
Mona Acts Out
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Alyssa Bresnahan
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By:
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Mischa Berlinski
About this listen
An exuberant, darkly humorous novel by the National Book Award–nominated author of Fieldwork.
Literary Hub • Best Book Covers of October 2024
Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!” is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and, ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved.
Beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we play roles to get through our days, and how the great roles teach us how to live.
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The Alternatives
- A Novel
- By: Caoilinn Hughes
- Narrated by: Sarah Bolger, Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Hughes, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home.
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Great character development.
- By CJW on 04-24-24
By: Caoilinn Hughes
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Hot Air
- A Novel
- By: Marcy Dermansky
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.
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It was soooo bad. I had to quit midway thru.
- By malibooboo on 04-22-25
By: Marcy Dermansky
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Shopgirls
- A Novel
- By: Jessica Anya Blau
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kinnunen
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nineteen-year-old Zippy can hardly believe it: she’s the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, “San Francisco’s Finest Department Store.” Every week, she rotates her three spruced-up Salvation Army outfits and Vaseline-shined pumps; still, she’s thrilled to walk those pumps through the employee entrance five days a week as she saves to buy something new.
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So good!
- By CCGOOD on 05-10-25
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The Killing Fields of East New York
- The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood
- By: Stacy Horn
- Narrated by: EJ Lavery
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin?
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Clear description of a muddy subject
- By Amy D. on 02-24-25
By: Stacy Horn
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Sky Daddy
- A Novel
- By: Kate Folk
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger with intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines.
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It was ok.
- By Rey M on 05-26-25
By: Kate Folk
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Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
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Vulgar and offensive
- By Queen's Jester on 05-19-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
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Colored Television
- A Novel
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped.
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Frustrating
- By Carolyn White on 12-12-24
By: Danzy Senna
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Playworld
- A Novel
- By: Adam Ross
- Narrated by: Adam Ross
- Length: 22 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
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Is it over yet?
- By Brady9876543 on 01-14-25
By: Adam Ross
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33 Place Brugmann
- A Novel
- By: Alice Austen
- Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio, Jilly Bond, Nicholas Boulton, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever. Charlotte Sauvin, an art student raised by her beloved architect father in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls on wood floors and voices echo off the marble staircase, the distinct knock of her dear friend, Julian Raphaël, the son of the art dealer’s family across the hall. Then the Raphaëls disappear, leaving everything behind but their priceless art collection, which has simply vanished.
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No flow, no plot
- By KSCAR70 on 05-25-25
By: Alice Austen
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The Usual Desire to Kill
- A Novel
- By: Camilla Barnes
- Narrated by: Harriet Walter
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983. This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.
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Keep with it.
- By Criticalthinker on 05-24-25
By: Camilla Barnes
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Embers of the Hands
- Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
- By: Eleanor Barraclough
- Narrated by: Eleanor Barraclough
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In imagining a Viking, a certain image springs to mind: a barbaric warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorize the hapless local population of a northern European town. Yet while such characters define our imagination of the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. Instead, in the time-stopping soils, water, and ice of the North, Eleanor Barraclough excavates a preserved lost world, one that reimagines a misunderstood society.
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Author is an excellent reader!
- By K on 02-11-25
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Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
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Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
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Memorial Days
- A Memoir
- By: Geraldine Brooks
- Narrated by: Geraldine Brooks
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz–just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy–collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
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Uninspired, mediocre writing.
- By C. Tyler on 03-04-25
By: Geraldine Brooks
Hilarious 48 hour romp through New York with a somewhat unbalanced Shakespearean actress and her Beagle.
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