Audio Books

Vicar's Daughter

George MacDonald
This is the third book of the 'Marshmallow' trilogy. It is a fictional autobiography written by Ethelwyn Percivale, or 'Wynnie'. Her father is a clergyman, Mr. Walton, whose history has already been told in "A Quiet Neighborhood", the first of the three books. Wynnie has a happy childhood and falls in love with a struggling artist. It is about Wynnie and her family, and her little circle of old and new friends. We learn much about the poor of society of that time. This book is set in the real, every-day world, and our narrator is serious when she calls her life ''quiet and ordinary''. Though there are some exciting incidents, visits made, and long conversations about God. This book is a delightful read.

Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

George Gissing
This novel consists of selections from the diary of an author, starting soon after his retirement and continuing until just before his death. There is very little in the way of plot, but a great deal of quiet musing about art, nature, society, and the things that make life worth living. Although this is a work of fiction, there are clear parallels between the narrator's life and Gissing's own life. This leads many commenters to view it as semi-autobiographical.

Bishop's Apron

W. Somerset Maugham
"Canon Spratte saw himself as he thought others might see him: mediocre, pompous, self-assertive, verbose." Maugham could have added ambitious, hypocritical, and vain. In this engrossing social satire, Theodore Spratte, a cleric, motivated by an obsessive desire to be elevated to bishop, embellishes his family history and intrudes upon his son's and daughter's courtships. A reviewer in 1906 wrote, "The whole book is an admirable blend of cynical gaiety and broadly farcical comedy; it is the smartest and most genuinely humorous novel that the season has yet given us." -- Lee Smalley

Diary of a Superfluous Man

Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype - the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet not necessarily dignified with the title Prince: an individual of comfortable means leading a dreary existence, without purpose and led on by events which may, as in this story, engulf him. The novella takes the form of a diary started by Tchulkaturin in the shock of being diagnosed as having a terminal illness. The journal entries cover a period of two weeks, leading to his death. Tchulkaturin quickly homes in on the only significant event in his life - an unreciprocated falling-in-love leading haphazardly to a non-fatal duel that leaves him desolated and fully conscious of the futility of his inactive existence.

Woman of Genius

Mary Hunter Austin
In this 1912 novel, Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) draws inspiration from her own life to tell the story of a gifted woman caught between her public ambition and her private desire. Beginning with her post-Civil War Midwestern girlhood, Austin chronicles the tumultuous life -- its romantic and artistic challenges -- of "tragic actress" Olivia Lattimore. With lyrical insight, she explores the many social and economic obstacles talented women like Olivia face in their pursuit of self-fulfillment. In America’s cynical Gilded Age, Austin asks, can a “woman of genius” find both happiness and success? Summary by Amy Dunkleberger

Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

Bertha von Suttner
Die Waffen Nieder, in English: Lay Down Your Arms is a fictional biography, which describes four wars from the perspective of a soldier's wife. The response to the book was worldwide; it became popular, and it can be described as the beginning of the peace movements of our times. Von Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize - she was a candidate since the first award-ceremony (according to Alfred Nobel himself). She foresaw and watched the rise of the First World War, was warning and campaigning against it; but died before the beginning of WW1. Her friend for years, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Alfred Fried, passed on her last words - they were the title of this book and a plea: „Die Waffen nieder! Sag’s vielen... vielen“ “Lay down the arms! Tell it to many... many”

Secret City

Hugh Walpole
Written in the first person, The Secret City is a novel in three parts of a journey through post World War I Russia and the Revolution, during a period of Civil War and economic collapse. Our hero sets sail in 1916 and is swept up into the Revolution.The memories of a more opulent life remain.

Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance

Mark Twain
Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, a short volume, published by Sheldon & Co., NY in 1871, is Mark Twain's third book. It consists of two stories - First Romance, which had originally appeared in The Express in 1870, and A Burlesque Autobiography (bearing no relationship to Twain's actual life), which first appeared in Twain's Memoranda contributions to the Galaxy. Rather, the content consists of a few short stories of fictional characters who are supposedly part of Twain's lineage. In the final passage, Twain develops the story to a point of crisis, and then abruptly ends the tale, saying:
“The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close place, that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it again—and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers—or else stay there. I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten out that little difficulty, but it looks different now. ”

With that, Twain's "Autobiography" ends.

