wherein we start to like even dumb ideas the more we hear them) and the law of least effort (our slothful brains gravitate toward easy answers), and hundreds of examples of people being irrational, sometimes with hilarious or devastating results. Like, did you know that companies with easily pronounced names do better in the stock market during their first week? Apparently their familiar syllables just make us feel comfortable. And guess what: We do better on tests with smaller, less legible fonts, probably because we're concentrating more. I think this book is amazing, but I've also lost all faith in my stupid, lazy opinions.-Patrick Rapa
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#19 PATTON OSWALT, ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND

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Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

Patton Oswalt
2011 | Unabridged
Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt ("Ratatouille," "Big Fan") brings a little of this and a little of that to his first book. It's part memoir, part humor, part list of things he looked up on the Internet as he wrote. As the author puts it, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a work of comedy, terror and autobiography that begins with his early memories of working in a movie theater, committing light larceny and... playing Dungeons & Dragons until its magic is eclipsed by an actual social life. The amusing autobiographical sketches are interspersed with short out-and-out humor pieces (the title is a reference to the various philosophies nerds take towards life as we know it: you either identify with zombies, wish you commandeered a spaceship or looked forward to living a quiet life in a wasteland).
The best moment of the book is when Oswalt offers a look at what it's like to headline a comedy club somewhere in Canada (not nearly as glamorous as it seems, when you don't want to be there nor, seemingly, does the audience), while a reverie of a trip to an MTV gifting suite is rife with self-consciousness and loathing. Helped out by his musical friends Michael Penn and Michael Stipe, the book includes a few semi-jokey, semi-autobiographical musical references (like meaningful-to-Oswalt REM lyrics recited gamely by Stipe). At just over three hours long, it's ideal for a mini-road trip.-Claire Zulkey

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#18 STEPHEN GREENBLATT, THE SWERVE

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The Swerve

Stephen Greenblatt
2011 | Unabridged
Perhaps it's not surprising that Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is no lightweight listen. It is, after all, an examination of the 2000-year-old, 7400+ word Latin poem "De rerun natura" ("On the Nature of Things") and the effect it has had on philosophy and history since its rediscovery in 1417 in the archives of a German monastery. Despite this dense subject matter, Greenblatt, a major figure in academia,... has accomplished a truly remarkable feat: he's made his discussion not only eminently understandable to those of us not in the midst of a dissertation on Renaissance philosophy, but immensely fascinating and relevant to the 21st century American experience.

The comforting voice of narrator Edoardo Ballerini takes us through a papal emissary's initial discovery of the text by Roman writer Lucretius, as well as its unfriendly reception in the Catholic Church. Along with a discussion of the Roman understanding of physics, Lucretius's work proposed a truly radical idea: the gods were so absorbed in their own lives that they gave little thought to the acts or morality of mortals - and with that lack of attention came a lack of ultimate judgment after death. From this understanding came the conclusion that without that sort of final accounting, man had nothing to fear from death, and that one's only goal should be to live in the pursuit of personal fulfillment.

At the time, the Church was the leading school of science and philosophy, and Lucretius's thesis was borderline heretical to its teaching of faith and moral order. Greenblatt posits that because of the distribution of this one poem, a shift occurred in the philosophical community, and contributed a great deal to the Renaissance's push towards modernity and greater diversity of thought.

Taking his title from one of the lines of "De rerun natura" in which "the swerve" refers to an unpredictable change, Greenblatt draws a line from ancient Rome through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the Declaration of Independence's "pursuit of happiness," while his discussion of Lucretius's zen-like treatise on life and death doubles as a meditation on the modern fear of mortality. So no, it's not a beach book, but it is a fascinating - and extremely accessible window - into the evolution of modern thought.-Leah Friedman
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#17 ANN PATCHETT, STATE OF WONDER

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State of Wonder

Ann Patchett
2011 | Unabridged
Ann Patchett's State of Wonder begins, elegantly, with a death. "At that moment she un-derstood why people say, 'You might want to sit down,'" writes Patchett of Midwestern pharmaceutical researcher Dr. Marina Singh, as she is informed of a colleague's demise in the Amazon jungle. "There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her... ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles."

But what follows this moment is the most vibrant of stories, full of color and life. As Marina sets off for the Amazon in search of the last person to see her research partner alive, the reclusive and cantankerous Dr. Annick Swenson, the book blooms. The prose is rich, the characters are vividly rendered, and the relationship between Marina and Dr. Swenson, who is investigating an absurdly fertile Amazonian tribe, is complex, funny and deeply engaging.

