Classics audiobooks

The Ambassadors

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Walter Zimmerman

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

One of the final masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest authors, Henry James’s The Ambassadors is now available for the first time in a Modern Library edition, with a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín. A keenly observed tale of a man’s awakening to life, this dark comic novel follows Lewis... Read more

Oliver Twist - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Dick Cavett

Length: 2 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Oliver Twist is an orphan, born into the world of workhouses and poverty. Apprenticed at a young age, he runs away and finds himself with a curious collection of thieves, rogues and murderers. Tragedy and death are constantly at his heels. Oliver struggles with the burden of being a child and of being poor in industrial England. In this tale,... Read more

Common Sense

By: Thomas Paine

Narrated by: Adrian Cronauer

Length: 1 hour 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir," wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had. Read more

The Call of the Wild

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Frank Muller

Length: 3 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

The Call of the Wild is a novel by American author Jack London published in 1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush-a period when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and... Read more

Life on the Mississippi

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 15 hours

Abridged: No

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless... Read more

True At First Light

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Brian Dennehy

Length: 10 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Both a revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer.

A blend of... Read more

Close Range

By: Annie Proulx

Narrated by: Frances Fisher, Campbell Scott & Bruce Greenwood

Length: 5 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below,"... Read more

Trois contes

By: Gustave Flaubert

Narrated by: Sophie Chauveau

Length: 3 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

« Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeois de Pont l'Évêque envièrent à Mme AUBAIN sa servante Félicité. Pour cent francs par an, elle faisait la cuisine et le ménage, cousait, lavait, repassait, savait brider un cheval, engraisser les volailles, battre le beurre, et resta fidèle à sa maîtresse – qui cependant n'était pas une personne agréable. »... Read more

Lettres à un jeune poète

By: Rainer Maria Rilke

Narrated by: Redjep Mitrovitsa

Length: 1 hour 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Lettres à un jeune poète regroupe les correspondances qu'échangèrent Rainer Maria Rilke et son élève Kappu entre 1903 et 1908. Rilke a alors 27 ans, mais sa démarche est tellement détachée des velléités d'un jeune poète, qu'on le croirait déjà revenu d'une longue habitude. Aux envies d'honneur, il répond par la nécessité de créer. Il préconise... Read more

The Scarlet Pimpernel

By: Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Narrated by: Roe Kendall

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

The first and most successful in the Baroness’s series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, The Scarlet Pimpernel was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction, the novel “has almost reached its... Read more

Le rosier de Madame Husson

By: Guy De Maupassant

Narrated by: Lou Saintagne

Length: 2 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Il y avait autrefois dans cette ville une vieille dame, très vertueuse et protectrice de la vertu, qui s'appelait Madame Husson. Tu sais, je te dis les noms véritables et pas des noms de fantaisie. Mme Husson s'occupait particulièrement des bonnes oeuvres, de secourir les pauvres et d'encourager les méritants. Et donc, cette Madame Husson va... Read more

Der kleine Prinz (Gekürzt) - Abridged

By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Narrated by: Ulrich Mühe

Length: 1 hour 43 minutes

Abridged: Yes

"Man sieht nur mit dem Herzen gut. Das Wesentliche ist für die Augen unsichtbar." Der Kleine Prinz lebt zusammen mit seiner Rose auf dem Planeten Asteroid B 612 und besucht die Erde. Hier lernt er neben dem Erzähler, der mit seinem Flugzeug in der Wüste notlandete, unter anderem den Fuchs kennen, der ihm das Vertraut-machen erklärt: "Du bist... Read more

The Heart of the Matter

By: Graham Greene

Narrated by: Joseph Porter

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

In this widely acclaimed modern classic, Graham Greene delves deep into character to tell the dramatic, suspenseful story of a good man’s conflict between passion and faith.A police commissioner in a British-governed, war-torn West African state, Scobie is bound by the strictest integrity and sense of duty both for his colonial responsibilities... Read more

Burmese Days

By: George Orwell

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Colonial politics in 1930 Kyauktada, India, come to a head when the European Club, previously for whites only, is ordered to elect one token native member. The deeply racist members do their best to manipulate the situation, resulting in the loss not only of reputations, but of lives.Amidst this cynical setting, timber merchant James Flory... Read more

Catherine Carmier

By: Ernest J. Gaines

Narrated by: D. M. Greene

Length: 5 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of ten years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation, he... Read more

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

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