Literary Fiction Audiobooks | Literature

Pete Dexter (Author), Charles S. Dutton (Narrator)

Audiobook

"New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips magic is vibrantly alive, and it's on display in This Heart of Mine, the fifth book in her wildly popular Chicago Stars series! Molly Somerville loves her career as the creator of the Daphne the Bunny children's book series, but the rest of her life could use some improvement. She has a reputation for trouble that started even before she gave away her fifteen-million-dollar inheritance. Then there's her long-term crush on the quarterback for the Chicago Stars football team her sister owns—that awful, gorgeous Kevin Tucker, a man who can't even remember Molly's name! One night Kevin barges into Molly's not-quite-perfect life and turns it upside down. Unfortunately, the Ferrari-driving riving, poodle-hating jock isn't as shallow as she wishes he were, and she soon finds herself at a place called Wind Lake. Surrounded by paintbox cottages, including a charming old bed-and-breakfast, Molly and Kevin battle their attraction and each other as they face one of life's most important lessons. Sometimes love hurts, sometimes it makes you mad as hell, and sometimes—if you're lucky—it can heal in a most unexpected way."

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Author), Jennifer Van Dyck (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dandelion Wine

"Ray Bradbury's endearing, lyrical tale of boyhood and an idyllic Midwestern summer is presented here as a full-cast audio dramatization by The Colonial Theatre on the Air, complete with sound effects and a brilliant music score. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole world that lies beyond. For Douglas, summer is a pair of new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley bell on a hazy afternoon. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals that hold time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine that can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future."

Nancy Curran Willis, Ray Bradbury (Author), A Full Cast (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cossacks

"Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best. The Cossacks is based on Tolstoy's own forays into the Caucasus, abandoning his aristocrat life of gambling and carousing in Moscow and volunteering to be attached to the regular army. Leo Tolstoy's firsthand insight to the magnificent landscape and the colorful Cossack way of life is lushly descriptive, in a text translated from his manuscript by close friends. Olenin is an aimless young nobleman who is disenchanted with city life. Taking a post as a Cadet in the army, he finds himself assigned to the remote Cossack outpost in the Caucasus. It is here, among the Tatars, the Chechens, and the Old Believers, that he will fall in love with a beautiful Cossack girl. The only problem is that she is promised to a Cossack warrior. In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first is the dilemma of a young man who desires both fulfilling love and a place as a respected member of society. The other is the difficulty of a primitive society to accept domination by a higher culture that has no understanding of the traditions it asks its colonists to cast aside. AUTHOR Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born in 1828 about two hundred miles from Moscow. His mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. His parents were of noble birth, and Tolstoy remained acutely aware of his aristocratic roots, even when he later embraced doctrines of equality and the brotherhood of man. After serving in the army in the Caucasus and Crimea, where he wrote his first stories, he traveled and studied educational theories. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and for the next fifteen years lived a tranquil, productive life, finishing War and Peace in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877. In 1879 he underwent a spiritual crisis. Tolstoy then sought to propagate his beliefs on faith, morality, and nonviolence, writing mostly parables, tracts, and morality plays. He died of pneumonia in 1910 at the age of eighty-two. COMMENTARY Quotes about The Cossacks "The best story that has been written in our language."-Ivan Turgenev ""It was with a kind of amaze that I read [The Cossacks] and felt, word by word and line by line, the truth of a new art in it.""-William Dean Howells ""

Leo Tolstoy (Author), David Thorn (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bliss

"Already an international bestseller, this lyrical and moving story embodies the sweep and contradictions of modern Turkey. In a rural Turkish village, young Meryem is raped by her uncle, a sheikh in a dervish order. Outcast for shaming her family, she is locked in the cellar, where she is expected to kill herself. But she is defiant. Her commando cousin, Cemal, with whom she grew up, has returned a hero from fighting terrorists in the mountains. It is he who is chosen to execute his cousin outside the town, telling her he is going to "take her to Istanbul." In Istanbul, a media celebrity professor named Irfan leaves his wife and charters a boat to sail the Aegean. By chance, these three fugitives cross paths and embark on a journey that shows what unexpected things can happen in the space between wounded people."

O. Z. Livaneli (Author), Anna Fields (Narrator)

Audiobook

Season of the Snake

"From the author of Winter Range comes a powerful and frightening literary thriller of love, loyalty, and menacing secrets. Nance Able has finally recovered from the violent death of her first husband and is living a new life in the West with her second husband, Ned. When Meredith, her younger, errant sister, decides to move to the same town, Nance's long-sought happiness is threatened. As a snake scientist, she is attuned to the dangers of the natural world, but she is unaware of the danger in her own house. With Meredith's arrival, Nance begins to suspect her husband of being a sexual predator. As Ned's behavior unfolds, the two sisters struggle to come to some understanding of what separates them and fight to discover the strength they need to survive."