State of Wonder, the sixth novel from Pen/Faulkner award-winning Patchett, is the product of an artist in her prime. So, too, is the audiobook, which is narrated by actress Hope Davis, who mesmerizingly voices dozens of characters of different genders, ages and nationalities. A lesser work would still be worth listening to if Davis was reading it. But the combination of Pat
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#16 AMOR TOWLES, RULES OF CIVILITY

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Rules of Civility

Amor Towles
2011 | Unabridged
Amor Towles' Rules of Civility is a romp through the 1930s Manhattan glamour scene. His effervescent heroine, Katey Kontent (formerly known as Katya) manages to work her way up from law firm secretary to darling of Cond é Nast's Gotham - a thinly-veiled New Yorker Magazine - and entangle herself in a tempestuous love triangle involving her best friend, Eve, and the exquisitely-named, Jay Gatsby-esque Tinker Grey.

After Tinker injures Eve in a... car accident, he finds himself to be not only her generous benefactor, but a romantic conquest as well. However, Katey has already fallen for Tinker after a few chance encounters on the party circuit, and when she believes he returns her affections it becomes all the more difficult to be confronted with gossip about his and Eve's escapades. The vagaries of love and money push the listener through a number of twists regarding who is really manipulating whom, which, combined with the ultra-snappy dialogue and glamorous settings lend Rules the air of an old fashioned caper.

Capably interpreted by Rebecca Lowman, Rules can feel at times like the ultimate 1930s literary pastiche, however Towles' characters are charming enough to justify the plunge into familiar territory. Tinker may have the wealth and the mystery, and Katey may be the rags-to-riches American story, but it's Eve - the child of Midwestern privilege - who gets all the best lines. It's hard to resist a real broad in the tradition of Dorothy Parker - especially when she's dropping bon mots like, "I'm willing to be under anything - as long as it isn't somebody's thumb."-Leah Friedman
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#15 JANE LYNCH, HAPPY ACCIDENTS

#14 HELEN OYEYEMI, MR. FOX

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Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi
2011 | Unabridged
Helen Oyeyemi's playful, audacious and often breathtaking new novel, Mr. Fox, begins with an accusation: "You kill women." The accuser: the wickedly funny muse come-to-life, Mary Foxe. The accused: St. John Fox, the mid-century author of dark little books that always end with his female characters dying in gruesome ways. As Mary challenges Mr. Fox to treat his female characters differently - "Just be flexible," she says - a game commences, and... one of the more delightfully unconventional narratives in recent memory begins to unfold.

A good swath of the book, which in many ways is a retelling of the Bluebeard story, is comprised of extremely clever short stories co-written by Fox and Foxe. In this struggle, Mary insistently tries to get Mr. Fox to treat his female characters better, often with little success. There is also a separate storyline where we learn more about Mr. Fox's life, and his tumultuous relationship with his real-life wife, Daphne, who objects to the his relationship with his fictional universe and, by extension, Mary. ("Why have husbands got to keep themselves all locked up, that's what I want to know," wonders Daphne.)
Mr. Fox is Oyeyemi's fourth novel - she is just 26, and has won numerous awards - and she handles the complexities of the novel deftly and purposefully. Again and again, we see female characters get crushed in various ways, either physically or emotionally, which sounds sort of oppressive, but actually becomes empowering. As the stories get richer and darker, the novel begins to feel more expansive. And suddenly the female characters begin to thrive. There is still a struggle between all the voices - there will always be a struggle - but Oyeyemi presents a hopeful vision for love and equality in the end.-Jami Attenberg

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#13 GABRIELLE HAMILTON, BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER

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Blood, Bones, and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton
2011 | Unabridged
New York chef Hamilton has built a career on feeding people small, meaningful meals at her beloved eatery Prune, and this bittersweet memoir doles out her unusual life experiences in equally compelling, well-paced morsels. After a magical, party-filled childhood in rural Pennsylvania with an exacting French ballet dancer mom, a whimsical set designer dad and four wild siblings, Hamilton's fairy tale ended when her parents divorced. Abandoned and broke, the young teen... found work in restaurants to support herself - and her precocious habits. Later on, the waitressing and catering jobs got her through a few failed runs at college, and finally, a graduate writing program. Despite her intention to become a published author, Hamilton's passion for food - and for the ways food could convey emotion - drew her back to kitchens time and again. When she finally had the opportunity to open her own restaurant, she eagerly set about trying to recreate the cozy enclave of her lost youth, replete with bone marrow and sardine and Triscuit snacks. Her single-minded commitment brought in the crowds while alienating those closest to her. As a narrator, Hamilton is an alternately tough and vulnerable character whose difficult family life has led to ongoing personal disappointments, yet these very losses have also inspired culinary greatness. Her candid confessions, her obvious love for food and the sheer expressive force of her writing make Blood Bones & Butter a book to savor.-Elisa Ludwig
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#12 LEV GROSSMAN, THE MAGICIAN KING

