World Lit: Books in Translation

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A Novel

By: Olga Tokarczuk
Narrated by: Beata Pozniak
Length: 11 hours 39 minutes

“As the main character and narrator of this darkly funny novel, Mrs. Duszejko steals the show. A fierce old woman who lives alone in a house on a remote Polish plateau, she has a big personality as an eccentric astrologer, vegetarian, non-Catholic, and translator of William Blake. She patrols the area surrounding her home daily and has a few,... Read more

The Books of Jacob

A Novel

By: Olga Tokarczuk
Narrated by: Allen Lewis Rickman & Gilli Messer
Length: 35 hours 37 minutes

A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ”

“Just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed.” – The Washington Post

“Olga Tokarczuk is one of our greatest living fiction writers. . . This could well be a decade-defining book akin to Bolaño’s 2666.” –AV Club

“Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. . . The comedy in this novel blends, as it... Read more

The Master and Margarita - Abridged

By: Mikhail Bulgakov
Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Length: 8 hours 21 minutes

The Master and Margarita is one of the most famous and best-selling Russian novels of the twentieth century, despite its surreal environment of talking cats, Satan and mysterious happenings. Naxos AudioBooks presents this careful abridgement of a new translation in an imaginative reading by the charismatic Julian Rhind-Tutt. With War and Peace... Read more

The Summer Book

By: Tove Jansson
Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
Length: 4 hours 30 minutes

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland.... Read more

A Bend in the River

By: V. S. Naipaul
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

This incandescent novel chronicles both an internal journey and a physical trek into the heart of Africa, a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions. Exploring political and individual corruption, it expresses skepticism about the ability of newly decolonized nations to forge... Read more

One Hundred Years of Solitude

By: Gabriel García Márquez
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 14 hours 4 minutes

“Written in the beautifully poetic style of “magical realism”, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude leads the reader on an enchanted journey spanning generations. This book is no fairy-tale, however. A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo, the Latin... Read more

Pedro Páramo

By: Juan Rulfo
Narrated by: Mauricio Carrera
Length: 4 hours 24 minutes

“Desconcertante, lista a inquietar a la crítica, está ya en los escaparates la primera novela de Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, que transcurre en una serie de transposiciones oníricas, ahondando más allá de la muerte de sus personajes, que uno no sabe en qué momento son sueño, vida, fábula, verdad, pero a los que se les oye la voz al través de la... Read more

The Idiot

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Length: 22 hours 30 minutes

In The Idiot, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal,... Read more

The Iliad

By: Homer
Narrated by: Alfred Molina
Length: 16 hours 3 minutes

From the renowned translator of Rilke, Tao Te Ching, and Gilgamesh, a vivid new translation of Western civilization’s foundational epic: The Iliad.

Tolstoy called the Iliad a miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer’s story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or... Read more

The Arabian Nights - Abridged

By: Richard Burton
Narrated by: Philip Madoc
Length: 3 hours 42 minutes

Though The Arabian Nights are generally known as stories for children, they were originally tales for adults full of adventure, sexuality, violence and the supernatural. They certainly inspired the imagination of Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, linguist and erotologist who brought all his worldly experience and a superbly... Read more

The Savage Detectives

By: Roberto Bolaño
Narrated by: Eddie Lopez & Armando Durán
Length: 26 hours 58 minutes

“A road novel about both the end and beginning of literature. Dazzling. One of the true giants of Latin literature. Read more

2666

A Novel

By: Roberto Bolaño
Narrated by: various narrators, John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick & Grover Gardner
Length: 39 hours 15 minutes

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book’s subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence... Read more

Flights

Nobel Prize and Booker Prize Winner

By: Olga Tokarczuk
Narrated by: Julia Whelan
Length: 12 hours 31 minutes

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx)

"A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time

"A beautifully fragmented... Read more

Don Quixote

Translated by Edith Grossman

By: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 39 hours 40 minutes

Don Quixote is the classic story. Called the first modern novel, this marvelous book has stood the test of time to become irrevocably intertwined with the fabric of society. Sixteenth-century Spanish gentleman Don Quixote, fed by his own delusional fantasies, takes to the road in search of chivalrous adventures. But his quest leads to more... Read more

War and Turpentine

A novel

By: Stefan Hertmans
Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017
A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year

The life of Urbain Martien—artist, soldier, survivor of World War I—lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. In War and Turpentine, his grandson, a writer, retells his grandfather’s... Read more

Perfume

The Alchemy of Scent

By: Jean-Claude Ellena
Narrated by: David de Vries
Length: 3 hours 10 minutes

To women the whole world over, perfume means glamour, and in the world of perfume, Jean-Claude Ellena is a superstar. In this one-of-a-kind book, the master himself takes you through the doors of his laboratory and explains the process of creating precious fragrances, revealing the key methods and recipes involved in this mysterious... Read more

Notes from the Underground

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Narrated by: Norman Dietz
Length: 5 hours 7 minutes

A predecessor to such monumental works as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground represents a turning point in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing toward the more political side. In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he... Read more

Under the Sign of Saturn

Essays

By: Susan Sontag
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Sontag’s most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America’s leading essayists, Sontag’s writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection... Read more

My Struggle, Book 3

My Struggle: Book #3

By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 14 hours 57 minutes

A family of four-mother, father, and two boys-move to the south coast of Norway, to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory is upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Karl Ove Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the... Read more

My Struggle, Book 2

A Man in Love

My Struggle: Book #2

By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 21 hours 4 minutes

"[Book 2] sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist [who] wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence." -James Wood, The New Yorker In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his... Read more