Classic Audiobook Collection

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli audiobook. Genre: philosophy Written in the turbulence of Renaissance Italy, The Prince is Niccolo Machiavelli's stark, practical manual on how power is gained, protected, and lost. Addressed to a ruler seeking to unify and stabilize a fractured land, the book studies leaders both celebrated and feared, weighing their choices against the harsh realities of war, lo...

Around the World in Seventy-Two Days by Nellie Bly audiobook. Genre: adventure In 1889, journalist Nellie Bly makes a bold wager against the limits placed on women and on travel itself: she will circle the globe faster than the fictional record set in Jules Verne's novel. Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is her fast-moving, first-person account of that real-life race against time, told through...

Euthyphro by Plato audiobook. Genre: philosophy Set on the steps of an Athenian courthouse, Plato's Euthyphro stages a sharp, suspenseful conversation on a question that still unsettles moral and religious life: what makes an action truly holy or right? Socrates, facing a serious legal charge, encounters Euthyphro, a confident religious expert who has come to prosecute his own father for wrongdoin...

Mr. Spaceship by Philip K. Dick audiobook. Genre: scifi In a far-future war against the enigmatic Yuks, Terra's fleet keeps losing to weapons that are not machines at all, but living, adaptive organisms that can outthink any automated guidance system. Technocrat Philip Kramer and his colleague Gross propose a breakthrough that sounds like sacrilege: replace the standard Johnson Control with someth...

Psmith in the City by P. G. Wodehouse audiobook. Genre: comedy When impecunious but unflappably confident Rupert Psmith and his steady, athletic friend Mike Jackson arrive in London, they are fresh from school and short on funds, which means only one thing: employment. Soon they find themselves drafted into the gray world of a City bank, where clerks shuffle papers, superiors bark orders, and ever...

A Damsel in Distress by P. G. Wodehouse audiobook. Genre: comedy When wealthy, amiable American George Finch arrives in England, he expects country houses, polite society, and perhaps a little leisure. Instead, he collides with Maud Marsh - spirited, proud, and very much not looking for rescue - and promptly convinces himself that fate has handed him the perfect role: gallant savior to a damsel in...

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne audiobook. Genre: drama In a rigid 17th-century Puritan settlement, Hester Prynne is forced to stand before her community branded as an adulteress, marked by a scarlet letter sewn to her clothing. Refusing to name the child's father, she raises her spirited daughter Pearl on the edge of society, living under constant scrutiny and moral judgment. As Hester...

In the Bishop’s Carriage by Miriam Michelson audiobook. Genre: mystery Nancy 'Nance' Olden has learned to survive by her wits. Raised in a brutal charity home the girls bitterly nickname the Cruelty, she runs away into a city that offers little mercy and plenty of temptation. On the streets she falls in with Tom Dorgan, a charming, dangerous crook who sees her quick mind as an asset, and together...

The Blonde Lady by Maurice Leblanc audiobook. Genre: mystery In 'The Blonde Lady, being a record of the duel of wits between Arsène Lupin and the English detective' - original title 'Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes' - the gentleman-burglar once more meets his enemy, the English detective Herlock Sholmes. If in the last story of 'Arsène Lupin, gentleman-burglar' Sherlock Holmes arrives too late...

King Arthur and His Knights by Maude L. Radford audiobook. Genre: folklore Maude L. Radford's King Arthur and His Knights gathers a sweeping cycle of Arthurian adventures into a brisk, child-friendly retelling that begins with a boy raised in a knight's household, unaware of his true birth. When Britain lacks a rightful ruler, a test of destiny reveals Arthur as the one meant to wear the crown, an...

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley audiobook. Genre: horror When ambitious young scientist Victor Frankenstein pursues the secrets of life itself, his experiment crosses a boundary that cannot be uncrossed. In the shadowed lecture halls and icy landscapes of Europe, Victor assembles a living being from dead matter and brings it into the world - only to recoil from what he has made. Cast out and desperat...

