Audiobooks online: genre "Literary Fiction", page 10

Charismatic Marian Forrester, the wife of a railroad pioneer, captures the heart of every person she meets. Niel Herbert is no exception. He has adored Mrs. Forrester since the age of twelve, considering her the epitome of feminine charm and grace. However, as Niel comes of age, ...

Pinafore’s sublimely silly story is made even sillier by this (ostensibly for children) 1908 story version of the 1878 Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Gilbert, the author of the operetta’s lyrics, writes this version of the story with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. Most ...

The Journal of Julius Rodman, Being an Account of the First Passage across the Rocky Mountains of North America Ever Achieved by Civilized Man is an unfinished serial novel by American author Edgar Allan Poe published in 1840. Six installments of the novel were published in Burt...

Howell’s novel is set in New York of the late nineteenth century, a city familiar to readers of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Basil March, a businessman from Boston of a literary bent, moves with his family to New York to edit a new journal founded by an acquaintance. Its finan...

In order to liven up the literary history of Great Britain in the 1890s (as if Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling, Hardy, etc., were not lively enough) Max Beerbohm wrote short biographies of six imaginary writers. Though their works of course no longer exist, he leaves the impressi...

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life is one of the last great works completed by Balzac for his huge novel series entitled The Human Comedy. Sections of this book, in various groupings and with various titles, were published between 1838 and 1847. It eventually settled into the four s...

When Helen Graham moves into old Wildfell Hall with her little son Arthur, the rustic neighborhood comes alive with gossip and speculation, particularly when saturnine Mr. Lawrence (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the child) begins to visit her clandestinely. Local gen...

Cousin Betty (La Cousine Bette), published in serial format in 1846, was one of the last and greatest of Balzac's works. It was part of his long novel collection titled La Comédie Humaine. Set in mid-19th-century France, it tells the story of a woman who resents her position as a...

In this work, first published in 1883, James once again writes of an American trying to settle in England. The woman at the center, however, is not a product of the Boston or New York upper classes, but of the American West, and is thus distinguished from the characters of many o...

Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real honour against shameless duplicity and subjects its principal characters to extremes of mental suffering that appear to be analogous to the (...

First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces, then retold out of sequence by a narrator who occasionally appears to be half asleep. That is not wholly wrong, yet many have seen in this ...

Catherine Vernon has a firm hand on her family and on the family business. Her plans for her young protege Edward, whom she loves like a son, are disturbed by the arrival of Hester, a 14-year-old girl who is just as strong willed. The conflict between Catherine and Hester is reso...