A Whiff of Wilde, a Pinch of Poe, and a Frisson of Frost

Elliot Engel has taught at the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and Duke University. He earned his MA and PhD as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at UCLA, where he won the Outstanding Teacher Award. He has written numerous books, and his mini-lecture series on Charles Dickens ran on PBS stations around the country. His articles have appeared in many newspapers and national magazines, including Newsweek. He has lectured throughout the United States and on every continent.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish-born poet, dramatist, and novelist. His works include collections of fairy stories; the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; and many brilliantly witty plays, including what is often considered to be his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1848) transformed the American literary landscape with his innovations in the short story genre and his haunting lyrical poetry, and he is credited with inventing American gothic horror and detective fiction.

Robert Frost (1874–1963) is America’s best-loved poet. His work epitomizes this country’s affinity for plain speaking, nature, and the land. Over the course of his literary career he won four Pulitzer Prizes, among many other honors.

Elliot Engel has taught at the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and Duke University. He earned his MA and PhD as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at UCLA, where he won the Outstanding Teacher Award. He has written numerous books, and his mini-lecture series on Charles Dickens ran on PBS stations around the country. His articles have appeared in many newspapers and national magazines, including Newsweek. He has lectured throughout the United States and on every continent.

Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards, as well as more than twenty-five Earphones Awards, and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices.

Gabrielle de Cuir, an Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills.

Cassandra Campbell is a prolific audiobook narrator with more than 700 titles to date. Winner of four Audie Awards and nominated for a dozen more, she was a 2018 inductee in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame. She has consistently been an AudioFile Magazine Best Narrator as well as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Narrator of the Year. As an acting teacher, she spent five years as a faculty member of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and has performed in and directed dozens of plays at theaters across the country.

Christopher Cazenove (1943–2010), one of England’s finest actors, starred on stage and television in the United States and Great Britain. His motion-picture credits include A Knight’s Tale, Eye of the Needle, Children of the Full Moon, and Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill. He played Ben Carrington on television’s Dynasty.

Stephen Fry is an award-winning comedian, actor, presenter and director. He rose to fame alongside Hugh Laurie in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (which he co-wrote with Laurie) and Jeeves and Wooster, and was unforgettable as General Melchett in Blackadder. He has hosted over 180 episodes of QI, and has narrated all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the audiobook recordings. He is the bestselling author of four novels - The Liar, The Hippopotamus, Making History and The Stars' Tennis Balls - as well as three volumes of autobiography - Moab is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles and More Fool Me. Mythos, Heroes and Troy, his retelling of the Greek myths, are all Sunday Times bestsellers.

Joel Grey is a Tony, Golden Globe, and Oscar–winning actor and director. In his seven decades in entertainment, Joel has acted in more than a dozen Broadway productions, in over twenty films, and countless television appearances. Along with his work on the stage and screen, he is a renowned photographer. He lives in New York City.

Gregory Hines (1946–2003) was an American actor, singer, dancer and choreographer. Hines began dancing professionally at age five and was a tireless advocate for tap dancing in America. He received a Tony award for Best Actor for Jelly’s Last Jam and an Emmy for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program for Little Bill.

Arte Johnson is an award-winning narrator and an American comic actor who won an Emmy Award for his role in the television series Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. His audiobook narations have won two AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he placed as a finalist for the Audie Award for best narration in 2003 and 2007.

Kevin McCarthy was born in Suffolk and served in the RAF before studying at Boston College and University College Dublin. In 2005 he was awarded the Fingal County Council Arts Bursary for Fiction Writing. He lives in North County Dublin with his wife and two children.

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

Roger Rees, Welsh stage, film, and television actor and, more recently, narrator of audiobooks, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States he received a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Nicholas Nickleby. American TV viewers are familiar with Roger from Cheers, in which he played Robin Colcord. As for audiobooks, Roger has performed in a wide variety of programs, from the LA Theatre Works’ production of Lady Windmere’s Fan, to mystery anthologies such as Malice Domestic and thrillers like Pop Goes the Weasel. His audiobook narration has won four AudioFile Earphones Awards.

Read by Jean Smart, Eric Idle, Terry Bradshaw, and other celebrity narrators

Michael Tucker is perhaps best known for his work on L.A. Law which won him three Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations. He has starred on Broadway, and his film credits include Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Diner, Tin Men and An Unmarried Woman.

Read by Simon Vance, Kate Reading, Marisa Calin, Ralph Lister, Antony Ferguson, Henrietta Meire, and Tim Bruce

David Warner is an Emmy Award–winning English actor known for playing romantic leads and villainous characters across a range of media. He is most famous for his roles in films like The Lost World, Titanic, and Planet of the Apes, among numerous others.

Michael York, an acclaimed actor, has appeared in such films as Romeo and Juliet, Cabaret, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Austin Powers, as well as on the London and Broadway stages.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (1918–2014) was born in New York City and trained at the Yale School of Drama. An actor on stage, film, and television, he was also a narrator, voice-over artist, director, and award-winning producer. He is best remembered for his role as investigators on the TV shows 77 Sunset Strip and The FBI.