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Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
Thu, Mar 01, 2012
In Babbitt, an American classic, Sinclair Lewis satirizes the conformist middle-agers suburban life in the early 1920's.
Classics Archive
The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas
Thu, Mar 01, 2012
The black tulip has come to be synonymous with the concept of artificial demand: that anything, if arbitrarily deemed rare or valuable enough, can become so expensive that it’s real worth is forgotten.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Fri, Dec 02, 2011
“Twain's trip is narrated by award-winning narrator Grover Gardner who puts his audience right there in the middle of the action. Accents and some individualization of characters, but the voice of Twain mesmerizes. Highly recommended.”
A Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Thu, Dec 01, 2011
...it is a delight to come back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story and to be disturbed and revolted anew by Stevenson’s mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and his horrifying alter-ego, Mr. Hyde.
*Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Wed, Nov 02, 2011
“Anthony Heald reads this novel with gusto, laughing heartily when the writing warrants it. The voices reflect the personalities of the characters and are excellent.”
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Thu, Sep 01, 2011
Listeners expecting the novel Doctor Zhivago to resemble the famous movie by the same name may be disappointed, for it is the revolution that takes center stage, not the love story of Zhivago and Lara
*King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
Mon, Aug 01, 2011
This classic is narrated by Stefan Rudnicki.... If he were an Olympic athlete, he would win gold.
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
Mon, Aug 01, 2011
Robin Field gives us a cold and almost prissy protagonist, capable of hero worship in the abstraction while lacking the capacity for human love.
*Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini
Fri, Jul 01, 2011
Sabatini's classic swashbuckler is as good as the genre gets: a fast-paced action filled plot, an assortment of unusual situations and characters, romance, the French Revolution, and a thoroughly engaging protagonist whose wit is as quick as it is barbed.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Fri, Jul 01, 2011
Upton Sinclair did for the meatpacking industry in 1906 what Harriet Beecher Stowe did for slavery in 1852. Sinclair's famous muckraking novel exposed both the lack of sanitation in the meatpacking factories in Chicago and the lack of social support for its workers, many of whom died of neglect, starvation, and disease.
*A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Fri, Jul 01, 2011
Tough to choose between Simon Prebble or John Lee, but, if forced, I would give a slight edge to Prebble because of the emotional scenes, of which there are many. Both versions are highly recommended.
*Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
Wed, Jun 01, 2011
Lovers of fine literature who also understand the allure of soap operas will gobble up the sweeping sagas of Anthony Trollope. His unerring eye chronicles his times with detail, humor and warmth.
*Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sun, May 01, 2011
George Eliot was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). She began her literary career as a translator and later was editor of the Westminster Review. In 1857 she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name George Eliot. “She lived one of the most sexually unconventional and intellectually independent lives of her time, yet her works demonstrate a deep moral conviction concerning the virtue of integrity and the reward of virtue that would sit comfortably with many Anglican parsons.”---Roy McMillan, Naxos Audio.
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
Fri, Apr 01, 2011
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was a major twentieth-century British author, a great novelist and essayist, and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. In 1917, she and her husband founded the Hogarth Press, which published the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, as well as the earliest translations of Sigmund Freud. Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves, The Years, Between the Acts, Night and Day, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas. The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf’s first published novel.
The Essential Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Fri, Apr 01, 2011
Neville Jason trained at RADA where he was awarded the Diction Prize by Sir John Gielgud. He has worked with the English Stage Co., the Old Vic Company and the RSC as well as in films, TV and musicals. He is frequently heard on radio.
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Fri, Apr 01, 2011
Anne Brontë (1820–1849), a British novelist and poet, was the youngest member of the famous Brontë literary family. She wrote a volume of poetry with her sisters, Charlotte and Emily, entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and she is the author of the novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne's two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are completely different from the romanticism followed by her more famous sisters. She wrote in a realistic, rather than a romantic style.
*The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Tue, Mar 01, 2011
Wells is the Charles Dickens of popular science who coined the terms 'death ray' and 'time machine'. Although he is best known and remembered for his science fiction books, he was an energetic man with broad interests whose prolific writings included histories, polemics romances, fantasies, comedies, short stories, film scripts, utopias, dystopias, articles, essays, and non fiction.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Tue, Feb 01, 2011
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851), the first major American novelist, was the son of a wealthy landowner who founded Cooperstown, New York. He attended Yale and served in the navy before turning to writing, winning international fame with The Spy (1821). After The Pioneers (1823), public fascination with the character of Natty Bumppo led him to write a series of sequels that gradually unfold the entire life of the frontier scout.
*Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Sat, Jan 01, 2011
“Pip's story is presented by actor, announcer, radio journalist, and audiobook narrator Simon Prebble, whose considerable talent makes him the perfect choice for a novel rife with many disparate characters.”
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
Wed, Dec 01, 2010
H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was a professional writer and journalist who published more than a hundred books, including novels, histories, essays, and programs for world regeneration.
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Wed, Dec 01, 2010
Joseph Conrad was born to Polish parents in the Russian-dominated Ukraine in 1857. He was orphaned at the age of 11. At 16, Conrad left Poland for France to fulfill his ambition to go to sea. He rose to position of Master Mariner in the British Merchant Navy and his time at sea provided him with rich material for his stories. Conrad settled in Britain in 1894. His works also include: Lord Jim and Nostromo.
Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
Mon, Nov 01, 2010
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1802–1870), French novelist and playwright, was born the son of an innkeeper's daughter and one of Napoleon's generals. He moved to Paris in 1823 to make his fortune in the theater, and at twenty-eight he was one of the leading literary figures of his day. His complete works were eventually to fill over three hundred volumes, and his stories made him the best-known Frenchman of his age.
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mon, Nov 01, 2010
Born in Moscow in 1821, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Literary modernism and various schools of psychology and theology have been deeply changed by his ideas. He died in 1881 in St Petersburg, Russia.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Fri, Oct 01, 2010
Thomas Hardy,who was born in 1840 in Dorsetshire, England and is critically esteemed for both his poetry and his novels, died in 1928.
*Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Fri, Oct 01, 2010
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. Although he spent most of his childhood in Ireland, he considered himself English, and, aged twenty-one, moved to England, where he found employment as secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple. On Temple's death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin to pursue a career in the church. By this time he was also publishing in a variety of genres, and between 1704 and 1729 he produced a string of brilliant satires, of which Gulliver's Travels is the best known. Between 1713 and 1742 he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin; he was buried there when he died in 1745.
*The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Fri, Oct 01, 2010
Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time. Born in Iran in 1919, she is the recipient of the Prix Medicis for The Golden Notebook, 1976; an Honorary degree, Harvard University, 1995; the Companion of Honour, 1999; the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, 2001; the David Cohen British Literature Prize, 2001; the ST Dupont Golden PEN Award, 2002. She lives in north London.
*Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Fri, Oct 01, 2010
Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a friend of Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens, who first accepted Cranford for publication in his magazine Household Words. Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell published five more novels including Mary Barton (1848) and Wives and Daughters (1865).
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Wed, Sep 01, 2010
Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier, the book on which his reputation most surely rests, in deliberate emulation of the nineteenth-century French novels he so admired. In this way he was able to explore the theme of sexual betrayal and its poisonous after-effects with a psychological intimacy as yet unknown in the English novel.
The Watsons and Sanditon by Jane Austen
Wed, Sep 01, 2010
Jane Austen (1775-1817) began her writing career composing stories and novels for her family as entertainment. Although she began to write Pride and Prejudice at the age of twenty-one, her first book to appear in print was Sense an Sensibility. All of her novels, including Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, were published anonymously. Austen's identity as an author was announced after her death by her brother, Henry.
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
Wed, Sep 01, 2010
Anthony Hope is the pseudonym of Anthony Hope Hawkins , a successful and prolific author of fiction and drama. The son of a school headmaster, Hope was born in London in 1863. While practicing law, he also experimented with creative writing. With the publication of his most famous novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, in 1894, Hope abandoned his legal career to write full-time, penning the short story collection, The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), and the Zenda sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898). Throughout his productive life, Hope published a wide variety of fiction, in areas ranging from the light domestic comedy of The Dolly Dialogues (1894) to the more serious fiction of Simon Dole (1889). He died in 1933.
*Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Wed, Sep 01, 2010
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), despite an impoverished childhood and little formal education, achieved lasting artistic and popular success with the novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, all of which were originally published in serial form.
The History of Tom Jones, Foundling by Henry Fielding
Sun, Aug 01, 2010
HENRY FIELDING (1707- 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess. His writings reflect his ongoing preoccupation with fraud, sham, and masks. Tom Jones is considered to be his greatest work.
*Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Sun, Aug 01, 2010
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.
*The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Sun, Aug 01, 2010
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), despite an impoverished childhood and little formal education, achieved lasting artistic and popular success with the novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, all of which were originally published in serial form.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Thu, Jul 01, 2010
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an essayist, poet, philosopher, and anti-slavery activist. Among his other notable books are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He died of tuberculosis and he is buried in his family's plot near the graves of his friends Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, and Channing on Author's Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Thu, Jul 01, 2010
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his plays. Success, however, was short-lived. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde lost the case and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
*Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Thu, Jul 01, 2010
Walter Scott (1771-1832), considered the inventor and master of the historical novel, wrote The Heart of the Mid-Lothian, Rob Roy, Old Morality, and Waverley, as well as narrative poems, a nine-volume Life of Napoleon, and a history of Scotland.
*The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thu, Jul 01, 2010
FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY (1821–1881) was born in Moscow, the son of a surgeon. Leaving the study of engineering for literature, he published Poor Folk in 1846. As a member of revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg, he was condemned to death in 1849. A last-minute reprieve sent him to Siberia for hard labor. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1859, he worked as a journalist and completed his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, as well as other works, including The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
Tom Sawyer Detective/Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain
Thu, Jul 01, 2010
MARK TWAIN (1835–1910), was born Samuel L. Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri. His masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are not only classics of humorous writing but also a graphic picture of nineteenth-century America.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Tue, Jun 01, 2010
Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857 and grew up under Tsarist autocracy. In 1874 Conrad traveled to Marseilles, where he served in French merchant vessels before joining a British ship in 1878 as an apprentice. In 1886 he obtained British nationality. Eight years later he left the sea to devote himself to writing, publishing his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1895. The following year he settled in Kent, where he produced within fifteen years such modern classics as Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. He continued to write until his death in 1924.
*The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tue, Jun 01, 2010
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) was born in Scotland. He studied engineering and law at the University of Edinburgh and then began writing while traveling in France. The publication of Treasure Island in 1883 brought him fame and entered him on a course of romantic fiction beloved by young and old alike.
*The Last Cavalier by Alexandre Dumas
Tue, Jun 01, 2010
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1802–1870), French novelist and playwright, was born the son of an innkeeper’s daughter and one of Napoleon’s generals. He moved to Paris in 1823 to make his fortune in the theater, and at twenty-eight he was one of the leading literary figures of his day. His complete works were eventually to fill over three hundred volumes, and his stories made him the best-known Frenchman of his age.
*Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tue, Jun 01, 2010
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian novelist, social reformer and pacifist, whose classic novels include War and Peace and Anna Karenina, widely regarded as masterpieces for the scope, breadth and realism of their depiction of Russian life.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Sat, May 01, 2010
Though primarily known for her novel and short stories, Elizabeth Gaskell has a non-fiction work of both literary and historical importance: she wrote the first biography of Charlotte Bronte.
From Shakespeare with Love by William Shakespeare
Thu, Apr 01, 2010
William Shakespeare, believed to have been born on April 23, 1564, died on his birthday, in 1616.
The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson
Thu, Apr 01, 2010
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is one of the most famous popular authors of modern times. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland the novelist, poet and travel writer was the author of world famous books such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as this classic and much loved children's poetry collection A Child's Garden of Verse.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Jack London (1876-1916), by turns a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent, and an avowed socialist, first achieved fame with The Son of the Wolf (1900), a collection of short stories drawn from his experiences in the Klondike gold rush. "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived, said Alfred Kazin.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 and was wildly popular for his poems, short stories, novels, and children's books. As the British Empire waned, he was dismissed as a "jingoistic imperialist," but in more recent times his reputation has been at least partly rehabilitated. In 1990, for example, Reader's Digest included Kim on a list of "The World's Best Reading," and for those who can accept its old-fashioned language and world view, the book still offers mystery, fun, and a kaleidoscopic view of India in the late 19th century
The Odyssey by Homer
Mon, Feb 01, 2010
W.H.D. Rouse was one of the great 20th century experts on Ancient Greece, and headmaster of the Perse School, Cambridge, England, for 26 years. Under his leadership the school became widely known for the successful teaching of Greek and Latin as spoken languages. He derived his knowledge of the Greeks not only from his wide studies of classical literature, but also by travelling extensively in Greece. He died in 1950.
The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde
Mon, Feb 01, 2010
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and author of short stories. He was the author of the Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Happy Prince and many other works.