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The Magician King

Lev Grossman
2011 | Unabridged
What exactly does one do with a degree in magic? Excepting the odd Hampshire student, it's a dilemma confronted mostly by fictional characters, such as the recent graduates of Brakebills, the magical college in Upstate New York where Lev Grossman's The Magicians was set. The answer, though, is not so different than it is for non-magical graduates: anything. You can do anything with a degree in magic, though in practice - and... perhaps as a direct consequence - more often you wind up doing nothing. Quentin Coldwater, the titular king in Magicians sequel The Magician King, has left behind a vague and cushy sinecure to reign over Fillory, a Narnia-like kingdom, with three friends. Having saved the kingdom in the previous book, they don't have a whole lot to do, except drink copious amounts of whiskey and gallop around the forest in "man-tights" looking for a quest. When the quest finally finds them, it brings Quentin directly back to the place all recent grads, magical or not, fear the most. As in The Magicians
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#11 CHAD HARBACH, THE ART OF FIELDING

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The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach
2011 | Unabridged
Chad Harbach's much anticipated, decade-in-the-making debut doesn't disappoint. The Art of Fielding is a campus novel, but one that spends more time in the locker room than the library. Henry Skrimshander might look like a scrawny kid from South Dakota, but within months of his arrival at Westish College, he's known as one of the best players on the varsity baseball team. Recruited for his improbably good arm and virtuosic sense of... fielding, it's soon clear that Henry is meant for the big leagues. But not all dreams come true, and on the field, anybody can choke. As what once appeared to be an inevitably bright future fades, Henry - like his mentor, Mike Schwartz - is forced to rethink his prospects and grapple with a life after college that suddenly looks a lot different than he'd envisioned.
But Henry's story isn't the only one unfolding at Westish. There's also Guert Affenlight, the college president who's fallen head over heels in love for the first time - with Henry's roommate, Owen Dunne; and Affenlight's daughter, Pella, recently escaped from a misguided marriage to a much older man. The campus quarters are relatively close, and the lives led in the ivory tower are inextricably entangled. All of the book's characters - young and old, male and female, scholars and athletes - have their fair share of lessons to learn, not to mention mistakes to make. The Art of Fielding is brimming with snappy dialogue and excerpts from Melville, and listening to Harbach's prose read aloud is a perfect pleasure.-Alice Gregory
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#10 SARAH VOWELL, UNFAMILIAR FISHES

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Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell
2011 | Unabridged
Can any other American state boast a biography as interesting as Hawaii's? The 50th state, in Sarah Vowell's tale, is a land of tropical breezes, lepers, missionaries, deposed monarchs and hula dancing. It is a land of mayonnaise-based salads and proselytizing. It is where our current president grew up, and it is the subject of "Unfamiliar Fishes", an effort destined to please fans of David Sedaris and Gordon Wood alike. The book's... well-chosen narrators - Paul Rudd, Fred Armisen, Catherine Keener and Keanu Reeves, among them - elevate Vowell's material into something that can only be characterized as a "star-studded historical fiesta." Needless to say, it's fun.

Vowell's presence will be familiar to fans of This American Life and The Daily Show, both of which have featured her signature wise-cracking commentary. In writing, she's is a lot like the whiz kid from AP History - that lucky joker who sat in the back and made everyone laugh while effortlessly retaining every scrap of information that floated her way. Hawaii is rich territory, "a multi-ethnic miscellany in which every race is a minority," as Vowell characterizes it, which has lead to a "habit of hodgepodge" producing such Hawaiian delicacies as the loco moco, "a hamburger patty topped with gravy and a fried egg, a dish presumably invented to remedy what has always been the hamburger's most obvious defect: not enough egg." The archipelago is also a politically rich territory (see Queen Liliuokalani, overthrown in 1893) and a culturally intriguing one (the Hawaiian language contains no word for "adultery"). Not surprisingly, Vowell is the perfect serio-comic hostess for a Hawaiian tour.-Molly Young
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#9 ROB LOWE, STORIES I ONLY TELL MY FRIENDS

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Stories I Only Tell My Friends

Rob Lowe
2011 | Unabridged
Rob Lowe understands if you have a hard time taking him seriously. Looking back in his upbeat and quite entertaining memoir, he has a hard time, too - a serious thespian trapped in the body of a teen idol, a kid who makes up for his geekiness big-time once killer chin and ice-blue eyes begin to announce themselves to any number of gorgeous women, on and off-set. At one point, co-hosting a... fundraiser in Canada with Princess Stephanie of Monaco - with whom he has been carrying on a month-long affair - he approaches Gregory Peck, Robert Wagner, Cary Grant, and Prince Rainier to thank them for a wonderful evening. As he leaves, he hears Wagner mutter, "Ya know, guys, I think that kid's banged every one of our daughters." He has, though he's gentleman enough to leave out the sordid details.

