Neil Strauss in Audio: Two of the Big Ones Are Abridged

I have read all of Neil Strauss's own books in print, and the audio catalogue is patchier than the bibliography suggests. Two of his best-known titles are abridged, one has no audiobook at all, and the only unabridged recording of his own writing is a full-cast production rather than the solo reading you might expect.

What he has written

His own books, the ones with only his name on them, are a strange and coherent run. The Game (2005) is the one everybody knows, an immersion into the pickup community that turned into a bestseller and then into a millstone. Emergency (2009) is him learning to survive a collapse, which reads now as either paranoid or prescient depending on the decade you read it in. Everyone Loves You When You're Dead (2011) collects the interviews from his years as a music journalist. The Truth (2015) is the one that goes back over The Game and asks what it cost him.

Read in order they are one long argument with himself, which is why I read all of them.

What made it into audio, and what did not

This is the part no publisher page will tell you, and it is the reason this page exists.

Every row above was read off the product page, and cross-checked against his Audible author page on the same day. Everyone Loves You When You're Dead and Rules of the Game do not appear on it. That is not proof no recording has ever existed anywhere, but it does mean a listener cannot currently buy them in the catalogue I checked.

The two that are abridged

His two most famous books are both abridged in audio, and both are read by him.

That is worth knowing before you spend a credit, because abridged means text was cut, and neither listing makes a great deal of noise about it. On The Game, nine and a half hours is a lot of book, and it is still not the book. If you have read the print and want the voice, that is a perfectly good reason to buy it. If you have not read it and want the whole thing, the audio is not the way to get it.

I have heard The Game in audio as well as reading it, and what was cut has its own page. Emergency I have only read, so I am not going to tell you what its abridgement loses.

The one that is unabridged is a full cast

The Truth runs 16 hours 50 minutes, is labelled unabridged, and is not a solo reading. The credit line runs Neil Strauss, Ione Skye, Jessica Sattelberger, Justin Gunn, Adele Jacques, Mem Kennedy, Carola Madis, Leah Cevoli and John Runnette.

That makes sense for the book, which is full of other people's voices in transcript and dialogue, and it is a different listening experience from a memoir read by its author. Worth expecting rather than discovering.

The books he wrote in somebody else's voice

Strauss is also a working collaborator, and those books are in audio, read by their subjects rather than by him.

⚠️ Worth knowing if you search his name in an audiobook shop: these come up under Neil Strauss, and they are not books about him or narrated by him. He is the co-writer.

Where to start

*If you want the whole text, start with The Truth.* It is the only unabridged audiobook of his own writing, it is the longest, and it is the one that reframes everything before it. Starting at the end of the argument is an odd way to read him, but it is the only way to hear him complete.

*If you want The Game, read it.* The audio exists and it is his voice, but it is abridged, and this is a book people quote at each other for years afterwards. Get the version with all of it in.

What this page is and is not. I have read all of Strauss in print, and I have heard two of the recordings, The Game and The Truth. Everything above is catalogue fact: editions, lengths, who reads them, and what has no audiobook at all. What the two I have heard are actually like belongs on their own reviews, where the listening can be scored, and Emergency stays unheard.