The reader portrays Swann's longing for the former courtesan Odette de Crecy, and Marcel's childish love for their daughter Gilberte, with exceptional passion.

Rachel Innes believes that her summer house in the Adirondacks is haunted. Her niece and nephew arrive one night for an unexpected visit and then, the next night, they find a body at the bottom of the circular staircase. However, what...

The first historical novel and an international bestseller. Sir Walter Scott was one of the bestselling novelists of the nineteenth century and is credited with establishing the historical novel. His first novel, Waverley (1814), te...

As his father lies dying, Joseph Wayne decides to trade his Vermont farm for a new life in California. Once established on his ranch, he comes to revere a huge tree as the embodiment of his father's spirit. Joseph's brothers and thei...

Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Ch...

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author's ambitious claim that the work 'was done to last ...

Tom Sawyer is back, and he's looking for adventure, as usual. This less-well-known tale of Tom's exploits is narrated by Huck Finn, who recounts their trip by river steamer to visit Aunt Sally in "Arkansaw." When the boys en...

Newland Archer is a young lawyer, a member of New York's high society, and engaged to be married to May Welland.Countess Ellen Olenska is May's cousin, and wants a divorce from the Polish nobleman she married. Intelligent and beautif...

The chief thing is that they all need him' -thus Dostoyevsky described Prince Myshkin, the hero of perhaps his most remarkable novel. As the still, radiant center of a plot whose turbulent action is extraordinary even for Dostoyevsky,...

After Jane Austen's earliest known writings, she began a more serious work, Lady Susan, in 1793 or 1794. It is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point ...

'Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a collection of narratives a frame story, written between 1387 and 1400, tells of a group of thirty people from all layers of society who pass the time along their pilgrimage to Canterbury by telling s...

From the wonderful landscapes of the Shire and Lothlorien, to the stark and sunless land of Mordor, the courageous Hobbits pursue their quest, bearing the awesome Ring of Sauron, the Dark Lord! This epic trilogy takes up where The Hob...

A masterpiece of modern Gothic literature, Something Wicked This Way Comes is the memorable story of two boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway, and the evil that grips their small Midwestern town with the arrival of a 'dark carn...

With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak d...

...a story of passion carried to within sight of the highest classical pitch. It must be one of the most cleverly and intricately constructed novels in the English language, a marvel of craftsmanship in which skill is given its proper...

Fully dramatized and produced with cinema-quality sound design and music, each title in Radio Theatre's Chronicles of Narnia is now available in a travel-friendly size. Hosted by Douglas Gresham, stepson of C. S. Lewis, these timeless...

A young boy in Hollywood struggles to comprehend his parents, sadly aging ex-movie stars who haven't a clue about bringing up children, and to make his own way in a bizarre world. Originally published in 1977, the novel takes place in...

Next to the Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the most widely read books in English and for good reason. Most critics consider it the greatest allegory in any language'yet its author was only a barely educated tinker, confined ...

This audio production features the famous Hollywood couple who starred in the award-winning movie, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Evan S. Connell's saga of marriage, family, and middle age on the plains of Protest...

Bram Stoker's classic novel of suspense and horror was a bestseller in Britain when it was published in 1897. A late 20th-century biographer of Stoker has suggested that famed Victorian actor Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked for m...

The time is the eve of the World War II. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing nov...

First published in 1931, this classic psychological melodrama has been viewed as more of a social document in his tragic legend of the South than mere story. From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, b...

The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne's follow-up to The Scarlet Letter, tells the story of an evil house that is haunted by the ghosts of its past and wrapped in the fear of the living.

A new edition of the classic selection of entertaining, poetic, and erotic stories ranges from lyrical love to high comedy and deals with such subjects as the exotic pleasures of Paris in the 1930s and a woman's awakening to her sexua...

Written in the 1840s, this collection of classic horror stories touches upon some of our greatest nightmares, and has retained the power to shock and frighten even now; includes the title stories, as well as "The Black Cat,"...

Swann's Way' is not a book to read on the train, skipping over the pages with one eye on the landscape; it is a book of true originality and profundity to the point of strangeness, claiming the reader's attention and even seizing it f...

Subject of this extraordinary novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides. "Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and ...

Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the ...

An intense, psychologically charged domestic drama, The Return is a brilliant and haunting exploration of the insecurities that lie at the heart of human relationships. With a Foreword by Colm Tóibín. When successful businessman Al...

In this brilliantly inventive collection of stories, the author captures the disparate lives of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street from marriages, car accidents, love affairs, and adoptions. Unabridged. 8 CDs.