Lowe's accentuating-the-positive means we get only the bare minimum on the videotaped sex scandal with a pair of women, one underage, during the 1988 presidential campaign (lifelong Democrat Lowe was stumping for Michael Dukakis). But Stories I Only Tell My Friends hardly skimps on dirt, as when the author dishes on his "fairly friendly but simmering rivalry" with Michael J. Fox, with whom he butts heads by "debating whose movie themes were better": John Parr's "Man in Motion," from St. Elmo's Fire, or Huey Lewis & the News's "The Power of Love." "Hey, Teen Wolf, what time is it?" asks Lowe, to which Fox shoots back, "Screw off! You've made seven movies. My last one [Back to the Future] made more than all of yours combined!"

Lowe isn't always a sparkling stylist, but he's sharp, aware, and - deliberate omissions to the side - unself-important about his work and his time in rehab during 1990 for excessive drinking. "[B]eing in treatment lets my real self emerge," he writes. "But first, it will have to gradually strangle the good-looking, successful, charming poster-boy pod person that stunted its growth many years ago." Looks like he did a good job of it. -Michaelangelo Matos
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#8 ANDRE DUBUS, TOWNIE

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Townie

Andre Dubus III
2011 | Unabridged
It may be a little bit early to start counting the votes for audiobook of the year, but Andre Dubus III's Townie should be on the ballot. The book - Dubus's fifth; he is best known for the novel House of Sand and Fog - is a compelling and brave memoir of Dubus's troubled childhood in a Massachusetts mill town. But beyond the excellent source material is Dubus's narration, which is so... expert and engaging that he transforms the traditional audiobook into something quite intimate and special. And, with apologies to Mark Wahlberg, Dubus's representations of the subtle shadings of the Massachusetts accent are some of the finest recorded.
The heart of the story focuses on Dubus's relationship with his father, acclaimed short-story writer Andre Dubus II, who left his wife and small children, becoming an irregular yet powerful presence in their lives. Life is tough in their town, and his mother struggles. Eventually, Dubus's brother attempts suicide and his sister is assaulted. Dubus responds to the tumultuousness of his life by working out, bulking up and resorting to violence as a means of conflict resolution on more than one occasion. It was, of course, a plea for attention. "Did he think I was building muscles for my health?" he writes of his father.

Townie is so fluidly written it feels like a novel. And through it, Dubus treats every character fairly, especially his father, who could easily be the villain in this story, but instead just feels very human and flawed. And, as Dubus evolves from a musclebound troublemaker into someone who falls in love with writing, the book collects some truly enchanted moments. "I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I'd never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casting, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator." We are with him the entire time.-Jami Attenberg
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#7 KAREN RUSSELL, SWAMPLANDIA!

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Swamplandia!

Karen Russell
2011 | Unabridged
In the opening pages of her debut novel, Karen Russell creates a wonderfully primeval paradise and then starts pulling the Jenga pieces away in bold, beautiful sentences. Ava Bigtree and her siblings grow up in Swamplandia!, a charming little tourist trap on an undertamed island in the Florida Everglades, with a dad who calls himself Chief and a mom who wrestles alligators nightly. All around them is the teeming chaos of nature... but, as long as the rest of civilization is a long ferry ride away, the Bigtrees are free and safe and happy.

This kind of thing can't last, and when it all comes crashing down - mom gets cancer, a crass rival theme park opens up on the mainland, siblings start running away - it's a special kind of heartbreak, for the Chief who tried his hardest to keep the tribe together, for Ava who's so young and unworldly, and for the reader who, if only briefly, wanted nothing more than to watch Hilola Bigtree dive into that pool full of gators forever. Swamplandia! is about a lot of things: coming of age, coming to grips, learning you're not the hero of the story. It's also about that thick, murky line between fantasy and reality, and wanting to live in a world more lovely, more magical, and less precise than the one we're stuck in.
-Patrick Rapa
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#6 JOSHUA FOER, MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN

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Moonwalking With Einstein

Joshua Foer
2011 | Unabridged
Given that humans screw up so often and so spectacularly, it's nice to be reminded that we're also capable of performing incredible feats. It's especially nice to be reminded by someone like Joshua Foer, the talented and likable young author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. With his debut effort, Foer has written a book that mingles science writing with picaresque memoir and daubs of history (try... finding that combination elsewhere!) in which he tells the tale of how his investigations into the art of memory led him to compete for, and win, the title of 2006 U.S.A. Memory Champion. The crown doesn't come easily - Foer trains like a fiend - but he does make the case, convincingly, that having a good memory depends more on discipline than it does on genetics. Anyone can memorize dozens of random digits or the order of a deck of cards provided he's willing to practice. Listeners can decide for themselves whether they're up for the challenge. In any case, Foer's account is compelling and adventuresome.-Molly Young
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#5 PATTI SMITH, JUST KIDS

