Do you have a short commute? Only take a 15 minute lunch break? Have 5 minutes to kill and don’t want to look awkward while you wait to meet up with a friend? There’s an audiobook for that.
The stories in these audio collections are enticing, intriguing, and perfect for those times when you just can’t bring yourself to pause in the middle of a novel. Go ahead, listen to a story: start to finish.
In these nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory and now read by favorite narrators Dominic Hoffman, Edoardo Ballerini, and Amy Landon.
Xuan Juliana Wang’s remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. Her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions.
Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Read by an all-star cast, the audiobook marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s stories will make you laugh, weep, and shiver in uncomfortably delicious recognition. Equally at home with the surreal and the painfully relatable (at once), Bob-Waksberg and his cast of kooky narrators deliver a killer combination of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.
Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master, read by a number of favorite narrators like Cassandra Campbell, Emily Rankin, and Bahni Turpin (just to name a few).
Coming this fall
Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do in her first short story collection.