I'm lucky!
Random audiobook

Searching by tag "Love"

Across the River and into the Trees - listen book free online

Ernest Miller Hemingway was the outstanding author, journalist, novelist, and short-story writer. His economical and understated style - which he termed the iceberg theory - had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established him as one of the greatest literary lights of the 20th century. His classic novella The Old Ma... Read More

The Garden of Eden - listen book free online

You definitely shouldn’t put The Garden of Eden on the back-burner in favour of Hemingway’s more famous works. The novel was published posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. Hemingway began The Garden of Eden in 1946 and wrote 800 pages. For 15 years, he continued to work on the novel which remained uncompleted. During that time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer... Read More

A Farewell to Arms - listen book free online

American novelist and short-story writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 Ernest Hemingway’ was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was leaving for the Italian Front in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1929, Ernest Hemingway’s classic A Farewell to Arms wa... Read More

A Canary for One - listen book free online

Ernest Miller Hemingway was the outstanding author, journalist, novelist, and short-story writer. His economical and understated style - which he termed the iceberg theory - had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Hemingway’s short story A Canary for One speaks leagues simultaneously about the author’s skill in observing irony in real life and colourfully painting it out in fiction, as... Read More

Jane Eyre - listen book free online

Most famous for her passionate novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë also published poems and three other novels. She was the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish crofter’s son who rose via a Cambridge education to become, in 1820, a perpetual curate at Haworth, in Yorkshire. Jane Eyre first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer Bell listed as the editor. It is... Read More

Wuthering Heights - listen book free online
Author: Emily Brontë
Reader: Hannah Gordon

Wuthering Heights is now a classic of English literature, but back in the Victorian era it was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby... Read More

Fellow Townsmen - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy is one of Britain’s greatest authors. Among his most famous works are Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. For a long time Thomas Hardy's short stories have suffered from critical indifference, perhaps, in part, because of the influence of assessments such as Irving Howe's that Hardy "seems to have regarded the writing of stories as mere journeyman's work by which to ear... Read More

Far from the Madding Crowd - listen book free online
Author: Thomas Hardy
Reader: Robert Powell

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England. Also, Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Ho... Read More

Emma - listen book free online
Author: Jane Austen
Reader: Belinda Lang

Jane Austen, for some, is simply the supreme English novelist, on any list. Some will say: she is the greatest. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Of... Read More

Persuasion - listen book free online

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Persuasion was the last novel Jane Austen completed, and it didn’t appear in print until 1818 after she had passed away. It’s also shorter than most of her other novels, and some critics think that, because she wrote t... Read More

Love and Freindship - listen book free online

The reception history of Jane Austen follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. During her lifetime, Austen's novels brought her little personal fame. Like many women writers, she chose to publish anonymously, but her authorship was an open secret. Jane Austen’s Love and Freindship is part of the second volume of Austen’s Juvenilia, short works she wrote from 1787 to 1793 mostly to ent... Read More

Sense and Sensibility - listen book free online
Author: Jane Austen
Reader: Julie Christie

Novel-writing was a suspect occupation for women in the early 19th century because it imperilled their social reputation by bringing them publicity, viewed as unfeminine. Therefore, like many other female writers, Austen published anonymously. Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen that was published anonymously in three volumes in 1811 and that became a classic. The satirical, comic w... Read More

Northanger Abbey - listen book free online

Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction - 'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, in 1803. However... Read More

The Gift of the Magi - listen book free online

William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. The Gift of the Magi is a short story by O. Henry first published in 1905. The story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christ... Read More

A Retrieved Reformation - listen book free online

O. Henry was an American short story author named William Sydney Porter, raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. Henry's rich canon of work reflected his wide-range of experiences and is distinctive for its witticism, clever wordplay, and unexpected twist endings. Set in the American Midwest during the early 1900s, A Retrieved Reformation concerns the surprising fate of Jimmy Valentine, a skilled... Read More

Complete Short Stories Collection - listen book free online
Author: O. Henry
Reader: Bob Thomley

William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. His stories were distinguished for their witty approach, use of words, effects of coincidence on their characters and most often for their surprise endings. His tales often dramatized the commonplace, especially the life of commoners of New York City. O. Henry was also a music enthusiast and a good... Read More

Cabbages and Kings - listen book free online
Author: O. Henry
Reader: Stan Pretty

William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, was an American short story writer. William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He changed the spelling of his middle name to Sydney in 1898. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favourite works were Lane's translation of One Thousand and One Nights and Burton... Read More

A Service of Love - listen book free online

We grow up hearing the phrase ''Love conquers all.'' O. Henry's short story ''A Service of Love'' is a great example of how love drives two people to sacrifice their ambitions for the sake of each other. O. Henry wrote about this kind of sacrifices before. In his story "The Gifts of the Magi”, a tale about a young couple, who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas g... Read More

Tender Is the Night - listen book free online

Before Francis Scott Fitzgerald died at the age 44, he thought he was a failure. His obituaries described him as an obscure writer who never fulfilled his early promise. Twenty years later, Fitzgerald was universally recognized as one of the great literary figures of the century and The Great Gatsby was widely acclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the modern era. Tender Is the Night is the... Read More

The Guermantes Way - listen book free online

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, known as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist. Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school, from 1890 to 1891 he published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel. Marcel Proust is best kn... Read More