
Bibliophobia
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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By:
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Sarah Chihaya
About this listen
“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
“[A] stirring and sparkling new memoir.”—The Washington Post
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH: Time, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”.
Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?
Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
©2025 Sarah Chihaya (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A seriously sharp and nuanced look at the impact books can have on us as readers, and our identities . . . If you read one non-fiction book this month, make it this.”—Cosmopolitan
“[Bibliophobia] is a reminder that instead of searching for a story that explains everything, we might do well to embrace the uncertainty of the unwritten pages still before us.”—The Atlantic
“[Bibliophobia] crackles with the electrical charge of a broken taboo. . . A reading experience as haunting as the ones it describes.”—The New Republic
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- By: Tess Chakkalakal
- Narrated by: Diana Blue
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Tess Chakkalakal gives listeners the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered "mixed race." Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing.
By: Tess Chakkalakal
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Pure Innocent Fun
- Essays
- By: Ira Madison III
- Narrated by: Ira Madison III
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “a virgin who can’t drive.”
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Relatable! Great word choice! Hilarious!
- By Anonymous User on 05-02-25
By: Ira Madison III
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Murderland
- Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
- By: Caroline Fraser
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
By: Caroline Fraser
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Seeking Shelter
- A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
- By: Jeff Hobbs
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Jeff Hobbs
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2018, poverty and domestic violence cast Evelyn and her children into the urban wilderness of Los Angeles, where she avoids the family crisis network that offers no clear pathway for her children to remain together and in a decent school. For the next five years, Evelyn works full time as a waitress yet remains unable to afford legitimate housing or qualify for government aid. All the while she strives to provide stability, education, loving memories, and college aspirations for her children even as they sleep in motels and in her car.
By: Jeff Hobbs
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Jane Austen's Bookshelf
- A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
- By: Rebecca Romney
- Narrated by: Rebecca Romney
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.
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Now I Have to Buy More Books
- By M. McCurdy on 03-19-25
By: Rebecca Romney
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We Could Be Rats
- A Novel
- By: Emily Austin
- Narrated by: Candace Thaxton
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal, but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.
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I cried
- By Hannah Putna on 05-12-25
By: Emily Austin
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Gliff
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Eliot Sumner
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
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No other author comes close!
- By Franki on 02-08-25
By: Ali Smith
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Roots and Rhythm
- A Life in Music
- By: Charlie Peacock
- Narrated by: Charlie Peacock
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this artful memoir, Grammy Award-winning music producer Charlie Peacock flexes his literary chops and gives listeners the gritty backstage stories they crave: biographical anecdotes, geeky trivia, and how the hits were written and recorded (from jazz to rock and pop). Threaded throughout is Peacock’s unique ancestral and spiritual story—the roots. Like Coltrane, Dylan, and Bono before him, Peacock reveals a Christ-affection while refusing genres too small for his music.
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Thoughtful, vulnerable and spiritual
- By Doug Romaine on 02-09-25
By: Charlie Peacock
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Fearless and Free
- A Memoir
- By: Josephine Baker, Ijeoma Oluo - foreword, Sophie Lewis
- Narrated by: Anam Zafar, Sophie R. Lewis, Ijeoma Oluo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in the US for the first time, Fearless and Free is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker, the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist. After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans—Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them.
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Oh la la!
- By Adie on 04-09-25
By: Josephine Baker, and others
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Alligator Tears
- A Memoir in Essays
- By: Edgar Gomez
- Narrated by: Edgar Gomez
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life. Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary, and learning to see the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach.
By: Edgar Gomez
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Dark Way Down
- By: Lauren Parker
- Narrated by: Lauren Parker
- Length: 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Dark Way Down, a road trip in verse, is a speculative continuation of David Bowie's album, Station to Station, featuring the iconic David Bowie character, the Thin White Duke. The collection explores gender, addiction, occultism, and toxic queer masculinity through the lens of the Duke’s lesbian daughter, a mixed-up queering of bygone relics and Casanova. From Lauren Parker's pensive daydreams out of Dodge, the Daughter of the Duke drives a rickey Chevelle from Bel Air to the Mesas of New Mexico seeking the place where her father was last seen. This is the story of what she found.
By: Lauren Parker
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Red Dog Farm
- A Novel
- By: Nathaniel Ian Miller
- Narrated by: Olafur Darri Olafsson
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the cavorting of a newborn calf, the return of birdsong after a long winter, the steadfast love of a good (or tolerably good) farm dog. But the outer world still beckons, so Orri leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík.
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So much animal death.
- By S. Nolte on 03-05-25