Audiobooks by Dara Horn

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to appease the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture-and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks-Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life-trying to explain Shakespeare's Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children's school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study-to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past- making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

Dara Horn (Author), Xe Sands (Narrator)

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Eternal Life

The award-winning, critically acclaimed author returns with an ingenious novel about what it would mean to live forever. Rachel has an unusual problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles-widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son-are only the latest. She's already put up with scores of marriages and hundreds of children, over 2,000 years-ever since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. There's only one other person in the world who understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever. In 2018, as her children and grandchildren develop new technologies for immortality, Rachel knows she must enable her beloved offspring to live fully-without her, but with meaning-by finding a way for herself to die. Gripping, hilarious, and profoundly moving, Eternal Life celebrates the bonds between generations, the power of faith, the purpose of death, and the reasons for being alive.

Dara Horn (Author), Elisabeth Rodgers (Narrator)

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A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novel

A thrilling new novel exploring how memory shapes the soul, by “an astonishing storyteller” (Financial Times) Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented a program that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt’s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is kidnapped—leaving Judith free to usurp her sister’s life, including her husband and daughter, while Josie’s talent for preserving memories becomes her only hope of escape. A century earlier, Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor, hunts for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. What he finds will reveal the power and danger of the world Josie’s work brings into being—a world where nothing is ever forgotten. Interweaving stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the digital frontier, A Guide for the Perplexed is a spellbinding tale sure to bring a vast new readership to the acclaimed work of Dara Horn. “What do computerized data storage, sibling rivalry, the Book of Ruth, and Egyptian uncertainty after the Arab Spring have in common? They’re all part of this latest work about two crucial aspects of being human: the ability to remember and to love. Horn has already proven herself by being named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and winning two National Jewish Book Awards. A sure bet.”--Library Journal

Dara Horn (Author), Carrington MacDuffie (Narrator)

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All Other Nights: A Novel

How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army, it is a question his commanders have answered for him: on Passover in 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After that night, will Jacob ever speak for himself? The answer comes when his commanders send him on another mission—this time not to murder a spy but to marry one. A compelling novel rich with romance and the history of America (North and South), this is a book only Dara Horn could have written. Full of insight and surprise, layered with meaning, it is a brilliant parable of the moral divide that still haunts us: between those who value family first and those who are dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.

Dara Horn (Author), William Dufris (Narrator)

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The World to Come

An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family. Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister, Sara, forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum. From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall brought art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. Richly satisfying and utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"-not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.

Dara Horn (Author), William Dufris (Narrator)

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