The illustrations form an interesting aspect of this book. They have no relationship to the text of the book. Rather, they use cartoons illustrating the children's poem The House that Jack Built to lampoon the Erie Railroad Ring (the house) and its participants, Jay Gould, John T. Hoffman, and Jim Fisk.

The book was not one of Twain's personal favorites. Two years after publication, he bought all of the printing plates of the book and destroyed them.

Rogue's Life

Wilkie Collins
"[T]he story offers the faithful reflection of a very happy time in my past life. It was written at Paris, when I had Charles Dickens for a near neighbor and a daily companion, and when my leisure hours were joyously passed with many other friends, all associated with literature and art, of whom the admirable comedian, Regnier, is now the only survivor. The revising of these pages has been to me a melancholy task. I can only hope that they may cheer the sad moments of others. The Rogue may surely claim two merits, at least, in the eyes of the new generation—he is never serious for two moments together; and he "doesn't take long to read." W. C."

Friendly Road, New Adventures in Contentment

Ray Stannard Baker
My grandmother Gertrude received a copy of The Friendly Road for Christmas in 1919. It must have been a special gift book--green leather binding, gold embossing, a sheet of tissue paper protecting the color plate facing the title page--this a painting of a solitary man enjoying a swim in a sun dappled stream with the caption "Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this."

Written in first person, pseudo autobiographical style, the “author” of The Friendly Road, David Grayson, is a writer,* living on a farm with cows to milk, and ducks and pigs to feed, and fields in need of plowing. One day he just slings a few belongings in a pack and walks off, leaving the cows unmilked and his sister Harriet standing in the doorway. "My sober friend," Grayson writes, "have you ever tried to do anything that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane? Try it!" The rest of the book is an odd mixture of nostalgia for a gentler, kinder age; adventures, as Grayson relies on the charity of strangers to get by; with a bit of progressive politics thrown in. After bumming for several days, Grayson arrives in the "City," where a strike is in progress. He sympathizes with the workers, but he is appalled by "the ill-smelling streets and dirty sidewalks and swarming human beings . . . the evidences of poverty, dirt, and ignorance." And guess what? He returns home to his farm, and Harriet bakes him a rhubarb pie.

Gertrude, who had immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1892 at the age of 17, was 44 years old that Christmas. She was living on a fruit ranch in western Washington state, with her husband, a school teacher, also a German immigrant, whom she had married in 1898. She had 6 children, the oldest 20, the youngest only 2. The last few years had not been easy for this family. Gertrude's 10-year old daughter Mary, my mother, was slowly limping towards recovery from a bout of polio. Worse yet, during World War I Gertrude's husband was unjustly accused of being a "German sympathizer" despite the fact that his oldest son was a U.S. Army volunteer, and he was forced from his teaching post. His job loss meant more work for Gertrude, because, as my grandfather later explained to a journalist, after losing his job, he decided to “retire” to the country--"to live calmly, read Homer and Goethe and Balzac and Emerson (and) raise fruit and chickens."**

Gertrude entrusted several of her favorite books to my teenage self before she died in 1958. Another was a book of poems entitled Because I Love You, inscribed to Gertrude as a birthday present in 1897 by a young man who was not my grandfather! Books. . . choices . . .

*David Grayson was a pseudonym used by the actual author of The Friendly Road, Ray Stannard Baker.
**Louis Adamic ,”A Man from the Black Forest," in Two Way Passage (1941).
( summary by Sue Anderson)

