The RUSA Listen List highlights extraordinary narrators and listening experiences that merit special attention by a general adult audience and the librarians who advise them. This list of outstanding audiobooks, designed for both avid listeners and those new to the pleasures of stories read aloud, includes fiction and nonfiction and features voices that enthrall, delight, and inspire.
Update your to-listen-list with Penguin Random House Audio’s 5 recordings on the RUSA Listen List:
In Broken Horses, musician, author, and narrator Brandi Carlile takes listeners through the events of her life that shaped her very raw art. Evocative and piercingly honest, Carlile’s memoir is an examination of faith through the eyes of a person rejected by the church and a meditation on the moments and lyrics that have shaped the life of a brilliant artist.
“Music is undoubtedly her [Carlile’s] first language–her phenomenal voice expresses her clear-eyed honesty, passion, and caring.”–AudioFile
A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans assembled by ninety brilliant writers and read by eighty-seven extraordinary narrators.
See the complete cast list of this production here.
A second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his Asian American family. A magical realist coming-of-age story, Gold Diggers skewers the model minority myth to tell a hilarious and moving story about immigrant identity, community, and the underside of ambition.
“Narrator Rama Vallury captures the sauciness at the center of this novel…”–AudioFile
In The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans, with her signature blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships, zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history.
“Seven talented narrators bring the complex protagonists of Evans’s short fiction to life. The stories are a dazzling blend of the personal and the universal…Evans’s writing is confident and spare, and each narrator amplifies the power of the prose in her own particular way.”—AudioFile
In This Is Ear Hustle, Nigel and Earlonne share their own stories of how they came to San Quentin State Prison, how they created their phenomenally popular podcast amid extreme limitations, and what has kept them collaborating season after season. The result is an illuminating view of prison life, as told by currently and formerly incarcerated people, from the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle.
Listen to Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods talk about the process of recording the This Is Ear Hustle audiobook on our This Is the Author podcast.
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