Fiction - Literary audiobooks

Tar Baby - Abridged

By: Toni Morrison

Narrated by: Alfre Woodard

Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people... Read more

Service with a Smile

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Nigel Lambert

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

The description of his ancestral seat as an earthly paradise would, at present, have struck its proprietor as ironical, full as it was with unwanted and troublesome inhabitants. What Lord Emsworth needed above all was a rugged ally at his side to remove from Blandings its superfluous guests, leaving him in peace to tend his beloved pig, Empress... Read more

Peyton Place

By: Grace Metalious

Narrated by: Tim O'Connor

Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark underside of a small, respectable New England town was published in 1956, it quickly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. A landmark in twentieth-century American popular culture, Peyton Place spawned a successful feature film and a long-running television series—the first prime-time soap... Read more

The Kite Runner

By: Khaled Hosseini

Narrated by: Khaled Hosseini

Length: 12 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

A Stunning Novel of Hope and Redemption

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different worlds: Amir... Read more

The Kite Runner - Abridged

By: Khaled Hosseini

Narrated by: Khaled Hosseini

Length: 6 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: Yes

A Stunning Novel of Hope and Redemption

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different worlds: Amir... Read more

The Wandering Hill

By: Larry McMurtry

Narrated by: Alfred Molina

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

The second volume in Larry McMurtry's four-part historical epic featuring the Berrybender family as they continue their journey through the West during the 1830s.

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of... Read more

Getting Mother's Body

By: Suzan-Lori Parks

Narrated by: Suzan-Lori Parks

Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae’s burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a supermarket.

As Willa Mae’s only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother’s substantial but... Read more

Villa Incognito

By: Tom Robbins

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 7 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War.

Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore.

Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a... Read more

Three Junes

By: Julia Glass

Narrated by: John Keating

Length: 13 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret
sorrows of his... Read more

Cosmopolis

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Will Patton

Length: 5 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of White Noise comes a riveting exploration on wealth as a man's life gradually falls to pieces over the course of one day—now a major motion picture directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson.

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism—when the... Read more

Evenings at Five

By: Gail Godwin

Narrated by: Gail Godwin

Length: 1 hour 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Every evening at five o’clock, Christina and Rudy stopped work and began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour. Rudy mixed Christina’s drink with loving precision, the cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire over ice shards, before settling across from her in his Stickley chair with his glass of Scotch. They shared a love of language and music (she... Read more

Child of My Heart

By: Alice McDermott

Narrated by: Sheryl Bernstein

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

A young girl's astonishing, poignant first look into the turbulent heart of things"I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps....... Read more

The Short Stories Volume III

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Stacy Keach

Length: 4 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. Set in the varied landscapes of Spain, Africa, and the American Midwest, this definitive audio collection traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style -- from the plain bold... Read more

Middlesex

By: Jeffrey Eugenides

Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori

Length: 21 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a... Read more

The Stories of Tevye the Dairyman - Abridged

By: Sholem Aleichem

Narrated by: Theodore Bikel

Length: TBA

Abridged: Yes

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the buoyant, ingenious, compassionate, resilient, irrepressible, anxious, philosophical, God-loving, God-fearing, Bible-quoting dairyman whose life embodies the existence of a Jew in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.This program presents six of the... Read more

The Wishbones - Abridged

By: Tom Perrotta

Narrated by: Jack Hawkins

Length: TBA

Abridged: Yes

In The Wishbones, Tom Perrotta's characters are 90s adults still clinging to their 70s dreams. Thirty-one-year-old Dave Raymond has an adoring girlfriend and a steady gig as guitarist for The Wishbones, a New Jersey wedding band. He still lives with his parents, but that's a small price to pay for the freedom to play the music he loves.
Dave's... Read more

Morgen und Abend (Ungekürzte Lesung)

By: Jon Fosse

Narrated by: Joachim Nimtz

Length: 2 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

In Morgen und Abend erzählt Jon Fosse von einem großen Thema, dem Tod. Die Geschichte, in deren Mittelpunkt ein einfacher norwegischer Fischer steht, dessen Leben hart und erfüllt war, öffnet den Blick auf das, wovon heute kaum noch jemand spricht. Eine kunstvoll rhythmisierte, ganz schlichte Erzählung des Nobelpreisträgers, die bezaubert und... Read more

Sense and Sensibility - Abridged

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Julie Christie

Length: 5 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Listen to audio presented by Literary Affairs: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.View our feature on Jane Austen.

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo.... Read more

Samaritan - Abridged

By: Richard Price

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

Length: 5 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: Yes

After a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex–high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him. He begins teaching again, embarks on an affair with a married woman from the... Read more

Forever - Abridged

By: Pete Hamill

Narrated by: Stevie Ray Dallimore

Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From the bestselling author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life comes this magical, epic tale of an extraordinary man who arrives in New York City in 1740 and remains...forever.

From the shores of Ireland, Cormac O'Connor sets out on a fateful journey to avenge the deaths of his parents and honor the code of his ancestors. His quest brings him... Read more

Choke

By: Chuck Palahniuk

Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to... Read more

The Short Stories Volume II

By: Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by: Stacy Keach

Length: 4 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The definitive short story collection that established Ernest Hemingway's literary reputation, originally published in 1938.

Ernest Hemingway is a cultural icon—an archetype of rugged masculinity, a romantic ideal of the intellectual in perpetual exile—but, to his countless readers, Hemingway remains a literary force much greater than his image.... Read more

That Old Ace in the Hole - Abridged

By: Annie Proulx

Narrated by: Arliss Howard

Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love.

Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be... Read more

Seek My Face

By: John Updike

Narrated by: Kathryn Walker

Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. • “A brief novel of deep feeling.”—Time

On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old... Read more