#4 ROGER EBERT, LIFE ITSELF

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Life Itself

Roger Ebert
2011 | Unabridged
For decades, Roger Ebert has been a pop-culture fixture as a film critic, television host and late-night talk show couch-warmer. In recent years, however, he's been more prominent than ever: His struggles with thyroid cancer may have silenced him in the literal sense, but they've made him more vocal as a writer, especially in new media.

In Life Itself, Ebert traces a full life with proud roots in Urbana, Illinois. Like many memoirs,... Ebert's has a sepia-tinged "good ol' days" quality at the start, but his life story quickly evolves as he travels the world, works with Russ Meyer to write Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, struggles with a drinking problem and learns to balance a desire for social justice with his Catholic roots. In the middle, film buffs can feast on Ebert's meditations on his favorite directors, including Werner Herzog, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. The book, narrated beautifully by Edward Hermann, never becomes gloomy or full of self-pity, although the last chapter is heavier than all those that precede it.-Claire Zulkey
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#3 PATRICK DEWITT, THE SISTERS BROTHERS

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The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt
2011 | Unabridged
"I do not regret that the man is dead, but I wish I had kept better hold of my emotions. The loss of control does not frighten me so much as embarrass me." - Eli Sisters. Most of the time it's only the darkest, most honest corners of your brain that can fess up to liking Eli and Charles Sisters. Even for Gold Rush-era hitmen, the brothers are bastards: They'll punch a... kindly woman in the stomach, rip off a whore and cheat at a gentleman's duel. The dusty, ramshackle towns in their wake are often strewn with blood and humiliation, and while we readers can't shrug off the cruelty as easily as the Sisters do, we gotta admit: These are men of action, and we kinda admire that about them. (And besides, there are rare moments of unexpected civility - even kindness - that let us know there is some sort of moral foundation, however corroded by greed and cynicism.)

On the payroll of a mobster-like tycoon back in Oregon City, the brothers are trekking south to San Francisco to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. Whether they should have a good reason, besides a paycheck, for taking a man's life, well, that's just one of the philosophical conundrums that (however briefly) occur to the brothers during their long, grisly ride. The Old West yarn has had no shortage of reinventions and reinvigorations in the past few decades, but Patrick DeWitt has managed to breathe rare new air into the genre with this stylish road novel. The Sisters Brothers is self-aware without getting meta, and funny without devolving into farce. It's also beautifully dark and inventively vicious, and it's okay to admit you're into that sort of thing.- Patrick Rapa
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#2 DANA SPIOTTA, STONE ARABIA

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Stone Arabia

Dana Spiotta
2011 | Unabridged
Dana Spiotta's third novel is, among other things, a poignant ode to the act of writing and the ways we document the events of our lives. Set in Los Angeles in the middle of the last decade, it tells the story of Nik Worth, a prolific and talented musician who spends his life on the outskirts of the industry. It turns out Nik, now approaching 50, had a chance to make it... big decades ago. But in place of that elusive record deal, Nik turns his obsessive documentation of his career - journal entries, letters, press clippings - into a fictional account of what could have been, achieving through his imagination what he couldn't achieve in real life. The Chronicles, as they're called, support the art and vice versa: Experimenting in different genres and founding homemade record labels, Nik also creates volumes of fake album reviews and a variety of dramatic yarns to go alongside his massive oeuvre. To add to the intrigue, it's only through the book's narrator, Nik's younger sister Denise, that we get to experience the Chronicles. Her documentation of Nik is a second purview woven through his.

The Chronicles are quite a feat. What Nik writes might be fictional (and, when juxtaposed with reality, depressing), but in his creation of another life richer and more public than his actual one, he holds a certain power, a control over his existence. Denise, meanwhile, is an ex-bad actress who feels her life's destiny is to "witness and witness and stupidly survive." She is preoccupied with other people: Nik, her daughter Ada and strangers, particularly the subjects of headline-making tragedies - murder-suicides, abductions and the like. College-age Ada is also transfixed by Nik, and soon enough the three of them have added a third layer to the story, a documentary film created by Ada about her uncle's life in the musical margins.

