Audiobooks online: genre "Literary Fiction", page 8

"The Rover: A weekly magazine of tales, poetry and engravings, original and selected" was a magazine started in 1843 by Seba Smith and Lawrence Labree. The editors aimed at a high quality standard in their selection of short stories and poetry. Every half-year, the 26 weekly issu...

Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. In it he contemplates man's beliefs, and questions whether or not one faith has value over another--or is it all simply a sham? Mardi is a poetically existential analysis of religious truths as told through the protagonist's allego...

This extract, taken from Parodies of the works of English and American Authors, vol 1, of parodies of Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade covers such topics as the Clergy, the Fairer Sex, Doctors, Engineers and many others. - Summary by Kim...

An 1881 comic story by Nikolai Leskov, presented in the form of a traditional skaz or folk-tale, but entirely of Leskov's invention. It tells the story of a left-handed Russian artisan required to impress Tsar Nikolas I with his craftsmanship by outdoing some famous Englishmen wh...

Something along the lines of Dorian Gray as part of the Comedies Humane Philosophique, this is Balzac's first successful novel. He even wrote "criticisms" of the writing himself in promotion of the book, in addition to hyping the work before it even came out. It is a criticism of...

The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, a woman who is torn between her desire for luxurious living and a relationship based on mutual respect and love. She sabotages all her possible opportunities for a wealthy marriage, loses the esteem of her social circle, and dies y...

This is a story by the English writer Mary Elizabeth Hawker (1848-1908) entitled Mademoiselle Ixe, by[pseudonym] Lanoe Falconer. The manuscript had been previously rejected by many publishers. The heroine is a governess in an English country house. The mystery is cleverly handled...

As much as any other work of literature, Henri Murger’s 1851 collection of witty sketches Scènes de la vie de bohème shaped the later romanticized image of the bohemian artist: independent, insouciant, exuberantly lustful, devoted to Art for Art’s sake no matter how cold and hung...

Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), published in 1835, is widely considered to be Balzac's finest and most popular novel. It is set in Paris in 1819, after Napoleon's defeat and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. France was undergoing massive social upheaval, as the new bourgeo...

In a fit of drunkenness, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter to the highest bidder at a country fair. He lives with regret and swears off drink, until his wife and daughter return eighteen years later, when he is now well-off and the Mayor of Casterbridge. - Summary...

James Parsons comes home to Little Primpton after serving in the Boer War. The whole town is proud of their new hero, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for risking his life to save a fellow soldier. However, for Jamie, nothing is the same anymore. His varied experience after lea...

A collection of short stories on the South Sea Islands, among which are the famous "Red," "Rain," and "The Fall of Edward Barnard," the last of which contains the basic story of what came to be one of the most well-known among W. Somerset Maugham's novels, The Razor's Edge. - Su...