If there’s one thing we’ve always loved about stepping into our friendly neighborhood bookstore, it’s perusing the staff picks that line the walls and end caps. That’s what we hope to replicate with our audiobook editors’ picks – a feeling of genuine discovery as you glance through our personal favorites.
Have a look down below, and feel free to take advantage of our new comments system to share some recent must-listens of your own…
J. EDWARD KEYES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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The lines separating fact and fable blur in The Tiger's Wife, the first novel by Tea Olbreht. On the surface, it's the story of narrator Natalia Stefanovic's attempt to unravel the mysterious death of her grandfather some years earlier while travelling through the Balkans providing medical assistance to those hit hardest by the ongoing wars. But as the story progresses, things get stranger — the fables her grandfather told her as a... young girl, particularly one about an unsettling "deathless man" — seem to have roots in reality. Ancient curses have real-life consequences and characters that seemed too fantastic to be believed — including one about the titular Tiger's Wife — are discovered to have a dark ring of truth. Moments of The Tiger's Wife recall the creeping dread of the best Haruki Murakami books, but Olbreht's concerns are more historical than supernatural. As the book progresses, it's clear she's telling not only the story of her heroine, but also of her own fractured homeland. It's opaque, unnerving conclusion is its most powerful metaphor.
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ANDREW PARKS, DIRECTOR OF MERCHANDISING
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While The Walking Dead regained its questionable creative footing in the second half of its sophomore season, the hit show's stilted dialogue is often more horrifying than its screen-splattering zombie hordes. Anyone looking for a more balanced ratio of body counts and believable plot developments should check out Zone One. Despite what some critics have claimed, it isn't Colson Whitehead's stab at a slumming-it genre novel so much as a celebration of... his B-movie roots, a well the acclaimed novelist recently tapped in a lengthy essay for The New Yorker's special sci-fi issue. As he admits in its opening graph, "Growing up on the Upper East Side in the 1970s, I was a bit of a shut-in…Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies." All of those late night VHS viewings propel every last page of Zone One, proving that Whitehead would much rather hang out with George Romero or John Carpenter than the high-minded literati that helped launch his career.
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MARIS KREIZMAN, AUDIOBOOKS EDITOR
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Greek mythology has always bored me. It should be fascinating—it's full of fantastical stories of men and gods, all of whom are fundamentally flawed or heartsick or doomed—but for me it's always been a list of confusing names. Which one was turned into a sunflower? Who was the lady who was seduced by that swan who wasn't a swan? How many dudes died in the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad?
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So, thank... you to Madeline Miller's debut novel for changing my mind. The Song of Achilles does the one thing I needed it to do in order to turn me into a fan of Greek myth: in retelling a central story of the Iliad it manages to fully humanize a man who was part-god. I cared so deeply about Achilles, who nearly glows with golden godliness on every page, because he is fallible, petulant, charming, heroic and desperately in love. That's the other thing The Song of Achilles does so well: it makes a hero out of Achilles' "companion", a man who had been a mere footnote in history. I put the word "companion" in quotes because Patroclus is not a mere bro who's on Team Achilles, he's a soul mate. And by soul mate I mean that this book contains numerous hot sex scenes, and also many tender moments—it's as much a love story as it is a tale of the battlefield (clearly they're related, Pat Benatar-style). Two things that don't get a mention in the novel at all are Achilles' famous heels—vulnerability, it seems, is too amorphous to be pinpointed to a particular place on the human body. It is everywhere, from the bloody siege of Troy to the tent where two men tend to each other after battle.
JAYSON GREENE, INTERNATIONAL EDITOR
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Many critics don't consider Another Country to be James Baldwin's best book, or even a very good one. There is a dodgy character who essentially functions as bisexual saint healer, for instance, curing the other characters of their ailments. And any narrative that kills a major character less than halfway in is bound to be a point of some contention. But Another Country is so smart, sad, and empathetic — about... homosexuality, about sexuality in general, about the way marriages deflate, about stifled writerly ambitions and the litany of minor indignities that come with Bohemian city life — that I can never see its flaws clearly. Set in 1962 Greenwich Village, it makes an ideal companion to a season-by-season trawl through Mad Men, drawing out the same internal and external conflicts with a similar sorrowful, all-seeing eye.
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LAURA LEEBOVE, PRODUCTION EDITOR
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I stopped eating meat in 2006 when I was a sophomore in college living mostly off of dorm cafeteria food. My decision was a combination of health reasons (I didn't like not knowing exactly what was in my food or where it came from) and the awful environmental impact of feeding animals that would later become food (which I had recently learned about in one of my classes). I'm happy to talk... about why I choose to eat the way I do, but I'll never try to force it on anyone, and what I love about Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals is that he does essentially the same thing. It's an incredibly well researched journalistic exploration into the farming industry, both factory and family-owned, but it's not a straight argument for vegetarianism. Because of Foer's conversational narrative style, it doesn't read like a textbook, but still exposes the often-disturbing details of the path an animal takes to get to a grocery store. Even if Eating Animals doesn't convert everyone who's not already a vegetarian, I hope it will at least make readers think before they eat.
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