The Tale of Tales
Penguin Audio Classics
By Giambattista Basile, Nancy L. Canepa & Jack Zipes
Narrated by Various / 18 hours 6 minutes
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from Naples, Italy, whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of fairy tales. The Tale of Tales opens with Princess Zoza, unable to laugh no matter how funny the joke. Her father, the king, attempts to make her smile; instead he leaves her cursed, whereupon the prince she is destined to marry is snatched up by another woman. To expose this impostor and win back her rightful husband, Zoza contrives a storytelling extravaganza: fifty fairy tales to be told by ten sharp-tongued women (including Zoza in disguise) over five days.
Funny and scary, romantic and gruesome—and featuring a childless queen who devours the heart of a sea monster cooked by a virgin, and who then gives birth the very next day; a lecherous king aroused by the voice of a woman, whom he courts unaware of her physical grotesqueness; and a king who raises a flea to monstrous size on his own blood, sparking a contest in which an ogre vies with men for the hand of the king’s daughter—The Tale of Tales is a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature.
Read by Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Paul Boehmer, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Will Damron, Susan Denaker, Kirby Heyborne, Hillary Huber, Ann Marie Lee, John Lee, Rebecca Lowman, Jorjeana Marie, Kathleen McInerney, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter, Fred Sanders, Tara Sands, Simon Vance, and Karen White.
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Penguin Audio Classics Series
Great Expectations - Abridged
By: Charles Dickens
Narrated by: Hugh Laurie
Length: 2 hours 49 minutes
Abridged: Yes
The orphan Pip’s terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his “great expectations.” How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients... Read More »
Bombs Away
By: John Steinbeck & James H. Meredith
Narrated by: Scott Aiello
Length: 4 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No
A magnificent volume of short novels and an essential World War II report from one of America's great twentieth-century writers
A Penguin Classic
On the heels of the enormous success of his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath and at the height of the American war effort John Steinbeck, one of the most prolific and influential literary figures of his... Read More »
To a God Unknown
By: John Steinbeck & Robert DeMott
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No
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The Russia House
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 13 hours 51 minutes
Abridged: No
“The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour.”
“Glasnost” is on everyone’s lips, but the rules of the game haven’t changed for either side. When a beautiful Russian woman foists off a manuscript on an unwitting bystander at the Moscow Book Fair, it’s a miracle that she flies under the Soviets’ radar. Or does she? The woman’s source (codename:... Read More »
Sense and Sensibility - Abridged
By: Jane Austen
Narrated by: Julie Christie
Length: 5 hours 52 minutes
Abridged: Yes
Listen to audio presented by Literary Affairs: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.View our feature on Jane Austen.
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo.... Read More »
The Long Valley
By: John Steinbeck & John H. Timmerman
Narrated by: Holter Graham
Length: 8 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No
A Penguin Classic
First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for... Read More »
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Henry Strozier
Length: 17 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No
More than three decades after his death, John Steinbeck remains one of the nation's most beloved authors. Yet few know of his career as a journalist who covered world events from the Great Depression to Vietnam. Now, this original collection offers a portrait of the artist as citizen, deeply engaged in the world around him. In addition to the... Read More »
Once There Was a War
By: John Steinbeck & Mark Bowden
Narrated by: Lloyd James
Length: 7 hours 19 minutes
Abridged: No
Nobel laureate John Steinbeck's bracing from-the-frontlines account of World War II-now with a new cover and introduction
In 1943 John Steinbeck was on assignment for The New York Herald Tribune, writing from Italy and North Africa, and from England in the midst of the London blitz. In his dispatches he focuses on the human-scale effect of the... Read More »
The Secret Pilgrim
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 13 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
The acclaimed novel featuring George Smiley, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies and The Night Manager, now an AMC miniseries
The rules of the game, and of the world, have changed. Old enemies now yield to glasnost and perestroika. The killing shadows of the Cold War are flooded with light. The future is... Read More »
Little Women
By: Louisa May Alcott & Jane Smiley
Narrated by: Christina Ricci
Length: 19 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No
This timeless classic is now an easy-to-read chapter book!
