Classic Audiobook Collection

The Bagpipers by George Sand audiobook. Genre: romance Told as a remembered tale shared during long winter work nights in the French countryside, The Bagpipers follows Etienne Depardieu, nicknamed Tiennet, as he looks back on the restless years of his youth in Berry. From the first days of catechism and village festivals, Tiennet is bound to two people who will shape his life: his sharp-minded cou...

Antonia by George Sand audiobook. Genre: romance Paris, April 1785: spring lilacs press against the studio window of Julien Thierry, a gifted young painter of flowers whose talent cannot erase a brutal inheritance of debt. Still grieving his celebrated artist father, Julien works side by side with his devoted mother, Madame Thierry, clinging to dignity as money troubles tighten and the world of ta...

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald audiobook. Genre: philosophy A Dish of Orts gathers George MacDonald's most searching short pieces - part literary criticism, part spiritual meditation, and part manifesto for the imagination. Rather than offering a single plot, the book invites listeners into an ongoing conversation with a Victorian storyteller who believed that art and faith meet in the deepest...

The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffith audiobook. Genre: scifi The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) is a science fiction novel by English writer George Griffith. It was his first published novel and remains his most famous work. It was first published in Pearson's Weekly and was prompted by the success of The Great War of 1892 in Black and White magazine, which w...

The Crocodile by Fyodor Dostoyevsky audiobook. Genre: comedy In a glittering St Petersburg arcade, a minor civil servant named Ivan Matveich takes his ambitious young wife Elena and their friend to admire the modern wonders of commerce and foreign goods. The outing turns instantly grotesque when Ivan, showing off with smug curiosity, provokes a placid exhibition crocodile and is swallowed whole -...

Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays by Friedrich Nietzsche audiobook. Genre: philosophy In Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, Friedrich Nietzsche turns to the origins of Western thought, reading the earliest Greek thinkers not as dusty names in a timeline but as daring psychological types and cultural forces. Moving from the pre-Socratics through the atmosphere that produced Socrates and Pla...

The Landlady by Fyodor Dostoyevsky audiobook. Genre: drama In The Landlady, Fyodor Dostoyevsky draws listeners into the foggy courtyards and cramped rooms of St Petersburg, where a lonely young intellectual, Vasily Ordynov, searches for cheap lodging and a quiet place to work. He finds it in the home of a strange pair: Katerina, a beautiful and frightened young woman, and Murin, an aging, enigmati...

Some American Storytellers by Frederic Taber Cooper audiobook. Genre: history In Some American Storytellers, editor and critic Frederic Taber Cooper offers a guided tour of American fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, introducing listeners to a vivid lineup of popular writers and the distinct narrative gifts that made them household names. Part literary portrait, part close reading, thes...

Capital and Interest by Frederic Bastiat audiobook. Genre: business Frédéric Bastiat was an early 19th century French economist/statesman whose common sense essays tried to battle the rise of socialist ideology after the French revolution, where provisional governments were rivaling each other for power. Of central concern was who should control the money. How is wealth created? How should it be d...

Henry D. Thoreau by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn audiobook. Genre: biography Written by Concord reformer and firsthand acquaintance Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau offers an intimate portrait of the man behind Walden and the era that shaped him. Drawing on personal memories, family testimony, and the literary circles of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Sanborn follows Thoreau from his...

The Mistress of Shenstone by Florence Louisa Barclay audiobook. Genre: romance When war draws Lord Ingleby away from Shenstone Park, his wife, Lady Myra, becomes the lonely guardian of a great country house that feels too vast for one heart, one small toy poodle, and a growing fear of what each telegram might bring. Florence L. Barclay sets Myra amid autumn terraces, shuttered rooms, and watchful...

Harry Dee; or Making it Out by Francis J. Finn audiobook. Genre: mystery Harry Dee has barely recovered from a nightmare of a childhood when he is sent to St. Maure's, the Catholic boarding school where Tom Playfair and Percy Wynn have learned, the hard way, what it means to grow up. Thin, jumpy, and prone to sleepwalking, Harry carries a burden no boy should bear: the shadow of his wealthy uncle'...

The Yellow Holly by Fergus Hume audiobook. Genre: mystery In fogbound Bloomsbury, Madame Jersey runs a shabby-genteel boarding house in Amelia Square, a refuge for the respectable and the ruined alike. Her weekly Friday 'At Home' gathers a gallery of odd lodgers and faded acquaintances, until a newcomer arrives: Leonard Train, a self-styled novelist hunting 'Old-World types' for his next book. Whe...

