The Essays category has 117 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 702 ratings. The most-rated is What the Dog Saw.
What the Dog Saw
Summary
Over the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has become the most gifted and influential journalist in America. In The New Yorker, his writings are such must-reads that the magazine charges advertisers significantly more money for ads that run within his articles. With his number one best sellers, The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, he has reached millions of readers and listeners. And now the very best and most famous of his New Yorker pieces are collected in a brilliant and provocative anthology. Among the pieces: his investigation into why there are so many different kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup; a surprising assessment of what makes for a safer automobile; a look at how we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job; an examination of machine built to predict hit movies; the reasons why homelessness might be easier to solve than manage; his famous profile of inventor and entrepreneur Ron Popeil; a look at why employers love personality tests; a dissection of Ivy League admissions and who gets in; the saga of the quest to invent the perfect cookie; and a look at hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America. For the millions of Malcolm Gladwell fans, this anthology is like a greatest hits compilation - a mixtape from America's alpha mind.
©2009 Malcolm Gladwell (P)2009 Hachette Audio
Dad Is Fat
Summary
In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children - everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills ("they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news"), to the eating habits of four-year-olds ("there is no difference between a four-year-old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor"). Dad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.
©2013 Jim Gaffigan (P)2013 Random House Audio
One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Summary
For listeners of Mindy Kaling, Jenny Lawson, and Roxane Gay, a debut collection of fierce and funny essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada, "a land of ice and casual racism", by the irreverent, hilarious cultural observer and incomparable rising star Scaachi Koul. In One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humour to share her fears, outrages, and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with Internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father's creeping mortality - all as she tries to find her feet in the world. With a clear eye and biting wit, Scaachi Koul explores the absurdity of a life steeped in misery. And through these intimate, wise, and laugh-out-loud funny dispatches, a portrait of a bright new literary voice emerges.
©2017 Scaachi Koul (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada
The Best of Me
Summary
David Sedaris’s best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career - as selected by the author himself For more than 25 years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to hear without laughing. Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler’s lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say “give it to me” in five languages, and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird. But if all you expect to find in Sedaris’s work is the deft and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer than in his writing about his loved ones. In this audiobook, Sedaris explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing one parent and coming to terms - at long last - with the other. Taken together, the stories in The Best of Me reveal the wonder and delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No experience, he sees, is quite as he expected - it’s often harder, more fraught, and certainly weirder - but sometimes it is also much richer and more wonderful. Full of joy, generosity, and the incisive humor that has led David Sedaris to be called “the funniest man alive” (Time Out New York), The Best of Me spans a career spent watching and learning and laughing - quite often at himself - and invites listeners deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.
©2020 David Sedaris (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company
How to Be Alone
Summary
The former sex and relationships editor for Cosmopolitan and host of the wildly popular comedy show Tinder Live with Lane Moore presents her poignant, funny, and deeply moving first audiobook. Lane Moore is a rare performer who is as impressive onstage - whether hosting her iconic show Tinder Live or being the enigmatic front woman of It Was Romance - as she is on the page, as both a former writer for The Onion and an award-winning sex and relationships editor for Cosmopolitan. But her story has had its obstacles, including being her own parent, living in her car as a teenager, and moving to New York City to pursue her dreams. Through it all, she looked to movies, TV, and music as the family and support systems she never had. From spending the holidays alone to having better “stranger luck” than with those closest to her to feeling like the last hopeless romantic on Earth, Lane reveals her powerful and entertaining journey in all its candor, anxiety, and ultimate acceptance - with humor always her bolstering force and greatest gift. How to Be Alone is a must-listen for anyone whose childhood still feels unresolved, who spends more time pretending to have friends online than feeling close to anyone in real life, who tries to have genuine, deep conversations in a roomful of people who would rather you not. Above all, it’s an audiobook for anyone who desperately wants to feel less alone and a little more connected through listening to her words.
©2018 Lane Moore. All rights reserved. (P)2018 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Essential
Summary
The best of the Minimalists! This book by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus collects the most relevant essays - some short, some long - from their popular website, TheMinimalists.com. This collection has been edited and organized to create an experience that's considerably different from reading individual selections online. From simple living, decluttering, and finances to passion, health, and relationships, Essential is for anyone who desires a more intentional life.
©2015 Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus (P)2016 Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus
Love's Executioner
Summary
The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too-human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient. The audio version of the book includes an exclusive interview with Dr. Yalom.
