The Honourable Schoolboy

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

The Wayward Bus

By: John Steinbeck & Gary Scharnhorst
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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

The Log from the Sea of Cortez

By: John Steinbeck & Richard Astro
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes
Abridged: No

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure. Read more »

To a God Unknown

By: John Steinbeck & Robert DeMott
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 »

Dracula - Abridged

By: Bram Stoker
Narrated by: Richard E. Grant
Length: 2 hours 57 minutes
Abridged: Yes

Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."

A popular bestseller in Victorian England,... Read more »

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 »

Appointment in Samarra

By: John O'Hara & Charles McGrath
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 »

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 Aeneid

By: Virgil, Bernard Knox, Robert Fagles & 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 Grapes of Wrath

By: John Steinbeck & Robert DeMott
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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

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 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

In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an... 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 »

The Long Valley

By: John Steinbeck & John H. Timmerman
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 »

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 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 »

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... 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 »

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 »

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. 

"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 anti-British factions are rising to power in Germany. Rioters are demanding... 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 »

The Snow Leopard - Abridged

By: Peter Matthiessen & Pico Iyer
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 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 »

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 »

Letters to a Young Poet

By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Charlie Louth & Lewis Hyde
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... Read more »

Once There Was a War

By: John Steinbeck & Mark Bowden
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 »

The Iliad - Abridged

By: Homer, Robert Fagles & Bernard Knox
Length: 8 hours 44 minutes
Abridged: Yes

Dating to the ninth century BC, Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to  the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb Introduction... Read more »

The New York Stories

By: John O'Hara, Steven Goldleaf, Steven Goldleaf, E. L. Doctorow & E. L. Doctorow
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 »