Literary Audiobooks | Biography & Memoir

Lisa Hilton (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

A captivating family history that illustrates how small actions can have an outsized political impact. Small acts of courage matter. Sometimes, they change the world. Our history books are filled with the stories of those who fought for democracy and freedom—for idealism itself—against all odds, from Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. These iconic struggles for social change illustrate the importance of engagement and activism, and offer a template for the battles we are fighting today. But using the right words is often easier than taking action; action can be hard, and costly. More than a century ago, MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s great-grandfather sent his seven-year-old son to live at Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi’s ashram in South Africa. This difficult decision would change the trajectory of his family history forever. From childhood, Velshi’s grandfather was imbued with an ethos of public service and social justice, and a belief in absolute equality among all people—ideals that his children carried forward as they escaped apartheid, emigrating to Kenya and ultimately Canada and the United States. In Small Acts of Courage, Velshi taps into 125 years of family history to advocate for social justice as a living, breathing experience—a way of life more than an ideology. With rich detail and vivid prose, he relates the stories of regular people who made a lasting commitment to fight for change, even when success seemed impossible. This heartfelt exploration of how we can breathe new life into the principles of pluralistic democracy is an urgent call to action—for progress to be possible, we must all do whatever we can to make a difference.

Ali Velshi (Author), Ali Velshi, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Literature for the People: How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse

From publishing Alice in Wonderland and Tom Brown's School Days to the hugely influential science magazine Nature, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan's achievements are revealed in this entertaining, superbly researched biography. Daniel and Alexander Macmillan arrived in London in the 1830s at a crucial moment of social change. These two idealistic brothers, working-class sons of a Scottish crofter, set up a publishing house that spread radical ideas on equality, science and education across the world. They also brought authors like Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy and Charles Kingsley, and poets like Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti, to a mass audience. No longer would books be just for the upper classes. In Literature for the People Sarah Harkness brings to life these two amusing, warm-hearted men. Daniel was driven by the knowledge that he was living on borrowed time as his body was ravaged by TB. Alexander took on responsibility for the company as well as Daniel's family and turned a small business into an empire. He cultivated the literary greats of the time, weathered controversy and tragedy, and fostered a dynasty that would include future prime minister Harold Macmillan. Including fascinating insights about the great, the good and the sometimes wayward writers of the Victorian era, with feuds, friendships and passionate debate, this vibrant book is bursting with all the energy of that exciting period in history.

Sarah Harkness (Author), Sarah Harkness, TBD (Narrator)

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Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life

From New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and best-selling author Nicholas D. Kristof, an intimate and gripping memoir about a life in journalism Since 1984, Nicholas Kristof has worked almost continuously for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and now columnist, becoming one of the foremost reporters of his generation. Here, he recounts his event-filled path from a small-town farm in Oregon to every corner of the world. Reporting from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, while traveling far afield to India, Africa, and Europe, Kristof witnessed and wrote about century-defining events: the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Yemeni civil war, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and the wave of addiction and despair that swept through his hometown and a broad swath of working-class America. Fully aware that coverage of atrocities generates considerably fewer page views than the coverage of politics, he nevertheless continued to weaponize his pen against regimes and groups violating basic human rights, raising the cost of oppression and torture. Some of the risks he took while doing so make for hair-raising reading. Kristof writes about some of the great members of his profession and introduces us to extraordinary people he has met, such as the dissident whom he helped escape from China and a Catholic nun who browbeat a warlord into releasing schoolgirls he had kidnapped. These are the people, the heroes, who have allowed Kristof to remain optimistic. Side by side with the worst of humanity, you always see the best. This is a candid memoir of vulnerability and courage, humility and purpose, mistakes and learning-a singular tale of the trials, tribulations, and hope to be found in a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

Nicholas D. Kristof (Author), Nicholas D. Kristof, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

One Ukrainian Summer: A memoir about falling in love and coming of age in the former USSR

Summer 1994. Viv has just turned 21 and is on her year abroad, studying the language, history and politics of a world that supposedly no longer exists: the Soviet Union. Instead, she finds herself studying the lead guitarist of a Ukrainian punk rock band. Utterly besotted, Viv follows him to festivals and dive bars around the country, travelling through a blur of wheat fields and valleys of sunflowers. The guitarist sings her love songs, teaches her Ukrainian, and gives her a persistent case of head lice. But is he serious about her? Or is she just another groupie? Between gigs, they stay with his elderly parents in a dusty Soviet city. His mother shows her the correct way to eat borsch. His dad lends her books by Taras Shevchenko, the national answer to Shakespeare. At parties, Viv and her new friends argue about whose turn it is to buy cigarettes and the best places to find Levi's jeans. No-one debates whether to speak Russian or Ukrainian, where the border is, or whether the future is bright. Of course it is: the Soviet Union is finished. Isn't it? A poignant, often comical account of coming-of-age in the time after the Cold War and before Putin, One Ukrainian Summer evokes a unique moment in one country's history, and is a love letter to its people and culture. ALL AUTHOR PROCEEDS FROM THIS BOOK TO BE DONATED TO PEN UKRAINE

Viv Groskop (Author), Unknown (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America

Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this intimate biography. When twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones began working as a secretary at Doubleday's newly opened Paris office in 1949, she was tasked with wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture defining career in publishing. Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who's who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated the art and pleasures of cooking and culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food. Her work spanned the decades of America's most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women's equality, Jones's work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance. Now, her astonishing career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor tells the riveting behind-the-scenes narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers.

