
American Bulk
Essays on Excess
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $13.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Chloe Cannon
-
By:
-
Emily Mester
About this listen
What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses?
Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. In American Bulk, Emily Mester intertwines cultural critique and personal history to explore how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. With humor and sharp intellect, she reflects on the joys and anxieties of family Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get Mall Sad. In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother's abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family's obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces listeners to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.
©2025 Emily Mester (P)2024 Tantor MediaListeners also enjoyed...
-
A Real Emergency
- Stories from the Ambulance
- By: Joanna Sokol
- Narrated by: Joanna Sokol, Araya Mengesha, Emily Nixon, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger about the strange world of American street medicine. As her career progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, backs of gloves, and margins of EKG printouts. She read about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten, and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state of American medicine.
-
-
Get out of my head!
- By anotha misguided yout on 06-27-25
By: Joanna Sokol
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
-
-
Very Moving thoughtful meditation on tragedy and grief.
- By Zeta on 06-27-25
By: Yiyun Li
-
Is a River Alive?
- By: Robert Macfarlane
- Narrated by: Robert Macfarlane
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes listeners on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada.
-
-
One of the few books I will return
- By Amazon Customer on 06-28-25
-
How to Be Well
- Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time
- By: Amy Larocca
- Narrated by: Amy Larocca
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women's lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?
-
-
Couldn’t finish it
- By Susan Smith on 06-03-25
By: Amy Larocca
-
Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine
- The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight
- By: David A. Kessler M.D.
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber, David A. Kessler M.D.
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Overeating comes an illuminating understanding of body weight, including the role of the latest weight loss drugs, and the possibility of changing our health, weight, and bodies forever.
-
-
Way too much.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-25
-
Private Rites
- A Novel
- By: Julia Armfield
- Narrated by: Hannah van der Westhuysen
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
-
-
Beautifully Written, But Mainly Fluff and Filler
- By Megs on 02-26-25
By: Julia Armfield
-
A Real Emergency
- Stories from the Ambulance
- By: Joanna Sokol
- Narrated by: Joanna Sokol, Araya Mengesha, Emily Nixon, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger about the strange world of American street medicine. As her career progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, backs of gloves, and margins of EKG printouts. She read about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten, and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state of American medicine.
-
-
Get out of my head!
- By anotha misguided yout on 06-27-25
By: Joanna Sokol
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
-
-
Very Moving thoughtful meditation on tragedy and grief.
- By Zeta on 06-27-25
By: Yiyun Li
-
Is a River Alive?
- By: Robert Macfarlane
- Narrated by: Robert Macfarlane
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes listeners on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada.
-
-
One of the few books I will return
- By Amazon Customer on 06-28-25
-
How to Be Well
- Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time
- By: Amy Larocca
- Narrated by: Amy Larocca
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women's lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?
-
-
Couldn’t finish it
- By Susan Smith on 06-03-25
By: Amy Larocca
-
Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine
- The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight
- By: David A. Kessler M.D.
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber, David A. Kessler M.D.
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Overeating comes an illuminating understanding of body weight, including the role of the latest weight loss drugs, and the possibility of changing our health, weight, and bodies forever.
-
-
Way too much.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-25
-
Private Rites
- A Novel
- By: Julia Armfield
- Narrated by: Hannah van der Westhuysen
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
-
-
Beautifully Written, But Mainly Fluff and Filler
- By Megs on 02-26-25
By: Julia Armfield
-
The True Happiness Company
- A Memoir
- By: Veena Dinavahi
- Narrated by: Veena Dinavahi
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a typical white American suburb—except for its unusually high suicide rate. For years, she tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing seems to work. Until, on a late-night Google search, Veena’s mom discovers Bob Lyon—a sixty-year-old white man in the backwoods of Georgia who claims he can make her want to live again. He calls himself “The True Happiness Company” and, as their relationship progresses, “Daddy.”
By: Veena Dinavahi
-
Murder in the Dollhouse
- The Jennifer Dulos Story
- By: Rich Cohen
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rich Cohen’s Murder in the Dollhouse is the chilling story of Jennifer Dulos, a beautiful, rich suburban mother who dropped her kids off at the New Canaan Country School one morning and vanished. Her body has never been found. Dulos was in the midst of an ugly divorce—one of the most contentious in Connecticut state history. The couple, a beautiful, highly connected pair, met at Brown University, had five children, and led what appeared to be a charmed life. In the wake of her disappearance, Dulos’s husband and his girlfriend were arrested.
-
-
Author
- By cannot open on 06-28-25
By: Rich Cohen
-
An Honest Woman
- A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
- By: Charlotte Shane
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results. Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions.
-
-
A complete waste of time!
- By McNeil on 09-04-24
By: Charlotte Shane
-
Here After
- A Memoir
- By: Amy Lin
- Narrated by: Amy Lin
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. On a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It’s the last time she sees her husband alive.
-
-
Super sad
- By lilikoi on 06-10-25
By: Amy Lin
-
Sucker Punch
- Essays
- By: Scaachi Koul
- Narrated by: Scaachi Koul
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her biting wit to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress.
-
-
Vulnerable yet funny and so so relatable!
- By Diana on 03-14-25
By: Scaachi Koul
-
Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
-
-
Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
-
This Will Be Funny Later
- A Memoir
- By: Jenny Pentland
- Narrated by: Jenny Pentland
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Growing up, Jenny Pentland’s life was a literal sitcom. Many of the storylines for her mother’s smash hit series, Roseanne, were drawn from Pentland’s early family life in working-class Denver. But that was only the beginning of the drama. Roseanne Barr’s success as a comedian catapulted the family from the Rockies to star-studded Hollywood—with its toxic culture of money, celebrity, and prying tabloids that was destabilizing for a child in grade school.
-
-
Nepotism baby’s self pity party
- By Summer Sundae on 08-23-22
By: Jenny Pentland
-
Little Bosses Everywhere
- How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
- By: Bridget Read
- Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net.
-
-
Well researched.
- By Donald Schuster on 05-08-25
By: Bridget Read
-
All Things Are Too Small
- Essays in Praise of Excess
- By: Becca Rothfeld
- Narrated by: Ruth Crawford
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.
-
-
Smart and clever
- By David on 12-04-24
By: Becca Rothfeld
-
The Project
- How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
- By: David A. Graham
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Project, award-winning journalist David A. Graham offers much-needed context and distills the essential elements of this sprawling document. Breaking down the Project’s strategy for transforming—and radically empowering—the executive branch, Graham then explains what the architects behind Project 2025 would do with that power: restoring traditional gender norms and the supremacy of the nuclear family, decimating the civil service, performing mass deportations, reducing corporate regulation and worker protections, and more.
-
-
Clarity
- By Catherine on 06-21-25
By: David A. Graham
-
Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
-
-
Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
-
Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
-
-
Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
Interesting essays
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.