The Third Volume by Fergus Hume audiobook. Genre: mystery A widely publicized and unsolved murder of five and twenty years is brought to the forefront in a best-selling novel entitled “A Whim of Fate'. While Spencer Tait is looking forward to reading it, his best friend Claude Larcher, learns of the tragic death of his father which mirrors every detail of the new book. Not believing it to be a coi...

The Sealed Message by Fergus Hume audiobook. Genre: mystery On a blazing summer afternoon in an English riverside village, friends Gerald Haskins and Tod Macandrew are fishing when their line snags something far stranger than a trout: a tin cylinder sealed tight against the water. Inside lies a phonograph record, and on it a clear, haunting voice - a young woman calling herself Mavis Durham - begs...

Bransford Of Rainbow Range by Eugene Manlove Rhodes audiobook. Genre: adventure A genuine cowboy who speaks a bit of Greek? Ditto a bit of The Litany? And more than a little verse, including (would you believe?) Alice In Wonderland. What kind of young man do we have here? And a young woman who matches him without effort? And a definitely literate narrator with his tongue firmly inserted in cheek....

The Hundredth Chance by Ethel M. Dell audiobook. Genre: romance In this prequel to 'Charles Rex'' by Ethel M. Dell you will meet the aristocratic blackguard Lord Saltash for whom our distressed heroine Maude Brian still holds deep feelings. Dedicated to the care of her younger crippled brother whom she adores, Maude eventually agrees to a marriage of convenience in order to escape from a home whic...

Charles Rex by Ethel M. Dell audiobook. Genre: romance Excerpt: 'Saltash was thoroughly cosmopolitan in his tastes; he liked amusement but he abhorred boredom. He was never really wicked unless he was bored. And then- que voulez vous? He did not guide the star of destiny.' On his last night in Valrosa, Saltash (Charles Rex) returns to his luxurious yacht to find a stowaway, a young woman disguised...

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway audiobook. Genre: drama The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel to be published, though there is his novella The Torrents of Spring which was published earlier in the same year. The novel describes, expressed through the voice of Jake Barnes, a short period of social life that ranges from Paris to locations in Spain. One might say that the actio...

Discourses of Epictetus by Epictetus audiobook. Genre: philosophy Born into slavery and later freed, Epictetus became one of the most influential teachers of Stoic philosophy in the Roman world. Discourses of Epictetus collects the lively, practical lessons recorded by his student Arrian, preserving the feel of a classroom where sharp questions meet sharper answers. Moving from everyday annoyances...

The Markets of Paris by Emile Zola audiobook. Genre: drama The Markets of Paris is a remarkable work, and is the one which Zola calls his very best novel, and of which he is far more proud than of any others in his Rougon-Marquart series – prouder than of L’Assommoir. It must have been in his early manhood, when poor and friendless, he lived among the people, that much of the information which mak...

Nana by Emile Zola audiobook. Genre: tragedy In the glittering yet rotten heart of Paris under the Second Empire, Nana rises from the working-class streets to become the city's most notorious courtesan. Introduced amid the heat of the theater world, she is young, magnetic, and dangerous, a woman whose beauty turns desire into obsession and appetite into ruin. As financiers, aristocrats, politician...

My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon audiobook. Genre: comedy Many novels, most notably Hannah Webster's The Coquette, focused on how terrible it is for a woman to flirt before her marriage. 'I did not speak 20 sentences before sir Robert proposed to me', explained Lady Bidulph while teaching her daughter how to court properly in 'Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph'. A coquette must be a fool, wicked...

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen by Elizabeth von Arnim audiobook. Genre: adventure In this semi-autobiographical travel comedy of manners, Elizabeth von Arnim sends her quick-witted alter ego, Elizabeth, off to the Baltic island of Rugen in the summer of 1901 with an unlikely expedition: a maid, a driver, a carriage stacked with luggage, and a woman friend who seems determined to knit through...

The Women of the American Revolution Volume 1 by Elizabeth F. Ellet audiobook. Genre: history In The Women of the American Revolution, Volume 1, historian Elizabeth F. Ellet turns the spotlight from battlefields and legislatures to the households, roads, camps, and occupied towns where the struggle for independence was also fought. Drawing on letters, reminiscences, and early records, Ellet presen...