Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.
Hari Kunzru narrates his disturbing novel Red Pill at a deliberate pace in an eerily calm tone that mimics his protagonist’s diminishing mental state. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Alan Minskoff discuss this dystopian novel that ends just at the moment of the 2016 election. The protagonist has arrived in Germany after receiving a writing fellowship, but instead of working on the book, he’s drawn into an alt-right filmmaker’s show that unnerves him. Kunzru’s softly intoned English accent gives the audiobook a sense of otherness, and the plot unfolds as the protagonist’s mind descends into paranoia.
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Support for Behind the Mic comes from Blackstone Publishing, a 30-years plus strong independent audiobook publisher that is now also publishing print books and ebooks. This fall, Blackstone is publishing an array of stellar titles—Cecilia Aragon’s memoir Flying Free, which tells the odds-defying story of how she became the first Latina pilot on the US Aerobatic Team; the historical fiction novel Escaping Dreamland by NY Times bestselling author Charlie Lovett; the YA dystopian thriller The Key to Fear from NY Times bestselling author Kristin Cast, and Don’t Move—a horror novel from Darren Wearmouth and television star James S. Murray. Learn about these and more titles from Blackstone’s Fall 2020 list at BlackstonePublishing.com.