Listeners will find Nik as utterly fascinating as Denise and Ada do, owing to the verisimilitude of this eccentric yet charming character. Stone Arabia is an ode to family, to the people in our lives we never don't know - "no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other," as Denise puts it. But it is also a first-rate rock 'n' roll novel. Spiotta was as meticulous and inspired as Nik when she dreamed up a fake life for this die-hard musician, a true artist who finds a strange and beautiful way of sublimating that very human desire to stand out in the crowd.-Liz Colville
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#1 TINA FEY, BOSSYPANTS

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Bossypants

Tina Fey
2011 | Unabridged
Do yourself a favor and do not read Bossypants. Why read it when you can listen to it? If you don't listen to the audiobook version of Tina Fey's autobiographical essay collection, you won't be able to hear the beloved 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live star do impressions of her no-nonsense dad, or her fellow counselors at a Delaware County theater camp, or Monica Lewinsky, or (yay!) Amy Poehler, or,... last but certainly not least, her Red State doppelganger and intellectual polar opposite, Sarah Palin. Bossypantscontains everything fans have come to love about Fey: a healthy dose of self-deprecation ("I wouldn't even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did" ), a deep appreciation for the absurd and the embarrassing, and an unapologetic, take-no-prisoners attitude where it matters most - in describing her triumphs and struggles as a harried working mother who's become one of the most successful women (or people, for that matter) in show business today.

There's a moment in the book when Fey describes a famous SNL sketch in which she and Amy Poehler first impersonated Palin and Hillary Clinton: "You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even realize it because of all the jokes. It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!" And this is exactly what she does in Bossypants - sneaking us our daily recommended allowances of empowerment and self-acceptance, all through the alluring guise of comedy. Whether she's doling out career advice ("I encourage [young women] to always wear a bra. Even if you don't think you need it, just... you know what? You're never going to regret it") or saying a wonderfully perverse prayer for her young daughter ("May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers"), Fey embraces the irreverent even as the wisdom of her words seeps through.-Maris Kreizman
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eMusic Welcomes Macmillan

eMusic Editorial Staff — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:05:33 +0000

From touchstones of contemporary literature to cultural critiques and mega-thrillers, this new crop of books from Macmillan Audio is sure to please. Check out our favorites below.

HITS OF 2011

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Train Dreams

Denis Johnson
2011 | Unabridged
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The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides
2011 | Unabridged
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The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta
2011 | Unabridged
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Listen to This

Alex Ross
2011 | Unabridged
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That Used to Be Us

Michael Mandelbaum
2011 | Unabridged

CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS

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Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel
2011 | Unabridged
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Freedom

Jonathan Franzen
2011 | Unabridged
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By Nightfall

Michael Cunningham
2011 | Unabridged
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The Ask

Sam Lipsyte
2011 | Unabridged
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Sunset Park

Paul Auster
2011 | Unabridged

CELEBRITY WISDOM

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Stories I Only Tell My Friends

Rob Lowe
2011 | Unabridged
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Suck it, Wonder Woman!

Olivia Munn
2011 | Unabridged
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The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave
2011 | Unabridged
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Fragments

Bernard Comment
2011 | Unabridged

VITAL NON-FICTION

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Bright-sided

Barbara Ehrenreich
2011 | Unabridged
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The Checklist Manifesto

Atul Gawande
2011 | Unabridged
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Eaarth

Bill McKibben
2011 | Unabridged
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Conversations with Myself

Nelson Mandela
2011 | Unabridged

THRILLS

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The Night Season

Chelsea Cain
2011 | Unabridged
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Elegy for April

Benjamin Black
2011 | Unabridged
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Let Me In

John Ajvide Linqvist
2011 | Unabridged
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Buried Secrets

Joseph Finder
2011 | Unabridged

GUILTY PLEASURES

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Sweet Valley Confidential

Francine Pascal
2011 | Unabridged
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Goddess of Vengeance

Jackie Collins
2011 | Unabridged

eMusic’s Most Delectable Food Books

eMusic Editorial Staff — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:30:51 +0000

Take a break, diet books. As the holiday season gets underway, it’s time for indulgence. In honor of Thanksgiving and the impending party season where being decadent is almost as important as being thankful, here’s a list of our favorite culinary literature. From top chefs to restaurant critics and food historians, the authors of these savory books might just offer inspiration for your own feasts. So pull up a chair and dig in.

