How to Be

On the Shortness of Life

By: Seneca
Narrated by: Victor Craig
Length: 1 hour 7 minutes

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65), is the author of ‘On the Shortness of Life (c. 49 AD).’ In it, Seneca draws insight from different streams of ancient wisdom: Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic, Skeptic and Cynic, as he addresses some of the important questions humans face. Seneca encourages people to be mindful of... Read more

Being-Time

A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's Shobogenzo Uji

By: Shinshu Roberts
Narrated by: Leslie Howard
Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

A tour-de-force guide to Zen Master Dogen's most subtle and sophisticated philosophical premises: that being and time are inseparable.



Being-Time thoroughly explores Dogen's teaching on how we practice as Buddhas by understanding the relationship between being and time as it is—and as we perceive it to be. Using Dogen's Shobogenzo Uji (The True... Read more

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

By: Leo Tolstoy
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
Length: 2 hours 35 minutes

Hailed as one of the world’s masterpieces of psychological realism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high-court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own... Read more

The Last Days of Socrates

By: Plato
Narrated by: Justin Avoth & Laurence Dobiesz
Length: 6 hours 35 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Justin Avoth and Laurence Dobiesz. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Christopher Rowe read by Justin Avoth.

'Consider just this, and give your minds to this alone: whether or not what I say is just'

Plato's account of Socrates' trial and death (399 BC) is a... Read more

Pedro Páramo

By: Juan Rulfo
Narrated by: Thom Rivera
Length: 4 hours 37 minutes

Now an original film streaming on Netflix , directed by Rodrigo Prieto, cinematographer of Killers of the Flower Moon

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole.” —Jorge Luis Borges

The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative... Read more

The Complete Stories

By: Clarice Lispector
Narrated by: various narrators
Length: 22 hours 52 minutes

Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. These stories cover her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t... Read more

On Mysticism

The Experience of Ecstasy

By: Simon Critchley
Narrated by: Simon Critchley
Length: 8 hours 17 minutes

Mysticism is about existential ecstasy - an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.

Here, Simon Critchley... Read more

The Sea, the Sea

Booker Prize Winner

By: Iris Murdoch
Narrated by: Simon Vance & Kimberly Farr
Length: 20 hours 58 minutes

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work... Read more

The Sovereignty of Good

By: Iris Murdoch
Narrated by: Daisy-May Parsons
Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The... Read more

Waiting for Godot

By: Samuel Beckett
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
Length: 2 hours 2 minutes

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. He died in 1989. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, but the most popular of them all will be, without... Read more

The Myth of Sisyphus And Other Essays

By: Albert Camus
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 5 hours 39 minutes

One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric... Read more

Morning and Evening

2nd Edition

By: Jon Fosse
Narrated by: Kåre Conradi
Length: 2 hours 43 minutes

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks... Read more

Heaven

A Novel

By: Mieko Kawakami
Narrated by: Scott Keiji Takeda
Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

From the bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs and international literary sensation Mieko Kawakami comes a sharp and illuminating novel about the impact of violence and the power of solidarity in our contemporary societies.Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old student... Read more

On the Genealogy of Morals

By: Friedrich Nietzsche
Narrated by: Duncan Steen
Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

This is one of the most accessible of Nietzsche’s works. It was published in 1887, a year after Beyond Good and Evil, and he intended it to be a continuation of the investigation into the theme of morality. In the first work, Nietzsche attacked the notion of morality as nothing more than institutionalised weakness, and he criticised past... Read more