
Sucker Punch
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Scaachi Koul
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By:
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Scaachi Koul
About this listen
"Certain authors are their own best narrators.... Here, Koul's accomplished reading comes with the bonus of regular vocal interjections from her father."—Library Journal on One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
This program is read by the author.The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.
Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her biting wit to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.
©2025 Scaachi Koul (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A beautiful, painful, funny, and ultimately inspiring account of a marriage crumbling, told through Scaachi Koul’s distinct voice and trademark sense of humor. Brilliant.”—Jennette McCurdy, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller I’m Glad My Mom Died
“Scaachi Koul's Sucker Punch is an absolute knockout. Koul's essays are packed full of diamond-sharp writing, exemplary wit, eviscerating truths, and—most importantly—a rib-shattering amount of heart. Here is Scaachi Koul at her most vulnerable, while somehow still casually holding onto her rightfully-earned crown as one of America's funniest living writers.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
“With a sharp wit and even sharper writing, Scaachi Koul writes a compulsively readable memoir that journeys into the dark heart of heterosexual love. This book will have you howling with laughter, weeping with rage, and furiously turning every page. Sucker Punch is an unapologetic story of one woman's fierce fight to keep those beautiful loud, funny, raw, tender, pugilistic pieces of herself in a world that wants to yank them away. This book is a beautiful bruiser.”—Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
“Sucker Punch is a generous and gutting book about marriage and mothers and the inheritances we all carry. Scaachi Koul’s genius here is stacking moments where you’ll burst out laughing, then pulling her own sucker punch: just when your heart is open, she sneaks in a turn that will make you weep. It’s a magic trick every time.”—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere
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Brilliant writing, mesmerizing story!
- By jc on 03-14-25
By: Silvia Park
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Our City That Year
- A Novel
- By: Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell - translator
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse. Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his secular beliefs.
By: Geetanjali Shree, and others
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Connecting Dots
- A Blind Life
- By: Joshua A. Miele, Wendell Jamieson - contributor
- Narrated by: Greg D. Barnett
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of four, Joshua Miele was blinded and badly burned when a delusional neighbor poured sulfuric acid over his head in a crime that shocked New York. It could have ended his life, but instead, Miele—naturally curious, and a born problem solver—not only recovered, but thrived. Throughout his life, Miele has found increasingly inventive ways to succeed in a world built for the sighted, and to help others to do the same. At first reluctant to even think of himself as blind, he eventually embraced his blindness and became a committed advocate for disability and accessibility
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Great story, breathy reader
- By marianne reynolds on 04-30-25
By: Joshua A. Miele, and others
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How to Stop Trying
- An Overachiever’s Guide to Self-Acceptance, Letting Go, and Other Impossible Things
- By: Kate Williams
- Narrated by: Kate Williams
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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We exist within a culture that encourages us—often with a frantic urgency—to try, and try harder. We are told to try a different approach, try to do or be better, try to squeeze in a little bit more. This is especially true of women, who not only have to try harder than men to receive access to the same opportunities and resources, but who are also conditioned to try in the name of meeting others' needs and expectations, often at the expense of their own well-being. In this book, Kate tackles hustle culture head-on, exploring the ways in which women are primed to become relentless strivers.
By: Kate Williams
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Splinters
- Another Kind of Love Story
- By: Leslie Jamison
- Narrated by: Leslie Jamison
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.
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Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
- By Kristin H on 09-27-24
By: Leslie Jamison
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Devil Is Fine
- A Novel
- By: John Vercher
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.
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Mesmerizing
- By Gina Middleton on 06-24-24
By: John Vercher
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No Less Strange or Wonderful
- Essays in Curiosity
- By: A. Kendra Greene
- Narrated by: A. Kendra Greene
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness.
By: A. Kendra Greene
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Saving Five
- A Memoir of Hope
- By: Amanda Nguyen
- Narrated by: Sura Siu
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A brave and imaginative memoir by the Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, detailing her healing journey and groundbreaking activism in the aftermath of her rape at Harvard.
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Beautifully written!
- By Amazon Customer on 03-05-25
By: Amanda Nguyen
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The Man Nobody Killed
- Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
- By: Elon Green
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.
By: Elon Green
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Animal Instinct
- By: Amy Shearn
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
By: Amy Shearn
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Stop Me If You've Heard This One
- A Novel
- By: Kristen Arnett
- Narrated by: Cameron Esposito
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers. Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life.
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Pulpy nonsense trying to pass for “literary fiction”
- By cassandra on 05-03-25
By: Kristen Arnett
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The Californians
- A Novel
- By: Brian Castleberry
- Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Rob Shapiro, Nancy Peterson, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon. A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn—German-Jewish immigrant, resident of the Lower East Side—inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens.
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Seven Social Movements That Changed America
- By: Linda Gordon
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s.
By: Linda Gordon
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Crush
- A Novel
- By: Ada Calhoun
- Narrated by: Robyn Maryke
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes.
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insufferable main characters
- By Brian on 05-25-25
By: Ada Calhoun
What a work of art
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Excellent!!
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Vulnerable yet funny and so so relatable!
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All the feels!
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