Literary Criticism audiobooks

Bulfinch's Mythology

By: Thomas Bulfinch

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

Length: 13 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

First published in three separate volumes from 1855 to 1863, Bulfinch's Mythology quickly became the standard source of classic tales from ancient Greece and Rome, the Norse tradition, and beyond. This edition contains the full text of The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, the first volume of Bulfinch's seminal work. From stories of... Read more

Leaves of Grass

By: Walt Whitman

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 15 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." And Ralph Waldo Emerson found Leaves of Grass "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," calling it a "combination of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald." Published at the author's own... Read more

The Souls of Black Folk

By: W. E. B. Du Bois

Narrated by: Richard Allen

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

W. E. B. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk, his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the... Read more

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

By: Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D.

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

You've heard of the "Great Books"?



These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad... Read more

Plato's Republic

By: Simon Blackburn

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 4 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Plato is perhaps the most significant philosopher who has ever lived, and The Republic, composed in Athens in about 375 BC, is widely regarded as his most famous dialogue. Its discussion of the perfect city—and the perfect mind—laid the foundations for Western culture and, for over two thousand years, has been the cornerstone of Western... Read more

La ciudad de los herejes

By: Frederico Andahazi

Narrated by: Walter Krochmal

Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

En la Francia medieval, el duque Geoffroy de Charny ha hecho uso de su malefica inteligencia para urdir un plan que le asegurara gloria y poder. Dominado por la ambicion, se propone revivir el caracter milagroso del Santo Sudario, la perfecta excusa que justifique la construccion de una iglesia para su propio provecho. Mientras tanto, su hija... Read more

Ex Libris

By: Anne Fadiman

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 4 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

Anne Fadiman is—by her own admission—the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring... Read more

Letters to a Young Poet

By: Rainer Maria Rilke

Narrated by: Marc Allen

Length: 1 hour 50 minutes

Abridged: No

These have been called the most famous and beloved letters of the past century. Rainer Maria Rilke himself said that much of his creative expression went into his correspondence, and here he touches upon a wide range of subjects that will interest writers, artists, and thinkers. This luminous translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's classic offers... Read more

How Dante Can Save Your Life

By: Rod Dreher

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 10 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher... Read more

The Opposite of Loneliness

By: Marina Keegan

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 5 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.



As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief,... Read more

Contested Will

By: James Shapiro

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 11 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in... Read more

Harry, a History

By: Melissa Anelli

Narrated by: Renée Raudman

Length: 10 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

During the brief span of just one decade, hundreds of millions of perfectly ordinary people made history: they became the only ones who would remember what it was like when the Harry Potter saga was still unfinished. What it was like to seek out friends, families, online forums, fan fiction, and podcasts to get a fix between novels. When the... Read more

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

By: Pierre Bayard

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 4 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Eliminate the impossible, Sherlock Holmes said, and whatever is left must be the solution. But, as Pierre Bayard finds in this dazzling reinvestigation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, sometimes the master missed his mark. Using the last thoughts of the murder victim as his key, Bayard unravels the case, leading the reader to the astonishing... Read more

The Clothing of Books

By: Jhumpa Lahiri

Narrated by: Jhumpa Lahiri

Length: 58 minutes

Abridged: No

A deeply personal reflection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake that explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer.

How do you clothe a book? Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform;... Read more

A Tale of Love and Darkness

By: Amos Oz

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 23 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve... Read more

What Fire Cannot Burn

By: John Ridley

Narrated by: Patricia R. Floyd

Length: 12 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

John Ridley is an acclaimed screenwriter and best-selling author. His first novel featuring LAPD mutant hunter Soledad O'Roark, Those Who Walk in Darkness, was an instant hit. Soledad's second adventure finds her hunting down a vigilante who is murdering metanormals indiscriminantly. She has no love for the mutants, but no one is above the law.... Read more

The Possessed

By: Elif Batuman

Narrated by: Elif Batuman

Length: 9 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year 


THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS

No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University... Read more

Reading between the Lines

By: Gene Edward Veith

Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach

Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

This is a guidebook for Christians who want to learn how to recognize books that are spiritually and aesthetically good—to cultivate good literary taste. Gene Edward Veith presents basic information to help book lovers understand what they read, from the classics to the bestsellers. He explains how the major genres of literature communicate and... Read more

The Ten-Cent Plague

By: David Hajdu

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 11 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between “high” and “low” art.David Hajdu... Read more

Talking about Detective Fiction

By: P. D. James

Narrated by: Diana Bishop

Length: 4 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

To judge by the worldwide success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Poirot, it is not only the Anglo-Saxons who have an appetite for mystery and mayhem. Talking about the craft of detective writing and sharing her personal thoughts and observations on one of the most popular and enduring forms of literature, P. D.... Read more

Notes of a Native Son

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: Ron Butler

Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin's most influential work!Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained... Read more

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

By: Helena Kelly

Narrated by: Emma Bering

Length: 14 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was.

In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena... Read more

Odyssey of the West V

By: Timothy B. Shutt

Narrated by: Timothy B. Shutt, Fred Baumann, Joel Richeimer ...

Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

In weaving together the varied and interrelated strands of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse and events, this course focuses on the contributions to Western history that bear the most responsibility for shaping the world of today. Among these contributions are such vital, yet markedly different documents as the Federalist Papers and... Read more

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War

By: Joseph Loconte

Narrated by: Dave Hoffman

Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Deepen your insight into and appreciation for the writings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as you explore the untold story of how the First World War shaped their lives, faith, and writings.Had there been no Great War, there would have been no Hobbit, no Lord of the Rings, no Narnia—perhaps even no conversion to Christianity by C.S. Lewis.The... Read more