The four March sisters--Meg, Amy, Beth, and feisty Jo--share the joys and sorrows of growing up while their father is away at war. The family is poor in worldly goods, but rich in love and character. Read More »
In Dubious Battle
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
Length: 10 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No
A riveting novel of labor strife and apocalyptic violence that maps the frontier where the masses become a mobAt once a relentlessly fast-paced, admirably observed novel of social unrest and the story of a young man's struggle for identity, In Dubious Battle is set in the California apple country, where a strike by migrant workers against... Read More »
The Red Pony
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Frank Muller
Length: 2 hours 54 minutes
Abridged: No
John Steinbeck's masterpiece celebrates the spirit and courage of adolescence. Steinbeck draws on his memories of childhood in these stories about a boy who embodies both the rebellious spirit and the contradictory desire for acceptance of early adolescence. Unlike most coming-of-age stories, the cycle does not end with a hero "matured" by... Read More »
On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
By: Jack Kerouac
Narrated by: Will Patton
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: No
A 50th anniversary hardcover edition of Kerouac’s classic novel that defined a generation
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The Grapes of Wrath
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Dylan Baker
Length: 20 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No
John Steinbeck's powerful evocation of the suffering and hardship caused by the Great Depression, and a panoramic vision of the struggle for the American Dream, The Grapes of Wrath includes a critical introduction by Robert DeMott in Penguin Modern Classics. 'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'... Read More »
Letters to a Young Poet
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Charlie Louth & Lewis Hyde
Narrated by: Dan Stevens & Max Deacon
Length: 1 hour 50 minutes
Abridged: No
Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition
At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have... Read More »
Cup of Gold
By: John Steinbeck & Susan F. Beegel
Narrated by: Ronan Vibert
Length: 8 hours 19 minutes
Abridged: No
From the mid-1650s through the 1660s, Henry Morgan, a pirate and outlaw of legendary viciousness, ruled the Spanish Main. He ravaged the coasts of Cuba and America, striking terror wherever he went. Morgan was obsessive. He had two driving ambitions: to possess the beautiful woman called La Santa Roja and to conquer Panama, the “cup of gold.”... Read More »
A Russian Journal
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 7 hours 1 minute
Abridged: No
Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 12 hours 49 minutes
Abridged: No
Featuring George Smiley, this New York Times bestseller is the first installment in John le Carré’s acclaimed Karla Trilogy. From the author of A Delicate Truth and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
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The Odyssey
By: Homer
Narrated by: Ian McKellen
Length: 13 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No
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Call for the Dead
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Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 4 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No
Go back to Whitehall and look for more spies on your drawing boards.
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On the Road: the Original Scroll
By: Jack Kerouac
Narrated by: John Ventimiglia
Length: 12 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it
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The Winter of Our Discontent
By: John Steinbeck & Susan Shillinglaw
Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
Length: 10 hours 21 minutes
Abridged: No
The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers—a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis
A Penguin Classic
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Frankenstein - Abridged
By: Mary Shelley
Narrated by: Richard Pasco
Length: 3 hours 6 minutes
Abridged: Yes
The epic battle between man and monster reaches its greatest pitch in the famous story of Frankenstein. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor himself to the very brink. How he tries to destroy his creation, as... Read More »
Sweet Thursday
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Narrated by: Jerry Farden
Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No
"A postwar continuation of Cannery Row, [Sweet Thursday is] every bit as juicy and relaxed as the original. . . . This is comedy--bawdy, sentimental, and good fun.” The Atlantic
In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that is just naturally bad. Returning to... Read More »
The Forgotten Village
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Length: 35 minutes
Abridged: No
The novelist who wrote THE GRAPES OF WRATH and the director who produced CRISIS AND LIGHTS OUT in Europe combined their superb talents to tell the story of the coming of modern medicine to the natives of Mexico. There have been several notable examples of this pen-camera method of narration, but THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE is unique among them in that... Read More »
A Woman in Arabia
By: Gertrude Bell, Georgina Howell & Georgina Howell
Narrated by: Sian Thomas & Adjoa Andoh
Length: 9 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No
A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia, the subject of the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad, voiced by Tilda Swinton, and the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, and Robert Pattinson and directed by Werner Herzog
Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before... Read More »
The Inferno of Dante
By: Dante Alighieri & Robert Pinsky
Narrated by: Seamus Heaney, Frank Bidart & Louise Glück
Length: 5 hours 4 minutes
Abridged: No
Robert Pinsky's new verse translation of the Inferno makes it clear to the contemporary listener, as no other in English has done, why Dante is universally considered a poet of great power, intensity, and strength. This critically acclaimed translation was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the Harold Morton Landon... Read More »
The Tale of Tales
By: Giambattista Basile, Nancy L. Canepa & Jack Zipes
Narrated by: Various
Length: 18 hours 6 minutes
Abridged: No
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from... Read More »
Of Mice and Men
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Gary Sinise
Length: 3 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No
Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of... Read More »
The Looking Glass War
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. John le Carré’s new novel, Agent Running in the Field, is coming October 2019.
"You are either good or bad, and both are dangerous."
