Audiobooks by Ayelet Waldman

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case and read by an all-star cast. The all-star cast of readers includes: Annaleigh Ashford, Matt Bomer, Dennis Boutsikaris, Geraldine Brooks, Norbert Leo Butz, Michael Chabon, John Cho, David Cole, Sergio de la Pava, Santino Fontana, Elizabeth Frances, Neil Gaiman, Amber Gray, Michael C. Hall, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian D'Arcy James, Luke Kirby, Goran Kostić, Judith Light, Lucy Liu, Rebecca Luker, Javier Muñoz, Masi Oka, Morgan Parker, Ann Patchett, Alison Pill, Tonya Pinkins, Billy Porter, Missi Pyle, Zachary Quinto, Jen Richards, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, Tony Shalhoub, Heather Alicia Simms, Patrick Stewart, Corey Stoll, Moses Sumney, Ayelet Waldman, Bradley Whitford, and Constance Zimmer. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization's one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU's spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU's stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon (Author), An All Star Cast (Narrator)

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Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of fifty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence-an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there-and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories. Kingdom of Olives and Ash includes contributions from several of today's most esteemed storytellers including: Colum McCann, Jacqueline Woodson, Colm Toibin, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Raja Shehadeh, Mario Vargas Llosa and Assaf Gavron, as well as from editors Chabon and Waldman. Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers will gain unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news, as well as deeper understanding of the conflict as experienced by the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.

Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon (Author), Fred Sanders, Gabra Zackman (Narrator)

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A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

A revealing, courageous, fascinating, and funny account of the author's experiment with microdoses of LSD in an effort to treat a debilitating mood disorder, of her quest to understand a misunderstood drug, and of her search for a really good day. When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her mood storms have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month-bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity-she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is eye-opening, often hilarious, and utterly enthralling.

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Ayelet Waldman (Narrator)

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Love and Treasure

Three men - an American infantry captain in World War II, an Israeli-born dealer in art stolen by the Nazis, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siècle Budapest - find their carefully wrought lives turned upside-down by three women. A mystery: where does the worth of people and its treasures truly lie? What is the value of a gift, when giver and recipient have been lost - of a love offering when the beloved is no more?

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Jonathan Davis, Multiple Narrators, Paul Hecht (Narrator)

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Love and Treasure

The Hungarian Gold Train, loaded with Jewish treasure. A dazzling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three amazing and fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history or our times... Maine, 2012. An old man id dying with the weight of a plundered necklace on his conscience. As an US Army Captain in 1946 Salburg, guarding the 'Hungarian Gold Train' full of looted Jewish treasure, he fell in love with camp survivor and helped her escape to Israel. Now, as his granddaughter sets out to repatriate the necklace, secrets buried in the past are uncoverd,stories of love and deceit linked to that beautiful, peacock-shaped pendant and to a priceless,long-lost painting. spanning a century of European and Jewish history, from 1913 Budapest to comtemporary Israel, and filled with a vivid supporting cast of art dealers,freedom fighters,psychoanalysts and suffragette dwarfs, LOVE AND TREASURE is a thrilling, moving and haunting novel, one that bears an ever elusive question at its core, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket: where does the worth of a people and its treasure truly lie?

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Jonathan Davis, Paul Hecht (Narrator)

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Red Hook Road

As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman's follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy. Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity. A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter's death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin. As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life's finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it's often the little things that make life so precious.

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

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Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Mia Barron (Narrator)

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Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

In this moving, wry, and candid novel, widely acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman takes us through one womans passage through love, loss, and the strange absurdities of modern life. Emilia Greenleaf believed that she had found her soulmate, the man she was meant to spend her life with. But life seems a lot less rosy when Emilia has to deal with the most neurotic and sheltered five-year-old in New York City: her new stepson William. Now Emilia finds herself trying to flag down taxis with a giant, industrial-strength car seat, looking for perfect, strawberry-flavored, lactose-free cupcakes, receiving corrections on her French pronunciation from her supercilious stepson - and attempting to find balance in a new family thats both larger, and smaller, than she bargained for. In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Ayelet Waldman has created a novel rich with humor and truth, perfectly characterizing one womans search for answers in a crazily uncertain world. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ayelet Waldman (Author), Susan Denaker (Narrator)

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