Adventures of an Ugly Girl

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett
“Come, Dora! I shall never be ready, if you don’t make haste. They will be here in ten minutes, and my hair is not half so nice as it ought to be, thanks to your carelessness.”“You are very good to ignore my own claims to attention so utterly. I have been helping you this half-hour and have barely time enough left to change my frock. To make my own hair presentable is impossible now.”“Why, what does it matter how your hair is dressed, or what sort of a gown you put on? You may just as well spare your pains, for unfortunately nothing that you can do seems to mitigate your ugliness. I’m sure I cannot think where you get it. You are—”But, somehow, I did not feel inclined to wait for the end of Belle’s encouraging lecture. Perhaps it was because I was so often treated to my beautiful elder sister’s homilies that they had lost the spark of novelty and had acquired a chestnuty flavor. Perhaps I failed to recognize any generosity in her persistent efforts to nip such latent buds of vanity as from time to time tried to thrust their poor little heads above the chill crust of ridicule and contumely. Perhaps I was really as bad-tempered as I was said to be. Anyhow, my behavior could not claim to be either quiet or elegant as I stormily quitted Belle’s room, slamming the door behind me with such violence as to elicit from my more well-bred sister a little shriek of affected dismay. So far from feeling sorry that I had given Belle’s nerves a shock, I wished viciously that her fingers had been jammed in the doorway, or that something equally disastrous had occurred to take off the edge of her conceit and self-satisfaction." To be the homely sister is a torture to Dorrie, but she must make the best of it as she watches the beautiful Belle receive all the attention and adulation... but what choices will Belle make and what effect will they have on her life? And will Dorrie achieve the happiness even an ugly girl deserves?

Rise of David Levinsky

Abraham Cahan
Coming to New York from the Russian Empire, Abraham Cahan founded the Jewish Daily Forward to help Yiddish-speaking immigrants adjust to life in New York. He also became a popular novelist, best known for his semi-autobiographical The Rise of David Levinsky, about a Russian Jew who emigrates to America and rises from rags to riches. - Summary modified from Wikipedia

Proof-listened by marinal88 and Mark Chulsky

Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal

Sarah J. Richardson
Life in the Grey Nunnery was first published in Boston, in 1857 by Edward P. Hood, who was credited as the book's editor. It is likely that this account is by Sarah J. Richardson "as told to" Edward Hood, though it may in fact be completely fictional. It is clearly an anti-Catholic book, an example of the genre of fiction referred to as "the convent horror story."

As this summary shows, it is not known if this book is fictional or a true account.

Silas Strong

Irving Bacheller

Per the author: "The book has one high ambition. It has tried to tell the sad story of the wilderness itself—to show, from the woodsman's view-point, the play of great forces which have been tearing down his home and turning it into the flesh and bone of cities."But this story is much more than that. It revolves around Silas Strong and his distaste for the modernization and destruction of his beloved forest surroundings, and how it pleases him to teach younger folk how to appreciate that which has been given us. He takes matters into his own hands, as only Silas Strong can do.
Addison Irving Bacheller was an American journalist and writer who founded the first modern newspaper syndicate in the United States. He was a graduate of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York in 1882.

Lore of Proserpine

Maurice Henry Hewlett
If a thing is not sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it, is how the Greeks saw thunder-storms and other huge convulsions; that is how they saw meadow, grove and stream—in terms of their own fair humanity. They saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or of spiritual calm, and within the appearance apprehended the truth. So it may be that I have done. Some such may be the explanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact, I believe, that there is nothing revealed in this book which will not bear a spiritual, and a moral, interpretation; and I venture to say of some of it that the moral implications involved are exceedingly momentous, and timely too. I need not refer to such matters any further. If they don't speak for themselves they will get no help from a preface.

Sentimental Tommy

J. M. Barrie
"J. M. Barrie is most noted for being the author of Peter Pan, the beloved book about a child who does not want to grow up. The two Tommy novels, as they are collectively referred to, are also about a child who does not want to grow up. Yet, unlike Peter Pan, he has to. Tommy grows up in the slums of London at the end of the 19th century in difficult conditions. This book explores his boyhood. How would his childhood fantasies collide with the hard conditions in which he lives and the reality of his growing up? The Tommy novels are considered semi-autobiographical."

Rezanov

Gertrude Atherton
This novel by the prolific Californian author Gertrude Horn Atherton is based on the real life story of Nikolai Rezanov, a man who, in 1806, pushed for the Russian colonization of Alaska and California. "Not twenty pages have you turned before you know this Rezanov, privy councilor, grand chamberlain, plenipotentiary of the Russo-American company, imperial inspector of the extreme eastern and northwestern dominions of his imperial majesty Alexander the First, emperor of Russia—all this and more, a man." Twenty-one years later, Atherton penned the biography "Rezánov and Doña Concha" on the centennial of a famed romance between the statesman and a Spanish girl, who became a nun after his death.