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon audiobook. Genre: mystery In Victorian England, the beautiful and captivating Lady Audley seems to have stepped out of a fairy tale: she is young, charming, and newly married to the wealthy Sir Michael Audley at Audley Court. But beneath the bright surfaces of country-house comfort and polite society, unsettling questions begin to gather. When Sir Mic...

Poems Every Child Should Know by Mary E. Burt audiobook. Genre: poetry Poems Every Child Should Know, selected and arranged by educator Mary E. Burt, is a welcoming doorway into the classics of English-language verse for young listeners and the grown-ups who share stories with them. Built as a treasury rather than a single narrative, this anthology gathers memorable poems that have long been read...

The Story of Abraham Lincoln by Mary A. Hamilton audiobook. Genre: biography In this biography for young adults, Mary A. Hamilton gives a British person’s perspective on the 16th President of the United States. A glowing tribute to “Honest Abe”, the author traces Lincoln’s ancestral roots and recounts his birth in Kentucky, his youth in Indiana, his adult life in Illinois and his years in the Whit...

The American Claimant by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: comedy The American Claimant is an 1892 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The story focuses on the class differences and expectations of monarchic, hierarchical Britain and the upstart, 'all men are created equal' America. Twain wrote the novel with the help of phonographic dictation, the first author (according to Twain himself...

Roughing It by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: biography Mark Twain's Roughing It is a riotous, clear-eyed memoir of a young man's leap into the vast uncertainties of the American West. When Samuel Clemens follows his brother to the Nevada Territory, he trades the familiar rhythms of the Mississippi for stagecoaches, mining camps, boomtown dreams, and the hard lessons of life on the frontier. From du...

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: comedy When you dive into Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) The Innocents Abroad, you have to be ready to learn more about the unadorned, ungilded reality of 19th century “touring” than you might think you want to learn. This is a tough, literary journey. It was tough for Twain and his fellow “pilgrims”, both religious and otherwise. They set out,...

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: history In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain returns to the great river that shaped his youth, blending memoir, travel writing, and sharp-eyed social observation. The book opens with Twain's boyhood obsession with steamboats and his hard-won apprenticeship as a river pilot, where reading the Mississippi's shifting channels, snags, and sandb...

The Colors of Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley audiobook. Genre: scifi Bart Steele, Space Academy graduate, is on his way home to his father's business - he runs a fleet of spaceships for interstellar travel. The secret for fast interstellar travel though is still tightly kept by the alien race Lhari. An agreement between humans and Lhari has been made that permits humans only to travel in cold slee...

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney audiobook. Genre: family In a cramped little house that the neighborhood dismisses as the 'Little Brown House,' Mrs. Pepper is doing her best to keep her lively brood together after hardship leaves the family with almost nothing but each other. The five Pepper children - Ben, Polly, Joel, David, and the baby, Phronsie - tumble through each d...

The Story Girl by Lucy Maud Montgomery audiobook. Genre: family In The Story Girl, Lucy Maud Montgomery invites you into a golden summer on Prince Edward Island, where imagination is as essential as bread on the table. When Beverley and Felix King are sent to live with their relatives at the old homestead called the Golden Road, they quickly fall into the lively orbit of cousins, neighbors, and, a...

Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: speeches Anti-Imperialist Writings gathers Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) at his most fiery and uncomfortably funny: a celebrated American voice turning his wit against the language of empire. Written in the early years of the 20th century, these pieces draw on the era's headline conflicts and scandals - including US expansion after the Spanis...

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: scifi Come and hear the strange tale of The Boss Hank Morgan, a modern day (at the time of publication) Connecticut Yankee who inexplicably finds himself transported to the court of the legendary King Arthur (as the title of the book implies). Hank, or simply, The Boss, as he comes to be most frequently known, quickly uses...

A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain audiobook. Genre: comedy A Tramp Abroad is a work of non-fiction travel literature by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk mo...

Rilla of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery audiobook. Genre: family In the quiet Prince Edward Island community of Glen St. Mary, youngest Blythe daughter Bertha Marilla 'Rilla' grows up in the sunny shadow of Ingleside, expecting dances, flirtations, and the small dramas of a close-knit town. Then the Great War crashes into her world, and the Blythe family is swept into a new reality of enlistmen...