THE CHEFS

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Kitchen Confidential

Anthony Bourdain
2007 | Unabridged
There are no easy miracles in professional cooking. Gruff, growling, misanthropic Anthony Bourdain, the antithesis of Rachael Ray and her chipper Food Network colleagues, reveals that restaurant work is hard, dirty and performed by sordid characters who can barely talk, let alone flash toothy grins as they plate steak au poivre. A supreme storyteller, Bourdain recounts his own early discoveries in a Provincetown kitchen during a college summer, and the career passion... that led him to his post as executive chef at Les Halles in New York City. Along the way he shares his own adventures in the back of restaurants, his tussles with drug abuse and some of the naughtier goings-on between kitchen staff, plus some grim facts about food handling. Now a television personality, Bourdain has built a following on his caustic wit and searing judgments - all evidenced here in this early memoir.
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Blood, Bones, and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton
2011 | Unabridged
New York chef Hamilton has built a career on feeding people small, meaningful meals at her beloved eatery Prune, and this bittersweet memoir doles out her unusual life experiences in equally compelling, well-paced morsels. After a magical, party-filled childhood in rural Pennsylvania with an exacting French ballet dancer mom, a whimsical set designer dad and four wild siblings, Hamilton's fairy tale ended when her parents divorced. Abandoned and broke, the young teen... found work in restaurants to support herself - and her precocious habits. Later on, the waitressing and catering jobs got her through a few failed runs at college, and finally, a graduate writing program. Despite her intention to become a published author, Hamilton's passion for food - and for the ways food could convey emotion - drew her back to kitchens time and again. When she finally had the opportunity to open her own restaurant, she eagerly set about trying to recreate the cozy enclave of her lost youth, replete with bone marrow and sardine and Triscuit snacks. Her single-minded commitment brought in the crowds while alienating those closest to her. As a narrator, Hamilton is an alternately tough and vulnerable character whose difficult family life has led to ongoing personal disappointments, yet these very losses have also inspired culinary greatness. Her candid confessions, her obvious love for food and the sheer expressive force of her writing make Blood Bones & Butter a book to savor.
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Julie & Julia

Julie Powell
2007 | Abridged
Married to her high-school sweetheart, but childless and staring down her thirtieth birthday, disgruntled outer-borough secretary Julie Powell was in a serious funk. To pull herself out of it, she decided to devote a year to cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The author later admitted that the life-changing project was "like doing Thanksgiving every day for a year", especially if your idea... of Thanksgiving involves many pounds of butter. Powell risks her marriage, her job and her sanity as she tackles omelets and offal in her tiny kitchen, and chronicles her successes and failures in a blog that eventually became this book. Listening to the frequently foul-mouthed author describe sweating over broken mayonnaise - all the while staying well-lubricated with cocktails or red wine - is a tonic, the perfect soundtrack for any stressed-out cook short of time with company on the way.
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The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry

Kathleen Flinn
2007 | Unabridged
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My Life in France

Alex Prud'Homme
2008 | Unabridged

THE FOOD WRITERS

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Born Round

Frank Bruni
2009 | Unabridged
Warning: do not listen to Born Round on an empty stomach. Frank Bruni's memoir about growing up in a family where cooking is both an expression of love and a competition is bound to whet your appetite, from the descriptions of his grandmother's homemade pasta to the details of his father setting up to watch a baseball game with a pile of ice cream bars at the ready. Bruni both celebrates and... bemoans the role of food in his life, as eating was the cause of large amounts of physical and emotional stress: that's right, obsessing about pants size is not just for ladies. While the eventual New York Times restaurant critic's book bears some resemblance to David Sedaris' works, with colorful tales of a large family, it has the added bonus of being written from the perspective of a person who has also enjoyed a good life. While Bruni lays bare the effects of his yo-yo-ing weight on his self-esteem, it never gets too dire as he also describes his parents' beautiful homes, his fascinating experiences in journalism, and parties with "two dozen of my closest friends in Detroit." The juicy little details of what it takes to be a high-profile restaurant critic (wigs, fake credit cards, fake telephone numbers) is an additional dollop of fun on this sweet, enjoyable autobiography.
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Garlic and Sapphires

Ruth Reichl
2007 | Abridged
There are two editions of Ruth Reichl's latest memoir, but only the abridged one offers the warm, wry, concentrated flavor of the writer narrating her own story of life in the culinary trenches. Eating for a living sounds like a sweet gig, but for every bit of good-guy treatment she receives when she's recognized as the New York Times restaurant critic - in one memorable episode, Le Cirque's Sirio Maccioni leaves the... king of Spain waiting at the bar while wafting Reichl to a prime table and plying her with foie gras - there are plenty of grim slogs through less-than-memorable meals and lackluster service when she dines out undercover in a variety of disguises. Each chapter follows Reichl as she assumes another persona in service of her mission as a "spy in the house of food," while her reviews let the listener taste not only the food, but the anxiety that accompanies a critic's decision to bestow those all-important stars - or take them away.
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Heat

Bill Buford
2008 | Abridged
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Stuffed

Patricia Volk
2010 | Unabridged
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Tales from the Tummy Trilogy

