Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of f...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Orthodoxy is G. K. Chesterton’s response to his critics’ assertion that his earlier collection of essays, Heretics, had “merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.” In his intellectual journey from pagan to agnostic to positivist philosopher, he had attempted to build a philosophy “some ten minutes in advance of the truth.” But when he compared his modern philosophy with Christian theology...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. In the process of writing his memoirs, Arsène Lupin takes us back to his early twenties and his first love: Clarice d’Etigues. Although forbidden by her father to meet, that doesn’t stop Ralph d’Andresy—Lupin’s nom du jour—from wooing Clarice. But when he finds evidence on the d’Etigues estate of a conspiracy to murder a woman, he cannot help but be drawn into the ensuing threeway race to a legendary treasure. Memoirs of Arsène L...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Ardalyon Borisitch Peredonov believes himself better than his job as a teacher, and hopes that the Princess will be able to promote him to the position of Inspector. Unfortunately for him his connection to the Princess is through his fiancée Varvara, and she has her own plans. With little sign of the desired position his life of petty cruelty escalates, even as his grip on reality begins to break apart and his paranoia manifests ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Goodwill in the seventeenth century Polish Commonwealth has been stretched thin due to the nobility’s perceived and real oppression of the less welloff members. When the situation reaches its inevitable breaking point, it sparks the taking up of arms by the Cossacks against the Polish nobility and a spiral of violence that engulfs the entire state. This background provides the canvas for vividly painted narratives of heroism and ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is one of P. G. Wodehouse’s less famous characters. He first appears in Love Among the Chickens in 1906 and then continues to make appearances in another 19 short stories until as late as 1966, making him Wodehouse’s longest running character. Ukridge is an inveterate opportunist, and these stories chronicle his exploits as a young man: his trials and tribulations as one who is destined for great...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Affable and honourable, Lord Dawlish is the second poorest peer in England, relying on his income as a club secretary. Claire Fenwick, his beautiful fiancée, will not marry him until he has some money, so he draws up plans to travel to New York and make his fortune. When he unexpectedly comes into an inheritance, he attempts to give it to the person he believes is the more deserving recipient. This, however, proves more difficult...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. When Dorothy, ropedancer and palmist, arrives at the Château de Roborey with her circus, she’s already observed strange excavations at the grounds. Fate reveals a familial connection and drags her and her motley crew of war orphans into a quest for longlost ancestral treasure, but her newfound nemesis is always close on her trail. Maurice Leblanc, most famous for his Arsène Lupin stories, here switches to a new protagonist, but f...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The protagonist of this fictional autobiography wrestles with race in America from the perspective of someone who learns that he is considered black but also that he can pass as white if he wants to. His personal ambitiousness and racial ambivalence makes him a sort of American Hamlet: undone by indecision. Will he be “a credit to his race” by advancing an AfricanAmerican heritage he loves and appreciates in the face of a hostile...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Charing Cross Mystery follows a young lawyer, Hetherwick, who happens to be on a train alongside a former police inspector who dies suddenly in front of him. The other man in the carriage runs off at the next stop and vanishes. Hetherwick takes it upon himself to investigate what turns out to be a murder. J. S. Fletcher originally wrote the story in 1922 for a weekly magazine, who called it Black Money. It was published in a ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape isn’t one of his bestknown works, but it has gained popularity as an exploration of early American society. It was first produced in 1922 by the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts, embracing expressionism in its set design and staging, before moving on to Broadway, where it faced resistance from local and federal governments due to its radical views. The play examines the existential crisis of th...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus. In these disco...