Kat Johnson, Audible Editor

AUDIBLE EDITOR

Kat Johnson

Kat is an Audible editor and podcast addict who likes to mix up her diet of thrillers and true crime with cozy British comedies, weird literary fiction, and the occasional nonfiction blockbuster to sound smarter at parties.

Favorite listens of 2020

Weather Audiobook By Jenny Offill cover art
Donor 9623: Part One Audiobook By Dov Fox cover art
The Last Book On The Left Audiobook By Ben Kissel, Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski cover art
Caste Audiobook By Isabel Wilkerson cover art
Hidden Valley Road Audiobook By Robert Kolker cover art
Luster Audiobook By Raven Leilani cover art

Recent reviews

Product List
  • Geek Love Audiobook By Katherine Dunn cover art

    • Geek Love

    • By: Katherine Dunn
    • Narrated by: Christina Moore
    • Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
    • Release date: 12-18-07
    • Language: English
    • 1,855 ratings
    • Quarantining with genius
    • In the midst of calamity, there is inherent appeal in fiction so immersive and immediate that its story and your own bleed together, never to be untangled again. Katherine Dunn’s masterpiece of misfits, Geek Love, first ripped me open decades ago; in audio, it’s doing it again via the to-the-hilt commitment of Christina Moore’s bewitching narration. The Binewskis—a deliberately engineered brood of sideshow freaks—are probably the most indelible characters I’ve ever met, as real to me as my own family (even after being cooped up with them for the foreseeable future). I’ve been thinking a lot about how kids will be affected by this truly strange time; Geek Love offers not just the balm of escape but solace in the wisdom of children, the gift of weirdness, and the life-affirming persistence of art.

    $23.20 or free with 30-day trial

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  • The Stand Audiobook By Stephen King cover art

    • The Stand

    • By: Stephen King
    • Narrated by: Grover Gardner
    • Length: 47 hrs and 47 mins
    • Release date: 02-14-12
    • Language: English
    • 81,163 ratings
    • Still stands above the rest
    • How to be pithy about something so epic? The Stand was the novel that made me love Stephen King, after years of being merely terrified by him, when I read it at 13. (It was, even in paperback, an absolute unit: a badge of adulthood I toted proudly all summer; longer than any other book I would read as an actual adult.) And no, it didn’t predict coronavirus, but it makes fascinating pandemic listening, as I discovered when I started the audio version this winter, just before news of COVID-19 began to surface. I found myself as helplessly sucked in as I was the first time, as King vividly depicts how the gnarly superflu Captain Trips spreads and kills, shutting down society within weeks. Sure, it’s long, but here length is a luxury. King gives his band of survivors time to grow as characters, and to dawdle on harrowing scenes and unforgettable stray details: those who die, amid the chaos of superflu, of other causes; the banal artifacts, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, that survive. Grover Gardner’s performance is a luxury too, switching from straightforward to folksy, murderous, romantic, or gleefully gross—this being King, after all. Having spent more than 47 hours with his voice (by the way, I listened at x1 speed 💪), I can think of no one better to take the reins of this towering saga. M-O-O-N, that spells I forever stan The Stand.

    $40.50 or free with 30-day trial

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  • My Dark Vanessa Audiobook By Kate Elizabeth Russell cover art

    • My Dark Vanessa

    • A Novel
    • By: Kate Elizabeth Russell
    • Narrated by: Grace Gummer
    • Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
    • Release date: 03-10-20
    • Language: English
    • 4,099 ratings
    • A dark, absorbing Lolita for the 21st century
    • The sexual relationship between a 15 year old and her decades-older teacher can only be described as the rape of a child, but an adolescent—on a passionate identity quest, informed by literature and a culture that relentlessly sexualizes girls—doesn’t think of herself as a child, does she? Kate Elizabeth Russell’s absorbing and disturbing debut novel nails what it might be like to be 15, desperate to feel seen and to matter—and then, with devastating realism and pacing, to be groomed and raped by a predator. I’m going to ruin you, 42-year-old Jacob Strane tells Vanessa early in the novel, and his prediction plays out through a dual timeline that alternates with Vanessa’s adult reckoning, set in #MeToo-era 2017. With a necessary trigger warning for sexual violence and child abuse, My Dark Vanessa provides visceral nuance to the consent conversation as well as an effective contemporary response to Lolita (a publishing trendlet of late). Narrator Grace Gummer, known for her role in Mr. Robot and as the daughter of Meryl Streep, sounds both tough and achingly vulnerable in an unforgettable performance. She embodies the character so well that, combined with Russell’s masterful prose, Vanessa feels deeply real in a way that’s impossible to shake. I hope she’s doing OK.

    $29.69 or free with 30-day trial

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  • Weather Audiobook By Jenny Offill cover art

    • Weather

    • A novel
    • By: Jenny Offill
    • Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
    • Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
    • Release date: 02-11-20
    • Language: English
    • 291 ratings
    • A high unforgettable-sentence-to-listening-time ratio
    • Despite consuming a vast amount of novels, I’m terrible at remembering them, so I consider Jenny Offill’s 2014 book Dept. of Speculation a minor miracle. Years later, I still think of it (and its startling observations on everything from adultery to art monsters to sad, worn-out underwear) on a near-daily basis. While it’s too fresh in my mind to say for sure, Offill’s much-anticipated follow-up is working the same bracing magic on my beleaguered brain. Told by a Brooklyn librarian who picks up a side job with a futurist podcast, Weather is about many things: climate change, contemporary dread, the surprising savagery of domestic life, the fascinating characters you meet in libraries. What it isn’t is a traditional narrative with a neat, propulsive plot. Written in fragmented, impressionist vignettes and impeccably voiced by Cassandra Campbell, this is one you’ll want to dedicated some focused listening time to—all the better to have its sentences pleasingly burned into your brain for years to come.

    $13.50 or free with 30-day trial

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True crime that’s not a guilty pleasure

People Who Eat Darkness Audiobook By Richard Lloyd Parry cover art
West Cork Audiobook By Sam Bungey, Jennifer Forde cover art
The Road to Jonestown Audiobook By Jeff Guinn cover art
The Journalist and the Murderer Audiobook By Janet Malcolm cover art