Sara B. Franklin (Author), Eunice Wong, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Guest Privileges: Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East

Brought to you by Penguin. An intimate and illuminating account of queer lives and migration, homemaking and community in the Gulf, from a brilliant new voice in narrative non-fiction Upon moving to the Gulf States – where penalties for queer acts include deportation, imprisonment, torture and death – Gaar Adams wants to understand why LGBTQ+ migrants might choose to live amid such peril. From the UAE to Bahrain and Oman to Saudi Arabia – a region where four out of five residents are noncitizens – he begins riskily gathering interviews outside the tightly controlled state media, leading with what he thinks is a simple question: Isn't it harder for you to make a life here? But as unforgettable residents share a kaleidoscope of stories – from uproarious Filipino salon workers throwing secret drag parties to a courageous Pakistani farmhand helping his compatriots smuggle themselves across borders – cracks emerge in the framing of his enquiry, revealing disquieting assumptions about the motivations, places and identities of others. As Gaar begins his own clandestine queer relationship, fault lines and deeper questions begin to emerge: about what we perpetuate and refuse to examine, and how we balance opportunity, risk, subversion and assimilation. Weaving revealing memoir with unprecedented reportage, Guest Privileges is a decade-long journey of dislocation not just through the Gulf States – one of the most maligned and misunderstood regions in the world – but into the very nature of home, belonging and how we form a life and community. ©2024 Gaar Adams (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Gaar Adams (Author), Gaar Adams, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Self-Portrait: Collected Unpublished Writings

A collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive Jack Kerouac's archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped, adding depth to his lifework--the Duluoz Legend--and our understanding of Kerouac the man. Far from being the adrenalized thrill-seeker that he depicted in On the Road's Dean Moriarty, Jack himself was deeply spiritual, shy, and reclusive. He sought adventures for the sake of experience, needing them to fuel his writing, which according to him was his sole reason for living. Few people sacrificed more for their art. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Jack's adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death. Self-Portrait is a blend of fictional and nonfictional pieces, a few abandoned starts but most complete in themselves and all of them chosen for the revelations they contain. In The Moon and Sixpence, Somerset Maugham wrote, 'A man's work reveals him... No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.' There are more than two dozen Kerouac biographies, but Self-Portrait reveals the artist in his own words, from his early ambition to the deep self-examination of his 'Self-Ultimacy' period, his three-year struggle to write On the Road, musings about himself and America in the half-dozen years before the novel was published and then in the aftermath amid his public withdrawal, suffering from alcoholism and hounded by fame. Through it all there are tortuous feelings about his family--love, guilt, duty, and betrayal. As fans of Kerouac have come to learn, reading his work is a visceral probe.

Jack Kerouac (Author), T. Ryder Smith (Narrator)

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Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed and Other Works

Harlan Ellison (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World

Dorian Lynskey (Author), Dorian Lynskey, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

Brought to you by Penguin. The Book-Makers is a celebration of the printed book, from the late fifteenth century to the early twenty-first, told through the lives of eighteenth extraordinary men and women who made the book as we know it - printers and typesetters, publishers and illustrators, paper-makers and library founders, as well as eccentrics and artists who continued to re-invent it. Some of these names are familiar. We meet the jobbing printer Benjamin Franklin who preferred to produce popular almanacs to canonical literature. We witness how William Morris made books as if they were medieval manuscripts, even though that age had long passed. And we encounter the socialite Nancy Cunard, running a small press printing avantgarde titles from a farmhouse in France. Others have been forgotten, even written out of history. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the famous typeface named after her husband. Not to speak of Charles Edward Mudie - perhaps the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos - the populariser of the circulating library, who created both the 'general reader' and set the standards for literary taste. The history of the book is the story of the men and women who made it. The Book-Makers puts people back into that story: it's not a determinist account of technological change, nor a chronology of inventions, but a narrative teeming with lives, and a history that is full of the contingencies and quirks, the successes and failures, the routes forward and the paths not taken, of eighteen remarkable individuals. ©2024 Adam Smyth (P)2024 Penguin Audiov

Adam Smyth (Author), Adam Smyth, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life

A rich and comic portrait of the radical changes in American life and the literary world over the last eighty years. An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies—those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Brooks Adams—were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas, or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways, and far from dramatic. But it has also been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. He grew up in a petit-bourgeois, Midwestern milieu, and the city of Chicago looms large in his life. He drew a lucky ticket in the parent lottery and his was a happy boyhood spent on playgrounds and hanging around drug stores. At high school dances, he was the rhumba king and at drive-in movies he was never allowed to go as far with girls as he so ardently desired. At twenty-six, after two years in the army, he found himself married, the father or stepfather of four children, and living in New York on the meager salary of a magazine subeditor. He was ablaze with ambition and fettered by frustration. He broke out by moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, to direct the city's anti-poverty program at the height of the Civil Rights movement. His writing career blossomed, he began teaching at Northwestern University, and, for twenty-five years, edited one of great intellectual magazines. Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status, from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel on print, and on. But for all the seriousness of Epstein's themes, this book is memorable for its comic point of view and the constant reminder of how unpredictable, various, and wondrously rich life can be.

Joseph Epstein (Author), Fred Sanders, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Literary Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir