Behind the Mic With Kirkus Reviews

Host Jo Reed and contributor Leslie Fine discuss three new works of fiction that take listeners from 1980s New York to midcentury Florida and, finally, to a complicated homecoming in the present-day Adirondacks. Dion Graham returns to Ray Carney’s world in Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, bringing rhythm, humor, and depth to Ray’s divided life in Harlem. Amanda Stribling gives Laura Moriarty’s nov...

Jo Reed talks with contributor Alan Minskoff about three memoirs shaped by home and the complicated question of where we belong. In All That’s Unseen, Emilee Hackney narrates the story of her journey from an insular Pentecostal community in Southwest Virginia to Harvard University, with an Appalachian accent that keeps her connection to home unmistakably present, even as her world expands. Vincent...

Jo Reed talks with Laura Rossi about three Earphones Award–winning audiobooks that showcase the range and power of great narration. In Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, Rebecca Lowman gives surprising dimension to a deeply unlikable trad-wife influencer whose carefully constructed life takes an unexpected turn. Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect, read by Marin Ireland, follows four complicated women...

Jo Reed and Michele Cobb dig into three Earphones Award–winning police procedurals, each pairing a compelling investigator with a narrator who knows how to build suspense. In Missing by E.A. Jackson, Nicola Walker’s understated, magnetic performance and English accent capture Detective Inspector Martha Allen’s intelligence and persistence as a decades-old case pulls her back in. Dervla McTiernan’s...

Jo Reed talks with contributor Stephen Cummings about three memoirs created with audio at their center, using performance, archival clips, live recordings, and the human voice to tell their stories. Billy Eichner looks back at his Queens childhood, his rise through Billy on the Street, and the creation of the film Bros in Billy on Billy, an audio-only memoir that mixes his narration with clips fro...

Host Jo Reed and contributor Leslie Fine explore three distinctive novels and the narrators who shape the listening experience. In Sarah Damoff’s The Burning Side, Stacy Gonzalez, Timothy Andrés Pabon, and Jackie Sanders portray members of a family in crisis, with Sanders’ warm, multidimensional performance as the family matriarch a particular standout. Elizabeth Strout’s extraordinary The Things...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Kendra Winchester about three audiobooks that explore disability and offer distinct perspectives on community, resilience, and belonging. They begin with Mother Tongue by Sara Nović, narrated by Lisa Flanagan, a memoir that blends personal experience with Deaf history and culture while using inventive audio production to incorporate ASL into the listening experi...

Host Jo Reed and Kirkus young readers’ editor Laura Simeon discuss three audiobooks for young listeners that use sports to explore identity, family, culture, and social change. In Medicine Wheels by Byron Graves, narrator Meegwun Fairbrother captures both the turmoil and the exhilaration of an Ojibwe teenager who discovers skateboarding—and a new connection to his late father. Eva Kaminsky brings...

Three audiobooks explore people whose patience, curiosity, and determination changed how we understand—and protect—the natural world. Contributor Alan Minskoff joins host Jo Reed to discuss Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller by Miriam Horn, a biography of the pioneering wildlife biologist whose decades of patient fieldwork transformed our understanding of animals in the w...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Alex Richey about three audiobooks whose outstanding narrators bring emotional depth to stories of ghosts, murder, and terrifying change. They begin with The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean, in which Natalie Naudus’ emotionally precise narration guides listeners through a haunting tale set in wartime Hong Kong, balancing gothic fantasy and historical fi...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Laura Rossi about three Earphones Award–winning audiobooks whose narrators transport listeners in strikingly different ways. Recorded live before audiences across the country, The Land and Its People captures David Sedaris at his best: His impeccable timing and disarming honesty create an immersive listening experience that can be as moving as it is funny. Andre...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Michele Cobb about three audiobooks full of unexpected turns, each narrated by Golden Voice performers at the top of their craft. Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Howard Hughes feel uncannily real in The Original by Priya Parmar, as Cassandra Campbell's nuanced narration blurs the line between historical fact and imaginative fiction. Walter Mosley's Ghalen: A...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Stephen Cummings about three celebrity memoirs that reveal the many ways that authors tell their own stories in audio. They begin with Arsenio by Arsenio Hall and Alan Eisenstock, narrated by Hall, whose lively, charismatic performance revisits the groundbreaking years of The Arsenio Hall Show and its cultural impact. Then they discuss Famesick, written and read...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Kendra Winchester about three inventive story collections that reveal just how expansive audiobook storytelling can be. They begin with Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg, performed by a seven-person cast including Marin Ireland and Samantha Desz, where stories centered on fatness, vulnerability, and community take on added intimacy through distinct narrative voi...