Claire Davis (Author), Hillary Huber (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel

"In late afternoon on November 7, 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal was abducted after field hockey practice at her all-girls New England prep school. Or was she? A few weeks later an unharmed Mary reappears as suddenly and mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming to have little memory of what happened to her. Her mother, concerned that Mary has somehow been sullied by the experience, sends her to therapy with a psychologist named Dr. Hammer. Mary turns out to be a cagey and difficult patient and Dr. Hammer begins to suspect Mary concocted her tale of abduction when he discovers its parallels with a seventeenth-century narrative of a girl who was abducted by Indians and later caused her rescuer to be hanged as a witch. Hammer, eager to further his professional reputation, decides to write a book about Mary's faked abduction, a project her mother sanctions because she'd rather her daughter be a liar than a rape victim. Fifteen years later, Mary has returned to Boston for her mother's funeral. Her abduction—real or imagined—has tainted many lives, including her own. When Mary finds a suggestive letter sent to her mother, she suspects her mother planned a reconciliation before her death. Thus begins a quest that requires Mary to revisit the people and places in her past. The Uses of Enchantment weaves a spell in which the power of a young woman's sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has a devastating effect on all involved. The riveting cat-and-mouse power games between doctor and patient, and between abductor and abductee, are gradually, dreamily revealed, along with the truth about what actually happened in 1985. Heidi Julavits is in full command of her considerable gifts, and has crafted a dazzling narrative sure to garner her further acclaim as one of the best novelists working today."

Heidi Julavits (Author), Shelly Frasier (Narrator)

Audiobook

Animal Farm

"Now an animated film adaptation produced and directed by Andy Serkis George Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution has become an intimate part of our contemporary culture, with its treatment of democratic, fascist, and socialist ideals through an animal fable. The animals of Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm are overworked, mistreated, and desperately seeking a reprieve. In their quest to create an idyllic society where justice and equality reign, the animals of Manor Farm revolt against their human rulers, establishing the democratic Animal Farm under the credo, “All Animals Are Created Equal.” Out of their cleverness, the pigs—Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball—emerge as leaders of the new community. In a development of insidious familiarity, the pigs begin to assume ever greater amounts of power, while other animals, especially the faithful horse Boxer, assume more of the work. The climax of the story results in a brutal betrayal, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: “But Some Animals Are More Equal than Others.” This astonishing allegory, one of the most scathing satires in literary history, remains as fresh and relevant as the day it was published."

George Orwell (Author), Ralph Cosham (Narrator)

Audiobook

Against the Day

"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck. -Thomas Pynchon"

Thomas Pynchon (Author), Dick Hill (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Long Night of Winchell Dear

"The steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and the squeak of an overhead fan turning slowly are soft but insistent, counting down the night, while the high desert thrums like a half-remembered Victrola song. The sounds are below the consciousness of Winchell Dear, an old-time gambler, a Texas poker player on the southern circuit, as he waits for something . . . something vague that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his way. In Diablo Canyon, a distant part of Winchell Dear’s ranch, Peter Long Grass squats by a campfire, contemplating the profile he saw moving along the ridge of Guapa Mountain an hour ago, thinking about the gambler’s housekeeper, Sonia Dominguez, about the small, quiet world he has fashioned far from civilization and what undefined presence might now be threatening it. He gathers his tools and begins to run across the desert floor. And boring toward all of them is a cream-colored Lincoln Continental with two men aboard. Traveling from Los Angeles on a mission they’ve been given, they are professionals, cool and implacable at the start, but becoming steadily more confused by the strange landscape they are passing through. Forty minutes from their task, they ready themselves, while a kitchen wall clock ticks its way through the long night of Winchell Dear. The Long Night of Winchell Dear finds master storyteller Robert James Waller at his best as he takes us into the shadowy world of high-stakes poker fought in the back rooms of Amarillo and Little Rock, and headlong toward the story’s stunning finale of chaotic terror, where an unexpected hero emerges."

Robert James Waller (Author), Richard McGonagle (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Aeneid

"From the award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey comes a brilliant new translation of Virgil's great epic Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles’ mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself--all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire. An unsparing portrait of a man caught between love, duty, and fate, the Aeneid redefines passion, nobility, and courage for our times. Robert Fagles, whose acclaimed translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were welcomed as major publishing events, brings the Aeneid to a new generation of readers, retaining all of the gravitas and humanity of the original Latin as well as its powerful blend of poetry and myth. Featuring an illuminating introduction to Virgil’s world by esteemed scholar Bernard Knox, this volume lends a vibrant new voice to one of the seminal literary achievements of the ancient world."

Robert Fagles, Virgil (Author), Simon Callow (Narrator)

Audiobook

[German] - Im Arbeitslosenpark

"Andreas 'Spider' Krenzke ist einer der bekanntesten Autoren der Lesebühnenszene, Mitbegründer von 'LSD - Liebe statt Drogen' und seit 2000 festes Mitglied bei den Surfpoeten. In seinen Texten seziert er die Umwelt mit messerscharfem Blick, seine Geschichten sind facettenreich, hintergründigund voller Humor. br>Man wundert sich beim Lesen über originelle Ideen und lacht über treffende Milieuschilderungen und skurrile Charaktere, die die Geschichten bevölkern. Spider beschreibt mit satirischem Blick das Leben der Underdogs in der 'Berliner Republik'. Der Download der Texte zum Buch enthält Live-Aufnahmen einiger Geschichten aus dem Baiz - von Spider selbst in seinem unnachahmlichen schnoddrigen Stil vorgetragen..."

Andreas Krenzke (Author), Andreas Krenzke (Narrator)

Audiobook

Literary Fiction Audiobooks in Literature