TOP-100 audiobooks online, page 56

The Praise of Folly (Greek title: Morias Enkomion (Μωρίας Εγκώμιον), Latin: Stultitiae Laus, sometimes translated as In Praise of Folly, Dutch title: Lof der Zotheid) is a satirical essay written in 1509 by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69-1536). It is considered one of t...

A self-serving Spaniard discovers a means of traveling to the moon, describing his sensations in transit in terms remarkably consistent with modern astronauts' experiences. He finds on the moon a utopia, which he describes in detail, but being a fallen creature, he takes the firs...

The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society.The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from recepti...

Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick (1428-1471), wealthy and powerful peer of England, was one of the leaders of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). He joined Richard, Duke of York in opposing the ineffectual and often incapacitated Lancastrian king, Henry VI. Falling out with Y...

Terence's six plays are comedies written while he was a slave to a Roman senator. NOTE: the main plot elements in Hecyra are quite unacceptable today: Pamphilus has just married a woman he does not recognize that he had earlier raped in a drunken fit; nor does she recognize him. ...

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) was an American author of the naturalist school, known for dealing with the gritty reality of life. Sister Carrie (1900) is his first novel and tells the story of a young country girl who moves to the big city (Chicago) where she starts realizing h...

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) wrote eighty-eight Encyclicals during his twenty-five year pontificate (1878-1903). Fifty-six of those are included in this collection. Among the topics covered are the Rosary, socialism, Christian marriage, labour, freemasonry, Church and sta...

The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (in the original Italian, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri) is a collection of biographies of Italian artists writt...

Dracula as written by Bram Stoker in 1897 was not the first depiction of vampires and other such creatures, Gothic horror stories had been around since the early part of the century. The story related by Bram Stoker is told in an epistolary fashion utilising the journals and diar...

Marguerite St. Juste was Irish on her mother's side, who was born of the Desmonds of Desmondstown in the County Kerry. Marguerite's father was a French Comte, whose grandfather had been one of the victims of the guillotine. Both her parents are dead and she is being brought up by...

A melodramatic folksy Christmas story, a little like Dickens - with a Tiny Tim, but also with some romance. Tarkington's writings are very much set in his early 1900s American culture. We are meant to sympathize with the crippled child but not even notice the slights to the black...

A romance, a shipwreck and a hunt for buried Portuguese treasure in the Transvaal. All the ingredients of an imperial adventure that made Haggard one of the best-selling authors of the early years of the twentieth century. Also published as Benita: An African Romance, The Spirit ...