Host Jo Reed talks with Kirkus young readers’ editor Laura Simeon about three middle-grade audiobooks that explore difficult subjects with honesty, empathy, and respect for young listeners. In Phoenix by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, narrator Emma Ladji brings warmth and steadiness to young Harper’s story as she navigates her parents’ divorce, shifting friendships, and the rescued horse who becomes c...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Leslie Fine about three audiobooks that range from memoir to thriller to literary biography. They begin with Unread: A Memoir of Learning (and Loving) To Read on TikTok by Oliver James, where narrator James Shippy brings warmth and enthusiasm to the author’s account of achieving literacy as an adult and discovering the enduring pleasures of books. Then, they tur...

On this special sponsored episode of Behind the Mic, Kirkus’ Michele Cobb is joined by acclaimed narrator January LaVoy. Together, they go behind the scenes of recording Freida McFadden’s latest bestseller, The Divorce—without spoilers. The novel explores the unraveling of a marriage, and the audiobook is performed by a trio of narrators portraying the three characters at its center: January LaVoy...

From haunted New Jersey suburbs to melancholy Irish landscapes to the contested wilds of the American West, Alan Minskoff joins host Jo Reed to discuss three sharply different works of fiction in audio. Tom Perrotta’s Ghost Town, narrated by Robert Petkoff, blends grief, adolescence, and the supernatural through Petkoff’s nuanced character work, while Derbhle Crotty and Darragh Shannon bring quiet...

Three women tell deeply personal stories in audiobooks that gain even more force through performance. Michele Cobb joins host Jo Reed to discuss A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, who discovered that her husband had drugged her and arranged to have dozens of men assault her over the course of many years. The book recounts her life, the trial, and the reckoning that followed, all narrated by Emma Th...

Contributor Stephen Cummings joins host Jo Reed to talk about David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years, which Pogue narrates with the confidence and curiosity of a longtime tech journalist, weaving in archival clips and company lore. They turn to Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, where André Santana’s restrained and intelligent narration underscores...

On this special sponsored episode of Behind the Mic, Kirkus’ Michele Cobb is joined by Amy Metsch, associate publisher and director of audio programming at Spiegel & Grau, to talk about Kathryn Stockett’s highly anticipated new novel, The Calamity Club, narrated by the powerhouse team of January LaVoy and Jenna Lamia. Stockett’s new novel, her first since The Help in 2009, is about female friendsh...

Host Jo Reed is joined by contributor Alex Richey to explore three horror audiobooks that favor atmosphere and interiority over jump scares. We begin with The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann, where Florence Howard’s finely tuned vocal shifts capture Anne Boleyn’s intellect and fury in an intimate, reflective alternate history. We then turn to The Body by Bethany C. Morrow, with Nesta Cooper deli...

Laura Rossi joins host Jo Reed to talk through three recent Earphones Award winners, each offering a distinct listening experience. They begin with Judge Stone by James Patterson and Viola Davis, on which Davis also delivers exceptional narration, bringing authority and emotional precision to a fast-moving legal thriller. Then it’s Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi, where Adjoa Andoh delivers a commandi...

Contributor Kendra Winchester joins host Jo Reed to discuss three audiobooks that each spotlight a different side of Toni Morrison. In Language as Liberation, narrator Bahni Turpin guides listeners through Morrison’s own lectures, bringing an immediacy to her literary analysis of the American canon. Toni at Random, read with clarity and momentum by Deanna Anthony, highlights Morrison’s role in cha...

Host Jo Reed talks with contributor Leslie Fine about three audiobooks that circle around questions of identity, family, and belonging. In Kin by Tayari Jones, dual narrators Angel Pean and Ashley J. Hobbs give distinct voices to two lifelong friends shaped by maternal absence as well as the racial and class realities of the 1950s South. Boy From the North Country, written and read by Sam Sussman,...