Shockingly funny essays, a necessary new collection and a historic reimagining: three can’t-miss audiobooks to listen to right now.
★ Wow, No Thank You.
Samantha Irby’s latest essay collection, Wow, No Thank You, is the cynical, shockingly funny audiobook that’s been missing from your life. Irby is a transplant from Chicago to suburban Michigan, plus a stint in Hollywood, and her fish-out-of-water stories are delightfully hilarious. A proponent of staying in, Irby makes the art of turning down party invitations sound like the most fun you’ve ever had, and getting a voicemail from a friend the worst of horrors. Irby is frank and fearless, so if bodily functions make you uncomfortable, this is not the book for you. But if you admire a bold, brash woman who clearly enjoys telling it like it is, you won’t be able to stop laughing. Irby is already funny on the page, but she has a special gift for comedic delivery, and her narration adds even more laughs to the book.
Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, edited by Genevieve West, collects a variety of Harlem Renaissance legend Zora Neale Hurston’s early short stories. It’s a fascinating time capsule of early 20th-century urban and rural life, with roots in African American folklore. Narrator Aunjanue Ellis, an actor you may know from ABC’s “Quantico,” has a warm, liquid voice and a poetic rhythm that brings Hurston’s stories to life. Her narration makes Hurston’s signature dialect feel natural and modern, and her emotional performance lends additional depth to Hurston’s already strong characters.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Aunjanue Ellis discusses her experience narrating Zora Neale Hurston’s collection of short stories.
Miss Austen
Gill Hornby’s novel Miss Austen follows Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, as an elderly woman in 1840 England. Cassandra attempts to preserve Jane’s legacy by finding and destroying emotionally revealing letters that Jane wrote to a friend. Janeites will enjoy the story’s romance, mystery and social observations, but Hornby deals with aging and regret in a way the English novelist was never able to do, and fans will be surprised by some of Miss Austen’s most honest moments. Cassandra’s story beautifully addresses how history chooses to remember women—and the way that, for the most part, it doesn’t remember them at all. As a writer who is the sister of a famous author (Nick Hornby), Hornby is the perfect person to tell this tale, and actor Juliet Stevenson provides a very proper English narration that’s fitting for the early Victorian setting.
