Literary Fiction Audiobooks | Literature

"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 is an author, he a composer, after all), a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with popes, and nearly thirty years of life together. What did I think, that we had forever? muses Christina, seven months after Rudy’s unexpected death. While coming to terms with her loss, with the space that Rudy once inhabited, Christina reflects on their vibrant bond—with all its quirks, habits, and unguarded moments—as well as her passionate sorrow and her attempts to reposition herself and her new place in the very real world they shared. In this literary jewel, a bittersweet novella of absence and presence and the mysterious gap between them, Gail Godwin has performed a small miracle. In essence, Evenings at Five is a grief sonata for solo instrument transposed into words. Interwoven with meditations and movements, full of aching truths and a wicked sense of humor, it exquisitely captures the cyclical nature of commitment—and the eternal quality of a romance completed."

Gail Godwin (Author), Gail Godwin (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Short Stories Volume III

"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 language of this first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude. These stories showcase the singular talent of a master, the most important American writer of the twentieth century. The Short Stories Volume III features Stacy Keach reading such favorites as: An Alpine Idyll, A Pursuit Race, Today is Friday, Banal Story, Now I Lay Me, After the Storm, A Clean, Well-lighted Place, The Light of the World, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, The Sea Change, A Way You'll Never Be, The Mother of the Queen, One Reader Writes, Homage to Switzerland, A Day's Wait, A Natural History of the Dead, Wine of Wyoming, The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio, and Fathers and Sons. ALL STORIES ARE UNABRIDGED"

Ernest Hemingway (Author), Stacy Keach (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Short Stories Volume II

"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. Of all of Hemingway's canonical fictions, perhaps none demonstrate so forcefully the power of the author's revolutionary style as his short stories. In classics like "Hills like White Elephants," "The Butterfly in the Tank," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Hemingway shows us great literature compressed to its most potent essentials. We also see, in Hemingway's short fiction, the tales that created the legend: these are stories of men and women in love and in war and on the hunt, stories of a lost generation born into a fractured time. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway presents many of Hemingway's most famous classics alongside rare and unpublished material: Hemingway's early drafts and correspondence, his dazzling out-of-print essay on the art of the short story, and two marvelous examples of his earliest work—his first published story, "The Judgment of Manitou," which Hemingway wrote when still a high school student, and a never-before-published story, written when the author was recovering from a war injury in Milan after WWI. This work offers vital insight into the artistic development of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. It is a perfect introduction for a new generation of Hemingway readers, and it belongs in the collection of any true Hemingway fan."

Ernest Hemingway (Author), Stacy Keach (Narrator)

Audiobook

Choke

"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 send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve."

Chuck Palahniuk (Author), Chuck Palahniuk (Narrator)

Audiobook

Swan

"By the #1 bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany and In Tuscany, Swan is a haunting novel set in the deep South -- a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light. In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers."

Frances Mayes (Author), Debra Monk (Narrator)

Audiobook

All is Vanity: A Novel

"In All is Vanity, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood and now living on opposite coasts, reach their mid-thirties and begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides the best way to rectify this is to quit her job and whip out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately and humiliated at every turn, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband's new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that's better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and against her better nature, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend's stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for the world's regard, Margaret rashly sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel's suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal. Widely celebrated for her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz once again proves herself to be a writer of remarkable depth and range. Like Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires."

Christina Schwarz (Author), Blair Brown (Narrator)

Audiobook

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

"An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling."

Dai Sijie (Author), B. D. Wong (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Volume I

Ernest Hemingway (Author), Stacy Keach (Narrator)

Audiobook

Spoon River Anthology

"Deemed 'essential' in the canon of American literature, this audiobook masterpiece performed in its entirety by a full cast of fifty makes the classic accessible to everyone. From a cemetery in a fictional mid-American town, the dead speak the truths about their lives. Some speak of hardships and sordid affairs, while others speak of their simple, honest, happy lives. Some are elderly and others are youthful or children, but mortality has claimed them all. Their voices reach us deeply—alternately plaintive, anguished, enigmatic, angry, contemptuous, and comedic, evoking themes of love, hope, disappointment, despair, and abiding faith. As the Spoon River residents examine their lives, they invite us to do the same."

Edgar Lee Masters (Author), Ed Asner, Patrick Fraley, a full cast (Narrator)

Audiobook

Jackson's Dilemma

"Edward Lannion is to marry the lovely Marian Fox. But on the eve of the wedding, Marian's note leaves everyone in a tizzy and full of questions: Where is Marian? And who is Jackson? In this intricately plotted novel, a mysterious, charismatic English butler derails the marriage of his master, a young aristocrat, and his fiancé, sending them both off on strange, dark, and amusing paths."

Iris Murdoch (Author), Juliet Mills (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blessings

"Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard home on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work there are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep the child . . . while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him. Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present; what makes a person or a life legitimate or illegitimate and who decides; and the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community. This is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about whom The Washington Post Book World said, “Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.”"

Anna Quindlen (Author), Joan Allen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Good Harbor

"Anita Diamant, whose rich portrayal of the biblical world of women illuminated her acclaimed international bestseller The Red Tent, now crafts a moving novel of contemporary female friendship. Good Harbor is the long stretch of Cape Ann beach where two women friends walk and talk, sharing their personal histories and learning life's lessons from each other. Kathleen Levine, a longtime resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is maternal and steady, a devoted children's librarian, a convert to Judaism, and mother to two grown sons. When her serene life is thrown into turmoil by a diagnosis of breast cancer at fifty-nine, painful past secrets emerge and she desperately needs a friend. Forty-two-year-old Joyce Tabachnik is a sharp-witted freelance writer who is also at a fragile point in her life. She's come to Gloucester to follow her literary aspirations, but realizes that her husband and young daughter are becoming increasingly distant. Together, Kathleen and Joyce forge a once-in-a-lifetime bond and help each other to confront scars left by old emotional wounds."

Anita Diamant (Author), Linda Emond (Narrator)

Audiobook

Literary Fiction Audiobooks in Literature