Calvin Trillin
2009 | Abridged

THE HISTORIES

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The Big Oyster

Mark Kurlansky
2008 | Unabridged
When you think of locales famous for fresh seafood, New York City might not be the first place to come to mind; but author Kurlansky shows that oysters have played a pivotal role in the metropolis' culture, economy and political development throughout its early history. At once an haute cuisine luxury and a poor man's staple, the oyster was a highly versatile and at onetime naturally plentiful food, as Kurlansky demonstrates with... recipes from as far back as the 15th century. Between the Lenape Indians who left behind enormous middens (shell piles) through the Dutch settlers who built a mercantile empire on the bivalves and finally the English settlers who made them an important part of the local cuisine, it was widely acknowledged that oysters were one of the region's great natural resources. And like any great resource, the oyster beds would be exploited and depleted with subsequent overfishing and increasing water pollution. Like Kurlansky's previous food-themed tomes, Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster is an exhaustively researched history that reveals much about its edible subject, and even more about the people who valued it. Though Stechschulte's reading is a bit mannerly and dry, the material is juicy enough to stand on its own.
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Tomatoland

Barry Estabrook
2011 | Unabridged
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The Table Comes First

Adam Gopnik
2011 | Unabridged

CELEBRATIONS

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I Like You

Amy Sedaris
2009 | Unabridged
When a kid at your child's birthday party spills punch on his shirt, you can turn to Martha Stewart for stain-busting advice. When a kid at your child's birthday party catches on fire, however, Amy Sedaris has got you covered. In I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, Sedaris goes where Stewart fears to tread, covering both the eventualities and the unlikelihoods that throwing a party entails. Entertaining the elderly or... infirm? Check. Quarantining a mentally instable partygoer? Check. Tip-toeing around a guest's alcoholism? Check. Martha Stewart can help you get out punch, but Sedaris will lead you through removing blood, urine, and mud. It would be reasonable to assume that I Like You is simply a send-up or novelty. After all, Sedaris is most well-known as Strangers with Candy's 46-year-old high schooler Jerri Blank, whom any host would be wise to keep away from the medicine cabinet. The odd thing about I Like You is that, when she's not giving tips on feeding lumberjacks and unsolicited advice on genital maintenance, Sedaris proffers some shockingly practical and original insight. Her chapter on hosting or being an out-of-town guest is dead-on, as is the observation, "The moment someone says, 'Hey everyone, listen to the lyrics of this song!' your party is over." Sedaris calls herself "clinically simple," and though her humor sometimes verges on the juvenile, potty variety, I Like You is far from the disposable pulp that many comics try to pass off as reading material. This audiobook version wins extra points for taking advantage of the medium to add texture and humor to the text.
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Hallelujah! The Welcome Table

Maya Angelou
2007 | Unabridged
It's hard to avoid cracking wise about "And still I rise," when writing about Maya Angelou's celebration of food, family and fellowship. But this audiobook is no joke. The poet's savory memoir reveals that she's a dab hand in the kitchen, having even worked for a stretch as a cook at San Francisco's Creole Cafe. The Arkansas native filters a lifetime of memories through 73 mouthwatering family recipes, sumptuous-sounding down-home dishes like... her grandmother's (known as Momma) baked lemon meringue pie and chicken and dumplings and her brother's smothered pork chops. She even invited famed food writer M.F.K. Fisher home for cassoulet. But the rich voice of the poet reading her own words is the tastiest treat by far. This is not the book to listen to while grocery shopping on an empty stomach. Better to save it for dessert after a rich, satisfying meal. Like Angelou, you will long for a larger stomach, so you can eat two more helpings.
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DON’T FORGET THE WINE

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A Guide to Wine

Julian Curry
2007
his guy loves wine. I'm not calling Julian Curry a drunk, but it's pretty obvious from the opening moments of A Guide to Wine that this is no mere hobby or intellectual pursuit. "No discussion of wine should stray far from the glass in your hand and the experience of drinking it," he asserts in a playful British accent that could charm the label off a cabernet. His point? He's gonna pour... himself a glass right now, and recommends you do the same. From there he leads the listener from seed to grape to barrel to bottle in a parade of international names, regions and time-tested traditions. In the unlikely event you find yourself the sudden proprietor of a vineyard, Curry offers step-by-step directions for producing, say, a "roset wine with aspirations to quality." Seriously. There are tips on hiring help, choosing corks and bottles, cooling your barrels, even pruning and picking should you decide to get your hands dirty ("protect your knees with pads, darlings!"). It's noteworthy that at no point does Curry come off like some snobby five-star sommelier. His goal is more practical: The more skilled you become at discerning a Rioja from a Blaufrnkisch or a Sauvignon Blanc, the better drinking partner you will make for Lord Curry should he come knockin'.
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