The First Annual, Completely Scientific, Totally Unbiased eMusic Audiobook Awards

There's an unwritten rule among critics: If it happens in the first third of a book or movie, it's fair game to mention it in the review. Or maybe it's the first half. Anything after that and you're pushing it. So I'm not blaming my fellow critics for revealing THE THING THEY ALL REVEALED in their write-ups of Karen Joy Fowler's wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves — after all, it... happens pretty early. Hell, every interview with Fowler, and even eMusic's synopsis, gives THE THING away. I'm not blaming anybody, but anybody who spoils the SECRET THING in this book is a terrible monster. Because the THING WHICH I DARE NOT REVEAL should not be revealed. It's huge. It's a game changer. And not knowing it is essential to getting properly sucked in to the story of Rosemary, her locked-up sister Fern, her runaway outlaw brother Matt, and…Look, I know I'm not telling you much. You'll thank me.

Just about every best-of-2013 list is singing the praises of George Saunders's Tenth of December and they're right. It's an instant-classic short-story collection — but that wasn't the only nugget of literary gold the author dropped on us this year. Read by Saunders himself, Fox 8 is the funny and touching story of a fox who learns to speak to people (by eavesdropping on children's bedtime stories) right around the time the... construction of a shopping mall threatens his foxhole home. Magical and plainspoken, this Aesopian environmental tale inhabits an optimistic place outside Saunders's patented milkshake-thick satires and darkly comic dystopias.

The title kind of gives it away, but let me spell it out: The Taliban shot a little girl in the head and instead of dying, she wrote a book about how the Taliban can go suck rotten eggs. OK, it's a little more serious/devastating than that, with lots to think about regarding civil rights, politics, etc., but this thing really is exhilaratingly righteous.

If we didn't already know that Joe Hill was Stephen King's son, this book would have given it away. True, NOS4A2 (looks like a license plate, pronounced like the vampire) is maybe a bit slicker and meaner and more modern than his old man's stuff, but the kid's got that same gift for creating unspeakable evils in small-town New England settings. The story skips through time as it unravels the story of... our heroine Vic and her run-ins with the terrifying Charles Manx, who likes to drive around the country collecting children to decorate his Christmasland compound. The audio version is read by actress Kate Mulgrew, and it's so relentlessly chilling and unpredictable, you start to wonder whether you're one wrong turn away from Derry or Castle Rock. If Hill ends up even half as prolific as his dad, our horror shelves should be well-stocked for years to come.

You'd have to be pretty vain to name your autobiography Autobiography, right? Well, that's Moz for ya. The ex-Smiths frontman/worldwide leader of the poetically disenfranchised recounts his life's adventures in deliciously grand and quotable prose. For a certain kind of person who used to be a certain kind of teen, this book is the most important thing in this crummy, crummy world.

Look, everybody likes physical books, but would you rather read a script or hear it acted out by some of the funniest people on the planet? Exactly. That's why the Hollywood Said No! audiobook is so superior to its paper twin, which just sits there looking quiet and serious. These previously unused movie scripts and sketches by the creators of HBO's cult classic comedy show Mr. Show — David Cross (better known... as Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development) and Bob Odenkirk (aka Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad) — are reborn as loosely and enthusiastically acted radio plays. Also along for the ride are Paul F. Tompkins, Jerry Minor, Scott Aukerman, Scott Adsit and more. Hilarious, satirical theater-of-the-twisted-mind-type stuff.

Set in 1986 Omaha, this artful, endlessly charming, authentically dirty-mouthed novel will change your mind about YA books; they're not just kid stuff anymore (even when they're about kids). In fact, I think adults who survived high school will get just as much out of a book like this — a first-love story about a couple of Midwestern misfits — as the awkward teens it's aimed at. Total heartbreaker.

According to the New York Times, Packer "has clearly modeled this book on the novels of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (1930-1936), which came out in the pit of the Great Depression." Oh, well, yes, clearly. But, if you're not super-familiar with obscure Great Depression trilogies, The Unwinding's unusual format will feel pretty fresh. It's basically a bunch of life stories, all nonfiction, about making your way in modern and recent America.... Lots of famous people (Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey, Newt Gingrich, Jay-Z, Elizabeth Warren) and non-famous people become subjects for Packer's not-always-flattering mini-bios. The recurring theme is money: how they're making it, how they're losing it, how they're getting screwed out of it by a system that needs fixing. Some critics have decried this book's shortage of stats and analysis but I think that's what makes it special. It's a mosaic portrait of a country suffering from an inequality crisis.

Not since Ernest Hemingway has an author said so much with so few words — and The Lowland is not a short book, either. Jhumpa Lahiri's story of two brothers separated by distance and politics is so true and beautiful it hurts.

Karen Russell is a Pulitzer-nominated author with a Chabon-esque skill for sentence-sculpting. That's probably why this spectacular collection has been ghettoized as a literary masterpiece and a stunning example of magical realism, and rarely gets recognized for what it really is: kick-ass science fiction. Vampires? Human-silkworm hybrids? Spooky seagull oracles and presidents reincarnated as horses? You can get geeky and snobby about this stuff.