©1989 Irvin Yalom (P)2013 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC
On the Origin of Species
Summary
Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and a life-long committed Darwinist, abridges and reads this special audio version of Charles Darwin's famous book. A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals, starting with fish, all the way up through the ranks to apes, then to our current form. Dawkin's passion for his subject and hero are clear and exciting for listeners, who, whatever their religious or scientific views, will be intrigued and captivated by this involving production of arguably one of the most important books of all time.
©2006 CSA Telltapes Ltd. (P)2006 CSA Telltapes Ltd.
Mr. Know-It-All
Summary
"Cheerfully lewd and sincerely disingenuous, cult filmmaker, comic, and lifelong raconteur John Waters narrates his latest memoir/tell-all with a good-natured wink and a well-earned dab of sentimentality." (AudioFile Magazine) "[Just] like reading a description of a Waters film is nothing like seeing it on the screen, listening to him tell his own stories brings the context and inflection needed to truly appreciate his art. A singular experience." (Booklist) This program is read by the author and includes a bonus conversation. No one knows more about everything - especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling - than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, the original Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All, he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: "Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all." Studded with cameos of Waters’ stars, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotic, upsetting, revelatory audiobook yet - another instant Waters classic. Praise for John Waters: "Waters doesn’t kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird.... [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post) "Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America’s desolate freeway nodes - though they’re brilliantly evoked - but of American fame itself." (Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review) PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 John Waters (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Y en n'aura pas de miracle!
Summary
Dès leur mise en ligne, les capsules Cours Toutoune de Geneviève Gagnon sont visionnées par des dizaines de milliers d'internautes. Franche et directe, l'humoriste ne mâche pas ses mots. Son message est simple : « Prends-toi en main, enfile tes running-tchou et sors dehors ! » Comment expliquer un tel succès ? Y en n'a pas de miracle. Tout le monde se reconnaît dans la toutoune, le discours est motivant, et l'humour toujours au rendez-vous. L'ouvrage présente 52 chroniques humoristiques pour arrêter de se trouver des excuses, pour garder sa motivation et pour mettre de côté ses complexes, même si on a les bras mous et les cuisses dépendantes affectives.
©2016 Geneviève Gagnon et Les Publications Modus Vivendi inc. (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
We Learn Nothing
Summary
In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? How do you react when someone you've known for years unexpectedly changes genders? With a perfect combination of humor and pathos, these essays leave us with newfound wisdom and a unique prism through which to examine our own chaotic journeys through life. These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time.
©2012 Tim Kreider (P)2014 Seneca and Marcus LLC
The Collected Schizophrenias
Summary
Powerful, affecting essays on mental illness, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Whiting Award
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.
©2019 Esmé Weijun Wang (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
RISK!
Summary
A "fascinating" (MetroSource) collection of uncensored, confessional, and at times outrageously funny essays about coming of age, coming out, and the wildest experiences that define us. Collecting the most celebrated stories from the hit podcast RISK!, along with all-new true tales about explosive secrets and off-the-wall adventures, this book paints a spellbinding portrait of the transformational moments we experience in life but rarely talk about. No topics are off-limits in RISK!, no memories too revealing to share. From accidentally harboring a teen fugitive to being poisoned while tripping on LSD in the Mayan ruins, these stories transport listeners into uncharted territory and show how your life can change when you take an extraordinary leap. In these jaw-dropping stories, edited and introduced by RISK! host Kevin Allison, writers reveal how they pushed drugs for a Mexican cartel only to end up kidnapped and nearly killed, how they joined a terrifying male-empowerment cult and fought desperately for a way out, how they struggled with pregnancy complications and found a hero where they least expected it, and so much more. A lifelong construction worker shares the intimate details of transitioning to being a woman, a best-selling author discusses how he assumed the identity of his babysitter online in a social experiment gone awry, and a beloved comedian discusses how a blow job from a prostitute changed his life. By turns cautionary and inspiring, RISK! presents an extraordinary panorama of the breadth of human experience and a stunning tribute to the power of the truth to set us free.
©2018 Kevin Allison (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Consider the Lobster
Summary
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.
©2017 David Foster Wallace (P)2017 Hachette Audio
I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out
Summary
I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out, a collection of true narratives, reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first "sticks", first births, and first deaths and reflect on what gets them though long, demanding shifts and keeps them in the profession. The stories reveal many voices from nurses at different stages of their careers: One nurse-in-training longs to be trusted with more "important" procedures while another questions her ability to care for nursing home residents. An efficient young emergency room nurse finds his life and career irrevocably changed by a car accident. A nurse practitioner wonders whether she has violated professional boundaries in her care for a homeless man with AIDS. And a home-care case manager is the sole attendee at a funeral for one of her patients. What connects these stories is the passion and strength of the writers who struggle against burnout and bureaucracy to serve their patients with skill, empathy, and strength.
