MemoiR
Famesick
by Lena Dunham; read by the author
Lena Dunham has spent most of the past decade both sick and famous, an unhappy confluence to which she devotes her uninhibited, record-straightening new memoir, “Famesick.” In the cleareyed, conversational, almost girlish voice many of us still associate with Hannah Horvath, Dunham drips raw wisdom about the hazards — social, moral, physical — of having a public presence and a female body. She is self-flagellating, self-confident and acutely self-aware all in the same breath; she names names. This is, as our critic Alexandra Jacobs writes, a “portrait of a woman on fire” — and say what you want about Dunham, she may be one of the finest portraitists we have. (11 hours, 46 minutes)
Literary fiction
Night Night Fawn
by Jordy Rosenberg; read by the author
This painfully funny novel takes the form of one long, mean, OxyContin-fueled inner monologue by Barbara Rosenberg, a “dying Manhattan yenta” holed up in a stuffy Manhattan apartment next to “a coffin, quiet as a turd.” (It’s for her.) Barbara’s only caretaker in her final days is her estranged transgender son. It is one more disappointment in a life of many, and the author’s slow, gravelly cadence and thick Brooklyn-Jewish accent lands every blow in this satirical, laugh-to-keep-from-crying rant. (8 hours, 18 minutes)
Memoir
A Hymn to Life
by Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver; read by Emma Thompson
Pelicot became a feminist hero in 2024 when she refused her right to anonymity in the French court where her husband of 50 years, Dominique, stood trial for systematically drugging and raping her for almost a decade, and recruiting other men to do the same. Here Pelicot tells her story in full — from her mother’s death in her childhood, to the beginning of her relationship with Dominique when they were teenagers, to the horrific sequence of events that revealed to her, bit by agonizing bit, the reality of her husband’s violence and cruelty. The English actor gives a virtuosic performance as she inhabits the author’s dignified but frayed psyche, sometimes angry and self-searching and other times eerily nostalgic for the “happy” life she thought she’d had. (7 hours, 23 minutes)
History
Days of Love and Rage
by Anand Gopal; read by Ali Andre Ali
This 22-hour-long saga tells the history of the Syrian revolution and civil war, which began in 2011 and toppled the regime of Bashar al-Assad in 2024, through the intimate and stunningly detailed stories of six disparate individuals who played key roles in not just their city’s but the country’s fate. Ali, a professional voice actor, brings appropriate adventure, fury and gravitas to this thoroughly reported history, rendering the complex intertwining of ground politics with the protagonists’ broader philosophical inquiries about freedom not just captivating, but utterly profound. (22 hours, 36 minutes)
True Crime
London Falling
by Patrick Radden Keefe; read by the author
In 2019, a London teenager named Zac Brettler plunged to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment building into the Thames in an apparent suicide. But after meeting the boy’s parents a few years later, Keefe became embroiled in their quest to discover if their son’s death was in fact the result of foul play. Keefe is a trusted yet appropriately sensational guide to both their world (educated, affluent but not showy) and the one Zac was conning his way into: the city’s seamy underworld of unchecked wealth, of oligarchs and their hangers-on, of fraud and corruption and violent crime. (12 hours, 59 minutes)
Literary fiction
Good People
by Patmeena Sabit; read by a full cast
Told in a series of interviews collected for a true crime documentary, this oral-history-style novel assembles a fragmented, contentious, see-what-you-want-to-see impression of the Sharaf family, Afghan Americans whose teenage daughter Zorah is found dead in a canal. Was it a car accident? An honor killing? The cultural clash among the Sharafs’ immigrant community and the white neighbors, lawyer, schoolteachers and journalists circling around them determines each interviewee’s answer, read by a rotating cast of voice actors who bring the polyphony to life. (10 hours, 7 minutes)
Memoir
Strangers
by Belle Burden; read by the author
After 20 years of marriage to a Manhattan hedge fund manager, Burden was blindsided when he revealed in March 2020 that not only was he having an affair, but he was also leaving her and their three children. He didn’t want their life anymore, was the most she got by way of a reason; he didn’t even want to bother with joint custody. Burden, a former lawyer descended on all sides from dynastic wealth (Vanderbilts, Mortimers, Paleys), says that she wrote this memoir in defiance of the suffocating reticence of the women in her family and in their milieu. There is a sense of rebellion in her delivery, confessional but staid, as well as of quiet disdain. (7 hours, 3 minutes)
Literary fiction
The Witch
by Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump; read by Virginia Grainger
Published in France in 1996 and only now translated into English, NDiaye’s lean psychological novel tells the timeless, mystical tale of a woman’s power and the men who want to stifle it, of a mother who is determined that her daughters become women more powerful than herself, and her “fear, even envy” when they do. Lucie is a witch of middling talent who keeps her clairvoyance mostly under wraps, knowing her chauvinist husband can’t stand it. When she inducts her blithe 12-year-old twins into their “sacred” matrilineal inheritance, she watches in awe as their abilities swiftly surpass hers, just in time for their family life — and perhaps her own sanity — to unravel. (4 hours, 8 minutes)
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