Classics Written by Diverse Authors

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Ruby Dee
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

“This book is a masterpiece. Zora Neale Hurston explores stages in a woman’s life so powerfully. Ruby Dee’s audiobook narration is the best audiobook narration I’ve ever heard. She expresses so much emotion and personality. She brings the characters to life and she savors every perfectly chosen word of the text. Read more

The Alchemist

By: Paulo Coelho
Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
Length: 4 hours

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • OVER 80 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE“Translated into 80 languages, the allegory teaches us about dreams, destiny, and the reason we are all here.”—Oprah Daily, “Best Self-Help Books of a Generation”“It’s a brilliant, magical, life-changing book that continues to blow my mind with its lessons. [...] A remarkable... Read more

Native Son

By: Richard Wright
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 17 hours 44 minutes

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr.""The most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath."" —The New YorkerWhen it was... Read more

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou
Narrated by: Maya Angelou
Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute... Read more

Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison
Narrated by: Joe Morton
Length: 18 hours 36 minutes

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with... Read more

The Street

By: Ann Petry
Narrated by: Danielle Deadwyler
Length: 13 hours 25 minutes

With a new introduction from New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork.
The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence,... Read more

Winter in the Blood

Penguin Vitae

By: James Welch
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis & Tanis Parenteau
Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance — "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." —Tommy Orange, The Washington Post

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter... Read more

The House on Mango Street

By: Sandra Cisneros
Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
Length: 2 hours 17 minutes

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International... Read more

Beloved

Pulitzer Prize Winner

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. 

This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.

Sethe... Read more

Collected Fictions - Abridged

By: Jorge Luis Borges
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 5 hours 13 minutes

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. A selection of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered in this audiobook, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. These enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and... Read more

Bless Me, Ultima

By: Rudolfo Anaya
Narrated by: Robert Ramirez
Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Exquisite prose and wondrous storytelling have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the father of Chicano literature in English. Indeed, Anaya's tales fairly shimmer with the haunting beauty and richness of his culture. The winner of the Pen Center West Award for Fiction for his unforgettable novel Alburquerque, Anaya is perhaps best loved for his classic... Read more

Kindred

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Kim Staunton
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

“A beautiful story of the complex heritage of Dana, a Black woman who mysteriously gets transported from the 1970s to the early 1800 antebellum south where she is faced with saving the white son of a plantation owner from drowning. Throughout, Dana journeys back and forth from present to past, and each of her stays in the past grows longer and... Read more

Ceremony

By: Leslie Marmon Silko
Narrated by: Pete Bradbury
Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Leslie Marmon Silko's sublime Ceremony is almost universally considered one of the finest novels ever written by an American Indian. It is the poetic, dreamlike tale of Tayo, a mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo and veteran of World War II. Tormented by shell shock and haunted by memories of his cousin who died in the war, Tayo struggles on his... Read more

Passing

By: Nella Larsen
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 4 hours 5 minutes

Nella Larsen’s fascinating exploration of race and identity—the inspiration for the Netflix film directed by Rebecca Hall, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga.Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her... Read more

The Count of Monte Cristo

By: Alexandre Dumas
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 46 hours 56 minutes

Dashing young Edmond Dantes has everything: a fine reputation, an appointment as captain of a ship, and the heart of a beautiful woman. But his perfect life is shattered when three jealous friends conspire to destroy him.Falsely accused of a political crime, Edmond Dantes is locked away for life in the infamous prison at the French Chateau d’If.... Read more

Annie John

By: Jamaica Kincaid
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 4 hours 19 minutes

A haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua.An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence at the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign... Read more

The Women of Brewster Place - Abridged

By: Gloria Naylor
Narrated by: Tonya Pinkins
Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

The National Book Award-winning novel—and contemporary classic—that launched the brilliant career of Gloria Naylor, now with a foreword by Tayari Jones

“[A] shrewd and lyrical portrayal of many of the realities of black life . . . Naylor bravely risks sentimentality and melodrama to write her compassion and outrage large, and she pulls it off... Read more

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

By: Frederick Douglass
Narrated by: Christopher Preece
Length: 3 hours 50 minutes

An eye-opening real-life account of slavery in America.Artfully crafted with the same gripping and powerful prose that Frederick Douglass was so famous in his time for, this deeply moving memoir explores the harrowing reality behind slavery in America. Offering an illuminating insight into American society and culture in the 19th-century,... Read more

The Souls of Black Folk

By: W. E. B. Du Bois
Narrated by: Royal Jaye
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”

The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903 as a collection of essays from W.E.B. Du Bois, an African-American sociologist... Read more

A House for Mr Biswas

By: V.S. Naipaul
Narrated by: Sam Dastor
Length: 21 hours 28 minutes

A House for Mr Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man’s struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent.... Read more