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This book is basically a George Saunders masterclass on the short story, written down. For examples, he includes the full texts of several stories by Russian masters, and then examines why the stories work — and what lessons writers can take from them — all in his wise and compelling voice. Saunders’s prose is anything but dry, but still, a book of literary analysis should probably be read on the page, right? My answer in most cases would be yes, except that Saunders assembled an all-star cast to read the stories, and not only are their performances incredibly entertaining, but their readings also highlight the skillfulness of the stories. This format has allowed the cast to simultaneously present and reinforce Saunders’s book, without changing a word.

I knew that I wanted to read Claire Luchette’s debut novel when I first heard about it, but when I learned that Hillary Huber was narrating the audiobook, I knew that I would be listening to this one. Huber has a tremendous range, but is especially good at voicing wry or naïve characters (or characters that transition from one to the other, as in her performance of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet). Here, the story is narrated by Agatha, a young nun who, along with her sisters, is displaced when her parish goes broke. Huber embodies Luchette’s character and prose with warmth and precision.

Maybe it’s merely my singularly dour worldview, but I think that writing comedic prose is extremely difficult. Without a performer’s timing and intonation, text on the page can feel like it’s missing something. But prose offers a greater venue to develop ideas and characters than any other format, and I think audiobooks are a real enhancement of this kind of book. I’m sure I would have found Jen Spyra’s collection smart and hilarious if I had read it on the page, but I knew that I wanted to hear Spyra, Dan Stevens, and a full cast read it for me.

Not every author is a great narrator, but I knew that Patrick Radden Keefe was from his Wind of Change podcast. His book on the Sackler family’s opioid business, Empire of Pain, is a masterpiece of book-length reportage, and Keefe’s performance of it is engaging, while the facts he reveals are often enraging.

I’ve previously written about how charming I found Mizuki, the protagonist of Emily Itami’s Fault Lines, and Lydia Wilson’s performance more than lives up to Itami’s text. I think it’s very easy to fall in love with Mizuki on the page, and even easier to do so on audio.

I’ve read Murderbot and I’ve listened to Murderbot; I’ll take Martha Wells’s incredible killing-machine-who’d-rather-be-watching-long-running-streaming-shows protagonist in whatever format I can get, but Kevin R. Free captures the voice and spirit of Murderbot so well that I’ll be listening from here on out. Fugitive Telemetry is the sixth book in the series and can be read on its own, but why not start The Murderbot Diaries from the beginning?

Jaime Cortez’s collection of stories follow the title character from his youth in a migrant workers’ camp in 1970s California to his young adulthood. Performing Gordo required Alejandro Ruiz to narrate several stories in the voice of a child, and that certainly could have gone very wrong! It did not. Ruiz gets Cortez’s tone just right, and this collection sounds so good.

If poet and journalist Clint Smith ever gets writer’s block, he can always pivot to a new career in audiobook narration, because he excels at it. This book is a stand-out title of 2021, and Smith’s deeply personal exploration of how we reckon with the centrality of slavery in our nation’s history (or how we fail to do so) is absolutely vital.

This memoir is written and read by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, so of course it’s all about capturing voices. Hudes recounts her youth in the North Philly barrio, and ably conveys her love of the cacophony that animated it. She also reflects on the difficulty she had finding her own voice, which is all the more affecting when you hear it in her own voice.

This memoir is also read by its author (with a few other guest voices stepping in at times) and having Brian Broome read his account of Black masculinity and queerness is truly moving. His book has a few framing devises — one is a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, and the other is the story of a boy taking a ride on a city bus — and I still think about both, all the time.