Arabella Stuart

George Payne Rainsford James
Lady Arabella Stuart was an English noblewoman at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At one time considered to be a possible successor to Elizabeth I, the crown eventually went to her cousin, the tyrannical James I. Our story begins in 1603, shortly after his ascension to the throne. Apparently she was happy at the change in fortune, although relations with her kinsman deteriorated after her clandestine marriage, which was incorrectly seen as a power struggle. Even her closest friends could not protect her. In James's usual fashion, this is a colorful fictional account of her life.

Susan

Ernest Oldmeadow
Susan is a perfect gem of a maid until suddenly she begins to mess things ups and is so distracted that her mistress Gertrude is determined to find out what is bothering her. After much prodding Susan confesses that she has had a marriage proposal by letter from a Lord Ruddington whom she has never met. Should she accept?? Things get a little complicated as we follow this delightful story which unfolds in diary form written by Miss Gertrude. It will make you smile and sometimes laugh out loud. Enjoy!

Reveries of a Bachelor

Ik Marvel
Reveries of a Bachelor, or A Book of the Heart, is a novel by American author Donald Grant Mitchell published under the pseudonym Ik Marvel.Paul, the protagonist, vividly and emotionally recalls his life and loves as he sits by his fireplace smoking a cigar, his old dog sleeping at his feet. He muses on boyhood, the country lifestyle and travel, but especially on the young women he knew, or perhaps imagines he knew, through the years.The first two reveries were originally serialized in a magazine, and subsequently all four were published in book format. A bestseller, it was one of poet Emily Dickinson's favorite books. ( Lee Smalley)

Curiosities of Street Literature

Various
This is a collection of broadsides from London. Broadsides are short, popular publications, a precursor to today's tabloid journalism. The collection contains sensationalist and sometimes comical stories about criminal conduct, love, the Royal Family, politics, as well as gallows' literature. Gallow's literature (confessions, verses etc. relating to individuals condemned to public execution) were often sold at the execution. As a collection these broadsides are a reminder of how important the printer was at this time -- it is surely no coincidence that the printers are printed at the end of every broadside, while the authors remain anonymous.

Marge Askinforit

Barry Pain
A rollicking parody of the Margot Asquith memoirs, in which Pain's character, Marge, beguiles us with the most personal details of her dysfunctional family, and delights in relating every cringing, if not wholly accurate, minutiae of her exciting private life.

Jeremy And Hamlet: A Chronicle Of Certain Incidents In The Lives Of A Boy, A Dog, And A Country Town

Hugh Walpole
Hamlet is Jeremy’s dog. This 1923 book is Hugh Walpole’s second volume in his Jeremy semi-autobiographical trilogy (Jeremy (1919 available at librivox.org), Jeremy at Crale (1927, available at fadedpage.org)), about a ten-year-old English boy. One commentator wrote this of the first book: “With affectionate humor, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town…. Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things.”

English Audio Books

The most popular500

Children400

Fiction750

Fantasy350

Horror/Ghost stories700

Dictionary 180,000

Fiction364

Action & Adventure315

Animals & Nature275

Myths, Legends & Fairy Tales222

Family117

General102

Historical43

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Short works52

Non-fiction76

Reference5

Religion19

Science21

History14

Biography23

General113

Comedy76

Satire26

Tragedy & Drama101

Romance10

General694

Action & Adventure603

Classics (Greek & Antiquity)94

Crime & Mystery195

Detective322

Culture & Heritage127

Dramatic Readings151

Epistolary Fiction47

Erotica12

Travel Fiction42

Family Life123

Biographies & Memoirs73

Historical Fiction433

Humorous Fiction387

Literary227

Nature & Animal63

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Religious Fiction109

Romance477

Sagas16

Satire127

Sports Fiction9

Suspense & Espionage79

War & Military Fiction89

Westerns98

Fantastic Fiction103

Myths, Legends & Fairy Tales178

Horror & Supernatural Fiction150

Gothic Fiction25

Science Fiction490

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Short Stories260

Anthologies37

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Published before 180020

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General483

Anthologies44

Single author156

Ballads & Epics43

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Multi-version601

Non-Fiction427

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Animals62

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Biography & Autobiography360

Memoirs187

Business & Economics31

Crafts & Hobbies15