Classics audiobooks

As I Lay Dying

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Various

Length: 6 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

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

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Selected Short Stories

One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying,... Read more

The Notebook

By: Nicholas Sparks

Narrated by: Barry Bostwick

Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Experience the unforgettable, heartbreaking love story set in post-World War II North Carolina about a young socialite and the boy who once stole her heart -- one of PBS's "Great American Reads".

Every so often a love story so captures our hearts that it becomes more than a story -- it becomes an experience to remember forever. The Notebook is... Read more

Romeo und Julia (Ungekürzt)

By: William Shakespeare

Narrated by: Katharina Thalbach

Length: 3 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Das größte Liebesdrama der Weltliteratur: von jugendlichem Übermut und altem Hass. Das um 1595/96 entstandene Drama gilt als erste Liebestragödie der englischen Literatur und ist bis heute eines der erfolgreichsten Stücke von William Shakespeare. "Die Thalbach spricht alle Rollen, ist mit krächzender Stimme die komische Amme, gibt dunkel rauchig... Read more

The Sound and the Fury

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin.  •  The definitive corrected text, including Faulkner's Appendix

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

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the... Read more

The Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Audio Collection - Abridged

By: Kurt Vonnegut

Narrated by: Kurt Vonnegut

Length: 4 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself reads from his most celebrated works: Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and three complete stories from Welcome to the Monkey House. Read more

The Sibyl

By: Pär Lagerkvist

Narrated by: Lorna Raver, Kristoffer Tabori & Yuri Rasovsky

Length: 4 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In this powerful, poetic, and moving parable, the Wandering Jew of medieval Christian legend journeys to Delphi to consult the famed oracle of the pagans. He is turned away, but not before learning that one of the most adept of the old priestesses, or sibyls, lives in disgrace in the mountains above the temple. In her rude goat-hut he seeks the... Read more

Winesburg, Ohio

By: Sherwood Anderson

Narrated by: various narrators, Bruce Blau, David Thorn, Jim...

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young... Read more

Matador

By: Barnaby Conrad

Narrated by: Barnaby Conrad

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

It is the morning of Pacote’s last fight, the finale of one of the greatest careers in Spain. The posters are up, the great black bulls are waiting, and a heavy air of expectancy hangs over the city. Pacote, alone in his dressing room, feels the heavy ball of fear pressing against his heart. For he knows that he has been falling off, that he... Read more

Ringworld

By: Larry Niven

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 11 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, Ringworld remains a favorite among science fiction readers.The artifact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its center. Pierson’s puppeteers—strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens—discovered this “Ringworld” in a hitherto unexplored part of... Read more

Sister Carrie

By: Theodore Dreiser

Narrated by: C. M. Hébert

Length: 17 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face. Adrift in an indifferent city, she struggles from the sweatshop to stage success and inspires an obsessive love in a married... Read more

The Phantom of the Opera

By: Gaston Leroux

Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard

Length: 7 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

A shadow of unease, a quickening pulse, an unnamed fear breathing on the collar of those who sit alone in their dressing rooms at the great Paris Opera.An unbearable compulsion to glance quickly over a shoulder in the dark corridors to the stage would sometimes reveal a figure in evening clothes moving softly in the shadows—a figure no one could... Read more

The Coin of Carthage

By: Bryher

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

The war that began in 218 BC with Hannibal’s march across the Alps is one of the familiar stories of history, but its details are little known. A struggle between an emerging barbarian power and an old culture, it pitted a Roman army of mostly farmers against the highly trained officers of Carthage. Hannibal’s empire, founded on her control of... Read more

Moby-Dick - Abridged

By: Herman Melville

Narrated by: William Hootkins

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Moby-Dick is one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong... Read more

Frankenstein - Abridged

By: Mary Shelley

Narrated by: Richard Pasco

Length: 3 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The epic battle between man and monster reaches its greatest pitch in the famous story of Frankenstein. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor himself to the very brink. How he tries to destroy his creation, as... Read more

Crime and Punishment - Abridged

By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Narrated by: Alex Jennings

Length: 5 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police... Read more

Great Expectations - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Hugh Laurie

Length: 2 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The orphan Pip’s terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his “great expectations.” How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients... Read more

Dracula - Abridged

By: Bram Stoker

Narrated by: Richard E. Grant

Length: 2 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."

A popular bestseller in Victorian England,... Read more

A Tale of Two Cities - Abridged

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Ian Richardson

Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: Yes

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the... Read more

The Scarlet Letter - Abridged

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Narrated by: Elizabeth McGovern

Length: 3 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

'Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.' A tale of sin, punishment and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as the first real... Read more

Heart of Darkness - Abridged

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Joss Ackland

Length: 3 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: Yes

‘The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.’ At the peak of European Imperialism, steamboat captain Charles Marlow travels deep into the African Congo on his way... Read more

Kidnapped - Abridged

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

Narrated by: Tom Conti

Length: 2 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The classic adventure story of kidnap, shipwreck, murder and pursuit as young David Balfour tries to claim the inheritance he has been cheated out of. ‘I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.’ Orphaned as a young teenager, Lowlander... Read more

Ivanhoe - Abridged

By: Sir Walter Scott

Narrated by: Brian Cox

Length: 3 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Set in the 12th century, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, Ivanhoe tells of the love of Wilfred of Ivanhoe for the Lady Rowena, his father Cedric’s ward. Cedric intends Rowena for the oafish Athelstane, and banishes his son. 'The love of battle is the food upon which we live – the dust of the mêlée is the breath of... Read more

Gulliver’s Travels - Abridged

By: Jonathan Swift

Narrated by: Martin Shaw

Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Swift’s scornful satire, written “to vex the world rather than divert it”, takes a caustic look at those most contemporary concerns irrational prejudice, social inequality, ivory tower elitism and the correct way to open a boiled egg. 'I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little... Read more

Lord Jim - Abridged

By: Joseph Conrad

Narrated by: Joss Ackland

Length: 2 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: Yes

‘Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!’ Jim is a well-bred young romantic who takes to the seas with hopes of adventure and the aspiration to prove his mettle. When the boat he sails in threatens to sink, Jim abandons ship in fear in order to... Read more