Celebrating the Joy of Listening: Selecting the Best of the Best for the The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022 Audiobook

By Julia Barton / June 5, 2023 at 1:33 am

Audiobook $20.00

The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022

By Julia Barton (Editor)
Narrated by Julia Barton , David Sedaris

In Stock Online

Audiobook $20.00

Julia Barton is VP & Executive Editor of Pushkin Industries, an audio production house founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. She’s edited popular podcasts including “Revisionist History,” “Against the Rules,” and “Cautionary Tales.” And she’s the editor and curator of the audiobook collection, The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022, which features a foreword by David Sedaris.  Keep reading to discover how she decided what to include in this compilation of audio stories.

There’s never been a better time to be a listener: from podcasts to audiobooks, the production of audio storytelling has exploded over the past decade. As someone who started out in local radio, during the analog days of reel-to-reel tape, I’m amazed and gratified that digital streaming has expanded our opportunities to tell great stories in audio form — and to find new listeners. 

But like everyone else these days, I’m overwhelmed by all the new listening options. I’d need a year’s worth of road trips and long walks just to listen to the backlog of stuff in my audio queue. So, we at Pushkin decided to pull together a collection of great audio stories, in the style of annual “best of” volumes of short stories, magazine writing, and more. We want to highlight the craft and creative risk-taking of audio storytelling, while celebrating the range of work being made.

Throughout 2022, the audiobooks team at Pushkin invited everyone at the company to nominate shows or broadcast stories that inspired them. We also asked dozens of other audio professionals to nominate themselves or others. 

Then came the listening. Pushkin’s Senior Editor Sophie Crane took the lead in listening to all nominations — not just a single episode of a series but the whole series, or the whole year’s output of an ongoing show. She must have listened during every single waking hour of her day (when she was not doing her job, which also involves a ton of listening!). Near the end of 2022, with Sophie’s recommendations in hand, as well as my own list, I listened to as much as I could. 

I listened for the work that stayed with me for days after I heard it — work that contained voices, narrative writing, and sound design that cut through distractions and held my professional admiration.

I also wanted to include pieces that would show the range of nonfiction, narrative audio being made in the US right now, a decade after podcasts first started to become a popular form. So, I was looking for examples of narration-heavy audio essays, as well as broadcast features, and the more poetic, documentary-style of storytelling that some producers are able craft from interview tape alone, with little or no narration. Many pieces in the collection are outstanding examples of popular forms: the history podcast, the “explainer” podcast, true crime. 

Not that you need to know any of that in order to enjoy The Best Audio Storytelling. This is a collection to celebrate the joy of listening, and also our heartfelt appreciation of listeners. As an audio story editor, I try to remind myself that nothing we make is done until someone hears it — and ideally, our work persuades that person  to listen with attention. 

Our job as producers is to earn that attention, because our stories do not actually live inside smartphones or in the cloud (or in radio waves, as the case may be). They live inside the minds of listeners, who reconstruct the story in their heads word by word and image by image. With today’s abundance of audio stories, we may think of listening as nothing special. But as with reading, it’s a miracle — and something to marvel at.