Behind the Mic With Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Audiobook Reviews Find your next great audiobook on Behind the Mic with Kirkus Reviews. Every Thursday, host Jo Reed and her guests discuss what they’ve been listening to and recommend the very best audiobooks. It’s the perfect way to keep up with new releases and hear about the ones you may have missed. Launched by AudioFile magazine in 2018, Behind the Mic now has its home at Kirkus Reviews, the most trusted voice in book discovery for more than 90 years. Visit us at kirkusreviews.com. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Episodes
September 24, 2026 • 30 mins
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 novel Sunlight...
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September 17, 2026 • 22 mins
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 Coppola’s Gowanus Cros...
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September 10, 2026 • 26 mins
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 through a summer...
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September 3, 2026 • 22 mins
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 Three Reas...
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August 27, 2026 • 26 mins
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 from his career and reveals a more
ref...
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August 20, 2026 • 24 mins
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 We Never Say find...
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August 13, 2026 • 25 mins
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 experience. Next is A Way Home by Cinelle...
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August 6, 2026 • 23 mins
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 clarity and urgency to ...
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July 30, 2026 • 23 mins
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 wild. Timothy Andrés Pab...
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July 23, 2026 • 23 mins
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 fiction. Next is Craig DiLoui...
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July 16, 2026 • 27 mins
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. Andrew Sean Greer's Villa Coco, re...
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July 9, 2026 • 26 mins
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 Romance in Black begins as a love s...
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July 2, 2026 • 31 mins
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 by Lena Dunham, a candid and often...
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June 25, 2026 • 28 mins
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 voices. Then they discuss My Dear You ...
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June 18, 2026 • 29 mins
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 central to her new...
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June 11, 2026 • 24 mins
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 turn to Tiffany Crum’s Thi...
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June 5, 2026 • 16 mins
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, Edoardo Balleri...
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June 4, 2026 • 21 mins
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 emotional precision to...
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May 28, 2026 • 25 mins
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 Thompson with remarkable restraint an...
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May 21, 2026 • 29 mins
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 the frustrations ...
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