Classics audiobooks

Romola

By: George Eliot

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 21 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

"There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood." Thus wrote George Eliot about Romola, the book which is central in her career as a novelist and amongst her most colorful, fluent, and persuasive works. Set in Florence in 1492, a time of great political and... Read more

The Rum Diary - Abridged

By: Hunter S. Thompson

Narrated by: Campbell Scott

Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary—a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book—is Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean.

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy,... Read more

Oliver Twist - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Paul Scofield

Length: 2 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A pauper's child reared in a workhouse, young Oliver Twist serves an apprenticeship in a loveless house. Despairing, he runs away and is befriended by a gang of young pickpockets who offer him the only welcome home he has ever known. Falling under the influence of villainous company, the young orphan struggles to escape from a life of poverty... Read more

Classic Tales of Horror

By: Martin Greenberg, Ramsey Campbell, Ray Bradbury...

Narrated by: Susan Anspach

Length: 3 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

This collection of classic horror stories is sure to give you goosebumps, raise the hair on the back of your neck, and put some fright in your night. These dark tales from renowned authors such as Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Ramsey Campbell are sure to please everyone— from campfire storytellers to die-hard horror fans. Stories... Read more

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon - Abridged

By: Kaye Gibbons

Narrated by: Polly Holliday

Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate is a woman at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up increasingly aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery.

As she tells her story in 1900, she is still prey to her childhood, to the memories of a life... Read more

The Pickwick Papers - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Paul Scofield

Length: 2 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Nearly two centuries after The Pickwick Papers first appeared in 1837, listeners continue to enjoy the vigorous humor and heartwarming optimism of Dickens' first great literary achievement. Actor Paul Scofield evokes all the warmth and laughter of the unlikely adventures of the immortal Samuel Pickwick, Esq., and the other members of the... Read more

Our Mutual Friend

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: David Case

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk... Read more

A Confederacy of Dunces

By: John Kennedy Toole

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 13 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book ReviewA green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears... Read more

The Old Curiosity Shop - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Paul Scofield

Length: 5 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In London, Little Nell lives in The Old Curiosity Shop with her grandfather, who has a weakness for gambling. Hoping to mend his finances, the old man borrows money from Quilp, a moneylender and swindler. After losing that money as well, the grandfather flees to the country with Nell in a desperate attempt to escape the clutches of Quilp, who... Read more

A Virtuous Woman - Abridged

By: Kaye Gibbons

Narrated by: Terry Beaver & Kaye Gibbons

Length: 3 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a... Read more

Underworld - Abridged

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books

“A great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner.” —San Francisco Chronicle

*With a... Read more

Contact - Abridged

By: Carl Sagan

Narrated by: Jodie Foster

Length: 4 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Grammy Award Nominee for Best Spoken Word Album!

The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension.

In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who -- or what -- is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future -- and our own. Read more

The Hero of Swine Pump Creek - Abridged

By: Barbara Cooley

Narrated by: AudioscapePlayers

Length: 46 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Nightshade Racoon and his merry friends Hayward Chipmunk and Nettley Mouse, are charmingly animated in this dramatisation of the trials and tribulations of Swine Pump Creek's creature residents. Read more

A Room With a View

By: E.M. Forster

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Published in 1908, A Room with a View was one of Forster's earliest novels and it has become one of his most famous and popular. The story is set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England and centers on young Lucy Honeychurch's choice between propriety and love. It is an accomplished and beautiful love story, full of generous insights.
Edward... Read more

Don Quixote de la Mancha - Abridged

By: Miguel Cervantes

Narrated by: Christopher Cazenove

Length: 5 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Entranced by romantic tales of heroism and chivalry, Don Quixote— self-proclaimed knight errant— embarks on a delusional quest for fame and adventure. The eccentric Spanish country gentleman and his companion Sancho encounter an array of unforgettable characters and undertake some of the most famously foolhardy exploits... Read more

The House of the Seven Gables - Abridged

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Joan Allen

Length: 5 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A dark, many-gabled mansion in a small New England village— haunted by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft, and sudden death— houses the distinguished Pyncheon family. They are plagued by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin on its last four members. The arrival of Phoebe Pyncheon from... Read more

Visions of Cody - Abridged

By: Jack Kerouac

Narrated by: Graham Parker

Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

“To read On the Road but not Visions of Cody is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac’s wildest writings.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“The centerpiece of all [Kerouac’s] novels.”—The Washington Post
 
Originally written in 1951–1952, Visions of Cody was an underground classic by the time it was... Read more

Ellen Foster - Abridged

By: Kaye Gibbons

Narrated by: Kaye Gibbons

Length: 2 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: Yes

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy."

So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise,... Read more

Sense and Sensibility

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Glenda Jackson

Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

In a timeless tale of misguided romance and heartbreak, Jane Austen's first novel of love and marriage is seen through the eyes of two very different heroines, the Dashwood sisters—cautious, level-headed Elinor and impulsive lively Marianne—one representing sense and the other sensibility. In order to achieve the love and happiness they seek,... Read more

Hard Times - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Paul Scofield

Length: 3 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In the squalor of a textile town, successful businessman and arch-pragmatist Thomas Gradgrind, proclaiming that he is a self-made man, teaches his children to suppress their imaginations and embrace hard facts. He arranges the marriage of his daughter Louisa to Josiah Bounderby, an unattractive, boastful manufacturer who is thirty years older... Read more

Treasure Island - Abridged

By: Robert Stevenson

Narrated by: Michael York

Length: 1 hour 34 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper, longs for adventure. One of the inn's guests, a coarse old bully named Billy Bones, reveals a map showing the whereabouts of buried treasure. After Bones dies, Jim and his mother flee with the map to Squire John Trelawney, outwitting other pirates who were chasing Bones. With Trelawney's friend Dr. Livesey,... Read more

Stranger in a Strange Land

By: Robert A. Heinlein

Narrated by: Christopher Hurt

Length: 16 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Stranger in a Strange Land is the epic saga of an earthling, Valentine Michael Smith, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with “psi” powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, teleportation, pyrolysis, and the ability to take control of the minds of others—and complete innocence regarding the mores of man.After... Read more

Randall and The River of Tim - Abridged

By: C.S. Forrester

Narrated by: AudioscapePlayers

Length: 2 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In 1917, the Great War is in full swing. Young Randall is a second lieutenant, and is lucky enough to escape some of the consequences of the conflict by contributing to the invention of a flare, which will be of benefit to the allies. He falls in love with a woman a few years his senior, and with the imminence of death ever in a young man's... Read more

Mark Twain’s Library of Humor

By: Mark Twain & various authors

Narrated by: Marni Webb, Richard Russ & others

Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Master wit Mark Twain selected these twenty-seven stories himself by fifteen of his favorite nineteenth century authors. The order follows that which Twain placed them in in the original anthology, published in 1888. He indulged his comic fancy rather than making a textbook in which all themes or authors are placed together, saying that "This... Read more