The time is the eve of the World War II. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing nov...

Written in the 1840s, this collection of classic horror stories touches upon some of our greatest nightmares, and has retained the power to shock and frighten even now; includes the title stories, as well as "The Black Cat,"...

Swann's Way' is not a book to read on the train, skipping over the pages with one eye on the landscape; it is a book of true originality and profundity to the point of strangeness, claiming the reader's attention and even seizing it f...

Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the ...

A collection of five short stories by influential women writers from the close of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century include contributions from Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, and Virginia Woolf. Read by Liza...

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate fai...

A mission to rid the seas of a monstrous creature becomes a terrifying nightmare when Professor Arronax, Conseil and Ned Land are thrown overboard. The huge marine animal which has haunted the water is no living beast, but a spectacul...

Madame Bovary is perhaps the first 'modern' novel.  It has always been the most popular of Flaubert's books, and the character of Emma Bovary, a beautiful young woman longing to escape from her dull husband and the constrictions of ...

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmloads surrounding Augustus, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of destitute white sharecroppers debased by poverty to an elemental ...

TIME REGAINED, the final volume of Proust's great work, covers the years of World War I and its aftermath. Marcel returns to Paris, sees many of the people he once knew (now grown old and grotesque), and finds that the thrice-married ...

In early 1901, fifteen years after Little Lord Fauntleroy, and ten years before the Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson wrote the Making of a Marchioness. She followed this short novel in the spring of the same year with the sequel, The M...

Memorable retelling of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, written for younger readers by Ireland's great poet and illustrator, recalls the perilous journey of Odysseus and his encounters with the horrid Cyclops, treacherous Sirens, and evil C...

The Gambler paints a stark picture of the attractions---and addictions---of gambling. Using skillful characterization, Fyodor Dostoevsky faithfully depicts life among the gambling set in old Germany.

The bizarre story of a young man who awakens to find himself transformed into a large beetle is masterfully presented in this recording of Kafka's fascinating, sometimes disturbing and ultimately tragic study of human nature.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,' the only full-length novel that Edgar Allan Poe wrote, is the story of a boy, Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship. Along with Augustus, the captain's son, Arthur Gordon Pym avoids discover ab...

The heroine of this powerful novel is the spirited young American Isabel Archer. Blessed by nature and fortune, she journeys to Europe to seek her future, but what she finds may prove to be her undoing. She is courted by three men: ...

According to legend, Sweeney Todd had his barber shop at number 186 Fleet Street, next door to St. Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150...

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's eth...

First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale of the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fasci...

Barnaby Rudge, set against the background of the anti-catholic riots of the 1780s, follows the plight of young Barnaby and his widowed mother. Martin Chuzzlewit is a darkly comic masterpiece in which a disinherited Martin sets sail fo...

Three of Charles Dickens's much-loved Christmas novellas---The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man---are brought to life in this classic audiobook collection.

Les Miserables is primarily a great humanitarian work that encourages compassion and hope in the face of adversity and injustice. It is also a historical novel of great scope, and provides a detailed vision of nineteenth-century Frenc...

While Europe drifts toward Nazism, four students share an apartment in Paris. Thackara brilliantly forges the stories of these four men whose lives mirror the larger picture, while the listener follows Hitler's rise from a dozen diffe...

The works collected here span the early and late periods of Henry James' career. Widely considered the finest of his early novels, The Portrait of a Lady exemplifies a familiar theme in James' writing: the meeting of Europe and Americ...

Indoors are her duties. There, too, is The Man of Wrath, her upright Teutonic husband. But outdoors, Elizabeth can escape her domestic routine to read books, play with her three babies, and garden to her hearts content.

In his National Book Award winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It...

When a jealous Zeus discovers that the compassionate Titan, Prometheus, has introduced the gift of fire to liberate mere mortals from oppression and servitude, he has Prometheus bound to a rocky prison in the Scythian desert, where th...

The only complete trilogy to survive from the ancient Greek theater is here presented in the first sound recording of all three plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes the myth ...

A collection of BBC radio full-cast dramatisations of Jane Austen's six major novels Jane Austen is one of the finest writers in the English language, and this volume includes all six of her classic novels.Mansfield Park: On a quest t...

Experience four of Austen's classic novels as lively full-cast radio dramas! This gift collection includes Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey.