Classics audiobooks

Far From the Madding Crowd - Abridged

By: Thomas Hardy

Narrated by: Julie Christie

Length: 3 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Thomas Hardy's novel is about a British farm girl and her effect on the men who fall in love with her. This rebellious young woman finds her affections a cause for competition between a soldier, a wealthy landowner, and a modest sheep farmer. Read more

Great Expectations - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Tom Baker

Length: 3 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Here is the story of Pip and his mysterious rise from abused orphan to gentleman. Magwitch, the brutal convict, withered Miss Havisham, still wearing her yellowed wedding gown, and the heartless and beautiful Estella, are vibrant characters. Listen in to this superb story told with typical Dickensian warmth and humor and woven around... Read more

Northanger Abbey - Abridged

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Joanna Lumley

Length: 2 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Jane Austen skewers the novelistic extremes of her day made popular in many 18th-century Gothic potboilers. Dilapidated castles, locked rooms, inexplicable chests, enigmatic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly sardonic twist. Read more

The Sea Wolf - Abridged

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Theodore Bickel

Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The is a tale of Humphrey Van Weydon, unwilling captive and crewman on a sealing ship of cutthroats, thrown in with the treacherous outcasts that man the ship, and ruled by Wolf Larsen - the Sea Wolf, a brooding, violent brute... the captain. Read more

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Abridged

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Donald Pickering

Length: 1 hour 11 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Dr. Jekyll is a caring doctor who experiments with drugs because he's certain that within each man lurk impulses for both good and evil. He soon discovers a drug to liberate the evil side within himself, becoming the hard drinking, woman-chasing Mr. Hyde. Jekyll quickly becomes addicted to the formula, unable to control the violent and unstable... Read more

The Gift of the Magi/The Last Leaf

By: O. Henry

Narrated by: B.J. Harrison

Length: 35 minutes

Abridged: No

A poor young couple demonstrates the meaning of love and self-sacrifice in the Christmas Classic, "The Gift of the Magi". Also included is "The Last Leaf". This tale follows a young woman artist who is stricken with pneumonia. She watches the leafy vine opposite her window with hollow eyes, and she determines to stay alive until the last leaf... Read more

The Magical Monarch of Mo

By: L. Frank Baum

Narrated by: James Jordan

Length: 3 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

The Magical Monarch of Mo (1898) was the first full-length children's fantasy book by L. Frank Baum. Originally published in 1899 as 'A New Wonderland', the book was reissued in 1903 with a new title in order to capitalize upon the alliterative title of Baum's successful 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. An amazing collection of juvenile short... Read more

The House of Mirth, with eBook

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 12 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her... Read more

The Bible and the Roots of Western Literature

By: Adam Potkay & Monica Brzezinski Potkay

Narrated by: Adam Potkay

Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

The Bible is renowned as a rich source of myth and parable, prose and poetry. Indeed, much of Western Literature owes an enormous debt to the unique and widely varied writings in this important religious text. Read more

The Moviegoer

By: Walker Percy

Narrated by: Christopher Hurt

Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

A winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer established Walker Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller. It is the tale of Binx Bolling, a small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a... Read more

The Castle

By: Franz Kafka

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

This edition of Kafka's terrifying and comic masterpiece is the product of an international team of experts who used Kafka's original text and notes to render this story as close to the author's vision as possible. Kafka's final novel tells the haunting tale of a man's relentless struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the... Read more

Children’s Stories by Oscar Wilde

By: Oscar Wilde

Narrated by: Stephen Fry

Length: 2 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Immerse yourself in a world where the wonderful Stephen Fry reads some of the more memorable Children’s short stories written by one of our most successful playwrights of all time. A brilliant combination of reader and writer come together in these seven short stories available on digital download only. Immerse yourself in a... Read more

Atlas Shrugged

By: Ayn Rand

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 62 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for... Read more

Short stories by Anton Chekhov

By: Anton Chekhov

Narrated by: Stephen Fry

Length: 1 hour 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Immerse yourself in a world where the wonderful Stephen Fry reads some of the more memorable short stories of our time. A brilliant combination of reader and writer come together in these seven short stories available on digital download only. Immerse yourself in a world where the wonderful Stephen Fry reads some of the more... Read more

The Courtship of Miles Standish

By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Narrated by: B.J. Harrison

Length: 1 hour 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Complete and unabridged, and read with meticulous care, in this story Miles Standish and John Alden both seek the hand of the fair Priscilla. See the Mayflower abandon the first settlers as it returns to England. Feel the heated vision of the Indians, perpetually keeping their watch in the dark forest. Love and adventure collide in one of... Read more

Eternal Chalice

By: Monica Brzezinski Potkay

Narrated by: Monica Brzezinski Potkay

Length: 7 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the many different ways writers of fiction and nonfiction have imagined, and reimagined, the object known as the Grail. We'll look at how the Grail was invented as a powerful literary symbol in the late 12th and early 13th centuries by a group of medieval romancers who celebrated the Grail as... Read more

The Graduate

By: Charles Webb

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 6 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

The basis for the acclaimed 1967 film, this novel about a naïve college graduate adrift in the shifting social and sexual mores of the 1960s captures with hilarity and insight the alienation of youth and the disillusionment of an era.When Benjamin Braddock graduates from college and moves back to his parents’ house, everyone wants to know what... Read more

The Canterbury Tales

By: Geoffrey Chaucer

Narrated by: various narrators, Ric Jerrom, Cameron Stewart,...

Length: 22 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

Beyond its importance as a literary work of unvarnished genius, Geoffrey Chaucer’s unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language—and for good reason: it is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny. But despite the brilliance of Chaucer’s work, the continual evolution of our language has rendered... Read more

The Reader

By: Bernhard Schlink

Narrated by: Campbell Scott

Length: 4 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time... Read more

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

By: Lewis Carroll

Narrated by: Harlan Ellison

Length: 3 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

This 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finds Carroll’s inquisitive heroine in a fantastic land where everything is reversed. Whereas the first book has the deck of cards as a theme, this book is loosely based on a game of chess, played on a giant chessboard with fields for squares. Alice encounters talking flowers, madcap kings and... Read more

The Invisible Man

By: H. G. Wells

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

On a freezing February day, a stranger emerges from out of the gray to request a room at a local provincial inn. Who is this out-of-season traveler? More confounding is the thick mask of bandages obscuring his face. Why does he disguise himself in this manner and keep himself hidden away in his room?Aroused by trepidation and curiosity, the... Read more

Look Homeward, Angel

By: Thomas Wolfe

Narrated by: Scott Sowers

Length: 26 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The works of Thomas Wolfe cemented his legacy as one of the very best of the American Southern writers. Wolfe's largely autobiographical novel features Eugene Gant, who pines for a more expansive life after being born to a father whose bouts of maniacal raving are fueled by a prodigious appetite for drink. "... rich and ambitious and intensely... Read more

Favorite Stories of Christmas Past, with eBook

By: Louisa May Alcott, Christopher Andersen, Franci...

Narrated by: Renée Raudman & Alan Sklar

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Tantor Media presents a collection of some of the most popular Christmas stories read by award-winning narrators Renée Raudman and Alan Sklar. This special anthology will transport listeners back to the Christmases of their youth, when they first heard these holiday tales. From "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," Clement C. Moore's classic... Read more

The Turn of the Screw

By: Henry James

Narrated by: Vanessa Benjamin

Length: 4 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the world’s most famous intellectual ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw is a haunting tale of suspected supernatural possession. A governess at a country house claims that Miles and Flora, two orphaned children in her care, are being controlled by spirits for some evil purpose. No one else can see the ghosts, and the children themselves... Read more