
The Dry Season
A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $19.80
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Melissa Febos
-
By:
-
Melissa Febos
About this listen
From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.
“Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the ecstasy of abstinence. She never fails in her candor and precision.”—Katherine May, author of Wintering
In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy, not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the distinct pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from eleventh-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.
By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical, new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and, most of all, her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that’s as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it’s the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.
©2025 Melissa Febos (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
Girlhood
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations.
-
-
Great read, audio needs editing
- By Niurka Maldonado on 04-02-21
By: Melissa Febos
-
Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
-
-
This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
-
Culture Creep
- Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
- By: Alice Bolin
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.
By: Alice Bolin
-
No Fault
- A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
- By: Haley Mlotek
- Narrated by: Haley Mlotek
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
-
-
Probably better to read in physical form
- By harrison brinner on 05-08-25
By: Haley Mlotek
-
How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
-
-
Pause and rewind
- By Harkins5 on 06-09-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
-
I'll Tell You When I'm Home
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance.
By: Hala Alyan
-
Girlhood
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations.
-
-
Great read, audio needs editing
- By Niurka Maldonado on 04-02-21
By: Melissa Febos
-
Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
-
-
This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
-
Culture Creep
- Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
- By: Alice Bolin
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.
By: Alice Bolin
-
No Fault
- A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
- By: Haley Mlotek
- Narrated by: Haley Mlotek
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
-
-
Probably better to read in physical form
- By harrison brinner on 05-08-25
By: Haley Mlotek
-
How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
-
-
Pause and rewind
- By Harkins5 on 06-09-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
-
I'll Tell You When I'm Home
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance.
By: Hala Alyan
-
The Möbius Book
- By: Catherine Lacey
- Narrated by: Catherine Lacey, Gabra Zackman
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God.
By: Catherine Lacey
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
-
-
Be careful with this
- By whosis on 06-17-25
By: Yiyun Li
-
Sucker Punch
- Essays
- By: Scaachi Koul
- Narrated by: Scaachi Koul
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Vulnerable yet funny and so so relatable!
- By Diana on 03-14-25
By: Scaachi Koul
-
Original Sins
- The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
- By: Eve L. Ewing
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Eve L. Ewing
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
-
-
A must read for educators and everyone!
- By Alonna on 05-06-25
By: Eve L. Ewing
-
Sleep
- A Novel
- By: Honor Jones
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.
-
-
Best “literary fiction” book in years
- By Lydia Paddon on 05-30-25
By: Honor Jones
-
The Summer We Ran
- A Novel
- By: Audrey Ingram
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo, Andrew Gibson
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 1996, teenage Tess Murphy’s mom gave her two rules to abide by: keep quiet and stay out of trouble. Her mother landed a new job as a cook at an affluent Virginia estate and didn’t want anything to risk the opportunity, least of all her outspoken daughter. What no one saw coming was Tess falling deeply in love with the boy next door, high-society Grant Alexander.
-
-
Meh
- By Jennifer Burrows on 06-06-25
By: Audrey Ingram
-
Disappoint Me
- A Novel
- By: Nicola Dinan
- Narrated by: Martin Sarreal, Mei Mei MacLeod
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.
By: Nicola Dinan
-
So Gay for You
- Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All
- By: Kate Moennig, Leisha Hailey
- Narrated by: Kate Moennig, Leisha Hailey
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the early 2000s, Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey—both young artists trying to figure it all out—met at auditions for an unknown little TV show. Given that it was a show about lesbians living in Los Angeles, with the first ever ensemble cast of openly queer female characters, Kate and Leisha knew the project was going to be unlike anything else out there—that is, if it even got picked up.
-
-
I really needed that
- By Heather Stella on 06-22-25
By: Kate Moennig, and others
-
Murderland
- Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
- By: Caroline Fraser
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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?
-
-
Washington’s dark secrets
- By Erica J. on 06-18-25
By: Caroline Fraser
-
Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
-
-
Bizarre
- By Kevin on 04-23-25
By: Katie Kitamura
-
Notes to John
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Julianne Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.
-
-
This autobiography discusses notes from therapy regarding Joan’s daughter’s addiction. Very insightful!
- By Laura Borealis on 04-24-25
By: Joan Didion
-
Open Socrates
- The Case for a Philosophical Life
- By: Agnes Callard
- Narrated by: Agnes Callard
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined ones. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates’ thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.
-
-
Great insights on interpersonal philosophising, and how it differs from and interacts with internal philosophising.
- By Brian Pestridge on 06-22-25
By: Agnes Callard
Critic reviews
“Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly. Reading this book, I felt an ecstatic, nerve-tingling gratitude, like it was written just for me—finding such crisp, incisive language for emotional knots I’ve felt caught inside for years—but part of the joy of this feeling was knowing how many people will feel the same way: that this book was written just for them.”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
“The Dry Season is brilliant and powerful meditation upon addiction, desire, seduction, and the undervalued (and all-too-unexplored) power of a woman laying claim to a period of celibacy for spiritual and personal reasons. Febos is both unflinching and compassionate as she inventories all that she has done for love, and what she will never do again. A deeply important book, and I saw myself and many women whom I love and admire on every page.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
“Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season will be called a book about abstinence, about celibacy, but it’s so much more than that. This is a book about obsession, compulsion, about self and self-lessness, about sex and love and art and faith and the capacity of each to swallow us whole, to obliterate us, make us anew alit with our history instead of engulfed by it. Febos talks back to time as she unravels it, inviting everyone into the conversation from Hadewijch to Hildegard, Foucault to Lorde, St. Augustine to Annie Dillard. The Dry Season is about reenchanting oneself with the world. It’s the best book yet by one of contemporary non-fiction’s lodestars.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
-
-
This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
-
Girlhood
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations.