©2013 Creative Nonfiction Foundation (P)2015 Tantor
I Like to Watch
Summary
From The New Yorker’s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, a provocative collection of new and previously published essays arguing that we are what we watch. "Emily Nussbaum is the perfect critic - smart, engaging, funny, generous, and insightful." (David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon) Named one of the Best Books of the Year NPR • Chicago Tribune • Esquire • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews From her creation of the "Approval Matrix" in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality television president. There are three big profiles of television showrunners - Kenya Barris, Jenji Kohan, and Ryan Murphy - as well as examinations of the legacies of Norman Lear and Joan Rivers. The audiobook also includes a major new essay written during the year of #MeToo, wrestling with the question of what to do when the artist you love is a monster. More than a collection of reviews, the audiobook makes a case for toppling the status anxiety that has long haunted the "idiot box", even as it transformed. Through it all, Nussbaum recounts her fervent search, over 15 years, for a new kind of criticism, one that resists the false hierarchy that elevates one kind of culture (violent, dramatic, gritty) over another (joyful, funny, stylized). I Like to Watch traces her own struggle to punch through stifling notions of "prestige television", searching for a more expansive, more embracing vision of artistic ambition - one that acknowledges many types of beauty and complexity and opens to more varied voices. It’s an audiobook that celebrates television as television, even as each year warps the definition of just what that might mean. Finalist for the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay "This collection, including some powerful new work, proves once and for all that there’s no better American critic of anything than Emily Nussbaum. But I Like to Watch turns out to be even greater than the sum of its brilliant parts - it’s the most incisive, intimate, entertaining, authoritative guide to the shows of this golden television age." (Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland) "Reading Emily Nussbaum makes us smarter not just about what we watch, but about how we live, what we love, and who we are. I Like to Watch is a joy." (Rebecca Traister)
©2019 Emily Nussbaum (P)2019 Random House Audio
An Unsuitable Boy
Summary
Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. With his flagship Dharma Production, he has constantly challenged the norms, written and rewritten rules, and set trends. But who is the man behind the icon we all know? Baring all for the first time in his autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy, KJo reminisces about his childhood, the influence of his Sindhi mother and Punjabi father, obsession with Bollywood, foray into films, friendships with Aditya Chopra, SRK and Kajol, his love life, the AIB roast, and much more. In his trademark frank style, he talks about the ever-changing face of Indian cinema, challenges, and learnings, as well as friendships and rivalries in the industry. Honest, heart-warming and insightful, An Unsuitable Boy is both the story of the life of an exceptional filmmaker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.
©2017 Karan Johar (P)2018 Random House Audio
The Source of Self-Regard
Summary
Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: The first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "Black matter(s)", and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here, too, is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. In all, The Source of Self-Regard is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison's oeuvre.
©2019 Toni Morrison (P)2019 Random House Audio
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker
Summary
A Finalist for the NAACP Image Award Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay An NPR Best Book of the Year A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite of the Year From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be black (and male) in America. For Damon Young, existing while black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly black to “Portlandia...but with pierogies.” At its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.
©2019 Damon Young (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Simplicity
Summary
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus - The Minimalists - left their six-figure careers, jettisoned many of their material possessions, and started focusing on life's most important aspects. And they never looked back. Simplicity: Essays is The Minimalists' fifth book and second essay collection, a follow-up to their bestselling Minimalism: Essential Essays. In the two years since the authors quit their six-figure corporate jobs and embraced simpler lives, they have written more than 200 essays on the subject of simple living. Simplicity: Essays serves as a "best of" collection for their most important collaborative writings. This 152-page book contains 46 edited and revised essays about living a meaningful life with less stuff, including "UnAmerican Dream," "Asking Friends & Family to Embrace Change," and "I Am Not the Center of the Universe." It also includes a special forward by The Minimalists and two unpublished essays that can't be found anywhere else: "Simplicity" and "The Worst Christmas Ever." The order of the essays in this collection is deliberate; they are meant to be read in sequence from beginning to end. Doing so will result in an experience that is different from reading these essays individually throughout the web, connecting various concepts that may otherwise seem unconnected. These essays were written to encourage readers to think critically about the excess in their lives and, ultimately, to take action towards living more intentionally. This collection is short enough to be read in a few sittings, or it can be digested slowly, reading one essay a day for six weeks, applying its principals each day to your own life.
©2012 Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus (P)2012 Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus