The Honourable Schoolboy

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 »

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

IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road—typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. A major literary event when it was... Read more »

A Woman in Arabia

By: Gertrude Bell
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 »

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

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing... Read more »

Bombs Away

By: John Steinbeck
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 »

Cup of Gold

By: John Steinbeck
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 »

Appointment in Samarra

By: John O'Hara
Narrated by: Christian Camargo
Length: 6 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald,” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book.

One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement. In December 1930, just... Read more »

Travels with Charley in Search of America

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Gary Sinise
Length: 7 hours 58 minutes
Abridged: No

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers
 
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

With Charley,... Read more »

BUtterfield 8

By: John O'Hara
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 Russian Journal

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 7 hours 1 minutes
Abridged: No

Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.

Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare...

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 »

The Long Valley

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Holter Graham
Length: 8 hours 10 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 »

Burning Bright

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 2 hours 52 minutes
Abridged: No

The last of John Steinbeck’s play-novelettes, Burning Bright was the author’s final attempt after 1937’s Of Mice and Men and 1942’s The Moon is Down to create what he saw as a new, experimental literary form.  Four scenes, four people: the husband who yearns for a son, ignorant of his own sterility; the wife who commits adultery to fulfill her... Read more »

Letters to a Young Poet

By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Narrated by: Dan Stevens & Max Deacon
Length: 1 hours 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...

The Wayward Bus

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 9 hours 13 minutes
Abridged: No

In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the... 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 »

Once There Was a War

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Lloyd James
Length: 7 hours 20 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 »

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 Grapes of Wrath

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Dylan Baker
Length: 21 hours
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 »

Gravity's Rainbow

By: Thomas Pynchon
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 37 hours 18 minutes
Abridged: No

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

For more... Read more »

The Inferno of Dante

By: Dante Alighieri
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 »

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 »

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 »

East of Eden

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Length: 25 hours 18 minutes
Abridged: No

The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a sprawling epic in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence. 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 »

Sweet Thursday

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Jerry Farden
Length: 8 hours 55 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 »

Little Women

By: Louisa May Alcott
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 »

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

By: Ken Kesey
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...

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...

The Little Drummer Girl

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 20 hours 17 minutes
Abridged: No

You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat.

On holiday in Mykonos, Charlie wants only sunny days and a brief escape from England’s bourgeois dreariness. Then a handsome stranger lures the aspiring actress away from her pals—but his intentions are far from romantic. Joseph is an Israeli intelligence officer, and Charlie has been wooed... 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 »

The Russia House

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 13 hours 52 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:...

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. 

"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, while the Department dealt with matters military. But the Department has been... Read more »

To a God Unknown

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No

Set in familiar Steinbeck territory, To a God Unknown is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God. Read more »

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 »

Mary, Called Magdalene

By: Margaret George
Narrated by: Kate Reading
Length: 30 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No

The New York Times-bestselling author of Elizabeth I brilliantly reimagines the story of the most mysterious woman in the Bible

Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute, a female divinity figure, a church leader, or all of those? Biblical references to her are tantalizingly brief, but we do know that she was the first person to whom the risen Christ... Read more »

The Snow Leopa - Abridged

By: Peter Matthiessen
Narrated by: Peter Matthiessen
Length: 7 hours 56 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 »

The Tale of Tales

By: Giambattista Basile
Narrated by: Various, Dorothy Dillingham Blue, Paul Boehmer, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Will Damron, Susan Denaker, Kirby Heyborne, Hillary Huber, Ann Marie Lee & John Lee
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 »

The New York Stories

By: John O'Hara
Narrated by: Becky Ann Baker, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Jon Hamm, Richard Kind, Jan Maxwell, Gretchen Mol & Dallas Roberts
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)

Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive chroniclers of the city—the speakeasies and highballs,... Read more »

The Aeneid

By: Virgil & Robert Fagles
Narrated by: Simon Callow
Length: 12 hours 25 minutes
Abridged: No

From the award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey comes a brilliant new translation of Virgil's great epic

Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles’ mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love... Read more »

The Odyssey

By: Homer
Narrated by: Ian McKellen
Length: 13 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No

The Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of every man's journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, the energy and poetry of Homer's original is captured in a bold, contemporary idiom, giving us an edition of The Odyssey that is a joy to listen to, worth savoring treasuring for its sheer lyrical mastery. This... Read more »

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 »

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

Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a Camelot on a shabby hillside above the town of Monterey, California, and peopled it with a colorful... 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....

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.

The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for... 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 »

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 »

The Honourable Schoolboy

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 20 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No

Featuring George Smiley, The Honourable Schoolboy is the second installment in the renowned Karla Trilogy, the follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy.

As the fall of Saigon looms, master spy... Read more »

Call for the Dead

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Michael Jayston
Length: 4 hours 43 minutes
Abridged: No

Go back to Whitehall and look for more spies on your drawing boards.

George Smiley is no one's idea of a spy—which is perhaps why he's such a natural. But Smiley apparently made a mistake. After a routine security interview, he concluded that the affable Samuel Fennan had nothing to hide. Why, then, did the man from the Foreign Office shoot... Read more »

The Pearl

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Hector Elizondo
Length: 2 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No

“There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon.”
 
Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with... Read more »