-
-
Great read, audio needs editing
- By Niurka Maldonado on 04-02-21
By: Melissa Febos
-
Body Work
- The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it.
-
-
A must!!!
- By Karen S on 02-13-23
By: Melissa Febos
-
Songs of No Provenance
- A Novel
- By: Lydi Conklin
- Narrated by: Kristin James
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
-
-
Interesting story, unlikable protagonist
- By Madeline on 06-24-25
By: Lydi Conklin
-
How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
-
-
Pause and rewind
- By Harkins5 on 06-09-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
-
With Love from a Children's Therapist
- #lessonsihavelearnedalongtheway
- By: Stacy Schaffer
- Narrated by: Stacy Schaffer
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In With Love from a Children’s Therapist, Stacy Schaffer takes readers on a deeply personal and professional journey through trauma, resilience, and healing. As a survivor and a therapist with more than twenty years of experience, Schaffer weaves together her story with the lessons she’s learned from working with children, teens, and young adults.
-
-
Schaffer connects past experiences to the challenges children face today
- By KT Shaw on 06-04-25
By: Stacy Schaffer
-
Abandon Me
- Memoirs
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.
-
-
This journey is captivating to say the least!
- By Ilanna on 08-11-17
By: Melissa Febos
-
Girlhood
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations.
-
-
Great read, audio needs editing
- By Niurka Maldonado on 04-02-21
By: Melissa Febos
-
Body Work
- The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it.
-
-
A must!!!
- By Karen S on 02-13-23
By: Melissa Febos
-
Songs of No Provenance
- A Novel
- By: Lydi Conklin
- Narrated by: Kristin James
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
-
-
Interesting story, unlikable protagonist
- By Madeline on 06-24-25
By: Lydi Conklin
-
How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
-
-
Pause and rewind
- By Harkins5 on 06-09-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
-
With Love from a Children's Therapist
- #lessonsihavelearnedalongtheway
- By: Stacy Schaffer
- Narrated by: Stacy Schaffer
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In With Love from a Children’s Therapist, Stacy Schaffer takes readers on a deeply personal and professional journey through trauma, resilience, and healing. As a survivor and a therapist with more than twenty years of experience, Schaffer weaves together her story with the lessons she’s learned from working with children, teens, and young adults.
-
-
Schaffer connects past experiences to the challenges children face today
- By KT Shaw on 06-04-25
By: Stacy Schaffer
-
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
-
Culture Creep
- Notes on the Pop Apocalypse
- By: Alice Bolin
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.
By: Alice Bolin
-
The Intermediaries
- A Weimar Story
- By: Brandy Schillace
- Narrated by: Daniela Acitelli
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Through its unforgettable characters and immersive storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today's oppressive anti-trans legislation.
By: Brandy Schillace
-
The River's Daughter
- By: Bridget Crocker
- Narrated by: Bridget Crocker
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Recalling memoirs like Wild and Educated, an internationally renowned whitewater rafting guide offers a gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming hardship and coming into her own through her relationship with the rivers she has known.
-
-
Incredible story
- By Erika Holzapfel on 06-10-25
By: Bridget Crocker
-
This Dog Will Change Your Life
- By: Elias Weiss Friedman, Ben Greenman - contributor
- Narrated by: Elias Weiss Friedman
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This book weaves together stories of the many dogs Elias has been lucky enough to know, both in his personal life and while doing his Dogist work. Told in a light tone that does not shy away from more serious issues (Elias is not above the occasional sentimental moment or dog pun), this book charmingly explores the ways that dogs are not just our family and our friends but also irreplaceable beings capable of generating boundless love and restoring balance to our lives.
-
-
Joy personified!
- By Caroline on 06-22-25
By: Elias Weiss Friedman, and others
-
It's Not the End of the World
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Parks-Ramage
- Narrated by: André Santana
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 2044 and life is bleak for many Americans, but not for Mason Daunt. Safe in his Los Angeles mansion, Mason can remain blissfully unaware of the relentless wildfires engulfing California, the proliferation of violent right-wing militias, and the rampant authoritarianism destroying American society. He's so rich, in fact, that he and his partner Yunho Kim are throwing a 100-person, $100,000 baby shower to celebrate their newborn-on-the-way.
-
Black Salt Queen
- Letters from Mayanara, Book 1
- By: Samantha Bansil
- Narrated by: Jensen Olaya
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hara Duja Gatdula, queen of the island nation of Maynara, holds the divine power to move the earth. But her strength is failing and the line of succession gives her little comfort. Her heir, Laya, is a danger—a petty and passionate princess who wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference. Circling the throne is Imeria Kulaw—the matriarch of a traitorous rival family who wields recklessly enhanced powers of her own—with designs to secure a high-ranking position for her son and claim the crown for her family.
By: Samantha Bansil
-
The Hollow Half
- A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
- By: Sarah Aziza
- Narrated by: Sarah Aziza
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
-
-
Tedious
- By evan on 06-18-25
By: Sarah Aziza
-
When the Harvest Comes
- A Novel
- By: Denne Michele Norris
- Narrated by: L Morgan Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness. But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle.
-
-
Absolutely Beautiful
- By Elizabeth on 04-18-25
-
Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.
-
-
I want my 15 hours back
- By Amazon customer on 06-11-25
By: Susan Choi
-
I'll Tell You When I'm Home
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance.
By: Hala Alyan
-
Endling
- A Novel
- By: Maria Reva
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Saskia Maarleveld, Maria Reva
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
-
-
This might be a really good book to read
- By A on 06-11-25
By: Maria Reva
Excellent again!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.