It would have been an easy job for the Circus: a can of film couriered from Helsinki to London. In the past the Circus handled all things political,... Read More »
The Moon Is Down
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 3 hours 42 minutes
Abridged: No
Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside--and betrayal born within the close-knit community. Originally published at the zenith of Nazi Germanyâ's power, this masterful fable uncovers profound, often unsettling truths about war--and about human nature. Steinbeck's self-described... Read More »
A Murder of Quality
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 4 hours 41 minutes
Abridged: No
"Fielding and Jebedee were dead, Steed-Asprey vanished. Smiley—where was he?"
John le Carré's second novel, A Murder of Quality, offers an exquisite, satirical look at an elite private school as it chronicles the early development of George Smiley.
Miss Ailsa Brimley is in a quandary. She's received a peculiar letter from Mrs. Stella Rode, saying... Read More »
The Iliad - Abridged
By: Homer, Robert Fagles & Bernard Knox
Length: 8 hours 44 minutes
Abridged: Yes
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The Pastures of Heaven
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 7 hours 13 minutes
Abridged: No
In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the... Read More »
Moby-Dick - Abridged
By: Herman Melville
Narrated by: William Hootkins
Length: 6 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: Yes
Moby-Dick is one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong... Read More »
The New York Stories
By: John O'Hara, Steven Goldleaf, Steven Goldleaf, E. L. Doctorow & E. L. Doctorow
Narrated by: Various
Length: 13 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker)
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The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 7 hours
Abridged: No
John le Carré’s third novel—A #1 New York Times bestseller for 34 weeks—and the book that launched his career worldwide
In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or... Read More »
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
By: John Steinbeck, Robert E. Morsberger & Katherine Morsberger
Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
Length: 4 hours 38 minutes
Abridged: No
In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin’s wife, Queen Marie, who “might have taken her place at the... Read More »
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
By: Ken Kesey & Robert Faggen
Narrated by: John C. Reilly
Length: 10 hours 31 minutes
Abridged: No
A fiftieth-anniversary edition of Ken Kesey's searing American classic.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads, the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental... Read More »
Burning Bright
By: John Steinbeck & John Ditsky
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 2 hours 52 minutes
Abridged: No
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The Snow Leopard - Abridged
By: Peter Matthiessen & Pico Iyer
Narrated by: Peter Matthiessen
Length: 7 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: Yes
An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas...
IN 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the... Read More »
Smiley's People
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 14 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No
Featuring George Smiley, this New York Times bestseller is the third and final installment in the Karla Trilogy, from the author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman…
A very junior agent answers Vladimir’s call, but it could have been the Chief of the Circus himself. No one at... Read More »
BUtterfield 8
By: John O'Hara & Lorin Stein
Narrated by: Gretchen Mol
Length: 8 hours 7 minutes
Abridged: No
The bestselling novel that became an Oscar-winning film starring Elizabeth Taylor about New York's speakeasy generation
A masterpiece of American fiction and a bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from... Read More »
A Tale of Two Cities - Abridged
By: Charles Dickens
Narrated by: Ian Richardson
Length: 6 hours 3 minutes
Abridged: Yes
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the... Read More »
Cannery Row
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Jerry Farden
Length: 5 hours 58 minutes
Abridged: No
Steinbeck's tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society, dependent on one another for both physical and emotional survivalPublished in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of... Read More »
A Perfect Spy
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 20 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No
Over the course of his seemingly irreproachable life, Magnus Pym has been all things to all people: a devoted family man, a trusted colleague, a loyal friend—and the perfect spy. But in the wake of his estranged father’s death, Magnus vanishes, and the British Secret Service is up in arms. Is it grief, or is the reason for his disappearance more... Read More »
Crime and Punishment - Abridged
By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrated by: Alex Jennings
Length: 5 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: Yes
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police... Read More »
Ten North Frederick
By: John O'Hara & Jonathan Dee
Narrated by: Scott Aiello
Length: 17 hours 47 minutes
Abridged: No
The National Book Award–winning novel by the writer whom Fran Lebowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald”
Joe Chapin led a storybook life. A successful small-town lawyer with a beautiful wife, two over-achieving children, and aspirations to be president, he seemed to have it all. But as his daughter looks back on his life, a different man... Read More »
Tortilla Flat
By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: John McDonough
Length: 7 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No
"Steinbeck is an artist; and he tells stories of these lovable thieves and adulterers with a gentle and poetic purity of heart and of prose."--New York Herald Tribune
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A Small Town in Germany
By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 13 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. John le Carré’s new novel, Agent Running in the Field, is coming October 2019.
"Haven't you realized that only appearances matter?"
The British Embassy in Bonn is up in arms. Her Majesty's financially troubled government is seeking admission to Europe's Common Market just as... Read More »
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