Get Your Free Audiobook
-
The Writer's Library
- The Authors You Love on the Books that Changed Their Lives
- Narrated by: Nancy Pearl, Jeff Schwager, Xe Sands, Dominic Hoffman, Eileen Stevens, Piper Goodeve, Andrew Eiden, Lameece Issaq, Rick Adamson, JD Jackson, Ryan Do, Timothy Andrés Pabon, Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Essays
Non-member price: $42.90
People who bought this also bought...
-
The Bright Book of Life
- Novels to Read and Reread
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction, America's most original and controversial literary critic and legendary Yale professor writes trenchantly about 52 masterworks spanning the Western tradition.
-
The Boy in the Field
- By: Margot Livesey
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy's life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim's brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back.
-
Monogamy
- By: Sue Miller
- Narrated by: Sue Miller
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie is not the first love of Graham’s life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, and yet so well matched: the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham’s first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them.
-
The Cold Millions
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1909 in Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. When Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all....
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.
-
Mad at the World
- A Life of John Steinbeck
- By: William Souder
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice - paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy.
-
The Bright Book of Life
- Novels to Read and Reread
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction, America's most original and controversial literary critic and legendary Yale professor writes trenchantly about 52 masterworks spanning the Western tradition.
-
The Boy in the Field
- By: Margot Livesey
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy's life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim's brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back.
-
Monogamy
- By: Sue Miller
- Narrated by: Sue Miller
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie is not the first love of Graham’s life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, and yet so well matched: the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham’s first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them.
-
The Cold Millions
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1909 in Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. When Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all....
-
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.
-
Mad at the World
- A Life of John Steinbeck
- By: William Souder
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice - paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy.
-
The Saddest Words
- William Faulkner's Civil War
- By: Michael Gorra
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world.
-
Caste
- The Lies That Divide Us
- By: Isabel Wilkerson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.
-
-
Disappointed by the clumsy presentation.
- By Anu on 24-08-2020
-
Vesper Flights
- By: Helen Macdonald
- Narrated by: Helen Macdonald
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee’s flight to the UK.
-
Always a Guest
- Speaking of Faith Far from Home
- By: Barbara Brown Taylor
- Narrated by: Barbara Brown Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From beloved writer and renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor comes a new collection of stories and sermons of faith, grace, and hope. Full of Taylor's astute observations on the Spirit and the state of the world along with her gentle wit, this collection will inspire Taylor's fans and preachers alike as she explores faith in all its beauty and complexity.
-
A Promised Land
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 29 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
-
-
My review
- By Rebecca on 23-11-2020
-
Ex Libris
- Confessions of a Common Reader
- By: Anne Fadiman
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anyone who has ever loved a book will relish this playful, yet deeply literate collection of essays celebrating the joy of reading. From building castles with books as a child, to the trauma of joining her library with her husband's, the author reveals, with much warmth and humor, the intimate details of her lifelong affair with books. For Anne Fadiman, books are not built for function, and certainly not for decoration. They are close personal friends who never fail to delight and amaze.
-
The Best of Me
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What could be a more tempting Christmas gift than a compendium of David Sedaris' best stories, selected by the author himself? From a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories have become modern classics and are now for the first time collected in one volume. The collection will also feature an introduction by the author; two never-before-collected stories, 'Unbuttoned' and 'Undecided'; and a new interview with David Sedaris.
-
-
david sedaris' best of
- By Anonymous User on 21-12-2020
-
Transcendent Kingdom
- By: Yaa Gyasi
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought.
-
-
Great story but struggled with the narration
- By Siobhan Ashton on 19-01-2021
-
How to Fly
- (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Barbara Kingsolver's generous collection is divided into thematic sections that loop and interweave to form a carefully patterned whole: a series of 'How to' poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek pragmatism with revelatory wisdom, a complicated yet affirmative family pilgrimage to Italy, cherished childhood memories, the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer, elegies to lost loved ones and elegies to the planet.
-
Love and Other Thought Experiments
- By: Sophie Ward
- Narrated by: Sophie Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rachel and Eliza are hoping to have a baby. The couple spend many happy evenings together planning for the future. One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad - but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously, and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.
-
Group
- How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
- By: Christie Tate
- Narrated by: Christie Tate
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Christie Tate has just been named the top student in her law school class and seems to finally have got her eating disorder under control. So why is she driving through Chicago fantasising about her own death? Desperate, she joins Dr Rosen’s psychotherapy group, and through his unconventional methods, he challenges everything she thought she knew, about herself and others. In group, secrets are not allowed.
-
-
Heartwrenchingly Relatable
- By MrsBoaden on 10-01-2021
-
Decisions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- A Selection (Penguin Liberty, Book 2)
- By: Corey Brettschneider - editor
- Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The trailblazing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words. Her most essential writings on gender equality and women's rights, reproductive health care, and voting and civil rights, now available in a short, accessible volume as part of the new Penguin Liberty series.
Publisher's Summary
Performed by Nancy Pearl, Jeff Schwager and a multi-cast that includes book contributors Luis Alberto Urrea, Siri Hustvedt, Laurie Frankel, Vendela Vida, and Richard Ford. The Writer’s Library audiobook also features real conversations with Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, and Laila Lalami.
With a foreword by Susan Orlean, 23 of today's living literary legends, including Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, Laila Lalami, and Michael Chabon, reveal the books that made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives in this intimate, moving, and insightful collection from "American's Librarian" Nancy Pearl and noted playwright Jeff Schwager that celebrates the power of literature and reading to connect us all.
Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark.
The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors - the creative artists whose imagination and sublime talent make America's literary scene the wonderful, dynamic world it is.
A love letter to books and a celebration of wordsmiths, The Writer’s Library is a treasure for anyone who has been moved by the written word.
The authors in The Writer’s Library are: Russell Banks, TC Boyle, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Laurie Frankel, Andrew Sean Greer, Jane Hirshfield, Siri Hustvedt, Charles Johnson, Laila Lalami, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Madeline Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Luis Alberto Urrea, Vendela Vida, Ayelet Waldman, Maaza Mengiste, and Amor Towles.
More from the same
Author
What listeners say about The Writer's Library
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
20 Best Fantasy Audiobooks
This genre is so full of talent, it can be difficult to know what to listen to next — so look no further than this list to get you started.



20 Best Nonfiction Audiobooks
From the entire history of humanity to astrophysics, to our gut and mental health, dig into this list and learn something new.



Best Australian Podcasts on Audible
Audible Original Podcasts are free for Audible members. Check out this list of home-grown content, from binge-worthy true crime to self-help.


