Barack Obama Launches ‘A Great Book’ Literary Podcast Exclusively for Audible

NEW YORK – When Barack Obama was asked to describe why he chose these six books, he offered an answer that was less presidential than personal. Great literature, he said, had always helped him figure out who he is and what he believes. The six novels at the center of his new Audible podcast have stayed with him across his adult life, he added, and each one carries something worth revisiting. After more than a decade of media projects built around collaborators, including Bruce Springsteen, Larry David, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the former president is finally stepping to the microphone alone.Audible and Higher Ground announced Monday that “A Great Book with Barack Obama” will debut September 24, exclusively on the Amazon-owned audio platform. The six-episode series marks the sixth release under the two companies’ standing production agreement and the first project in that arrangement where Obama serves as host rather than executive producer.The books he chose span eight decades of fiction and resist easy thematic grouping. James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” from 1963, sits beside Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” from 1946. Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” from 1977, precedes Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” from 1992. Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” from 2004, and John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” from 1974, complete the selection. Together they trace a circuit from the civil rights era through the Cold War, linked less by genre than by the questions they raise about identity, complicity, and conscience.Each episode places Obama in conversation with one guest drawn from what Higher Ground describes as “the most compelling thinkers, writers, and artists” of the present moment. The names of the six guests have not been announced. The conversations are intended to explore a single central question: what do the stories we love reveal about the world we inhabit and the world we want to build?The announcement arrives at a moment when adult book readership in the United States has declined steadily for close to a decade, Audible announced alongside the launch, with Obama noting in a parallel essay that fewer people now have the opportunity to engage meaningfully with books. Podcasts have emerged as one of the few formats capable of returning audiences to sustained engagement with literature, a function that author-hosted series and book-club audio have occupied with growing success in recent years.Rachel Ghiazza, Audible’s chief content officer, said Obama brought “a remarkable ability to connect books to questions of who we are and how we see the world.” Dan Fierman, head of audio at Higher Ground, called the series a reflection of Obama’s “genuine passion for literature” presented in a way that is personal and broadly accessible. Both executives framed the podcast as distinct from the celebrity audio product that has dominated the space.The Audible and Higher Ground partnership previously delivered “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man,” which won a Peabody Award. Obama’s own audio history includes “Renegades: Born in the USA,” his 2021 Spotify collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, which drew significant cultural attention and was later adapted into a book. That project had two voices at its center. “A Great Book” places Obama as the singular anchor, with one rotating guest per episode organized around one literary text.The selections of Baldwin and Morrison will draw particular attention. “The Fire Next Time” remains one of the most precise literary examinations of American racism ever published; “Song of Solomon” won Morrison the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Their presence alongside a Cold War spy thriller and a Southern political novel about corruption and moral compromise suggests a reading list assembled for its difficulty as much as its prestige. Obama’s HBO executive-producing credit this year on Larry David’s history comedy arrived to divided reviews; this project moves him into entirely different territory.Higher Ground’s portfolio spans documentary films, series across multiple platforms, and audio projects ranging from international history to American political life. “A Great Book” extends that ambition into a format that allows the former president to speak unmediated, at length, in his own voice, on subjects that have shaped his thinking rather than subjects assigned by a news cycle.The guests, once named, will be the variable that determines how widely the series travels beyond the existing Obama audience. A conversation between the former president and a literary figure of comparable cultural standing about the meaning of Toni Morrison’s work could arrive as one of the more distinctive events in audio this fall. A roster of undistinguished names would narrow the audience considerably. Nothing about that question has been settled yet.“A Great Book with Barack Obama” launches September 24 exclusively on Audible. Guest announcements and episode order to follow in the coming weeks.