Books published by publisher MP3 Audiobook Classics

North of Boston was Frost’s second book, a collection of seventeen poems published in 1914. It contains his famous classic poems such as “Mending Wall”, “Death of the Hired Man”, and “After Apple-Picking”. Most of the poems are dialogues or short dramas that evoke the style of speech and concerns of rural New England Yankees and clearly position New England as the locus and inspiration of Frost’s work. Frost’s concept of poetry centered on what he called the "sentence-sound," the tonal sound of a sentence separate from the sound or meaning of its words. The sound of the simple,direct and often spoken language here conveys the feel of the subject and the speaker beyond the strict meaning of the words. Frost conjures the sense of time and loss associated with the seasons and the sense of isolation and contemplation inherent in the rural environment. North of Boston was received well by critics and the reading public, and together with A Boy’s Will established Frost’s reputation. By the 1920’s he had become the most celebrated poet in America and remained so for the rest of his life.

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) is the second novel by P. G. Wodehouse featuring the unflappable character of Reginald Jeeves, valet to ditsy British aristocrat Bertie Wooster. Set mostly at Brinkley Court, the English country home of Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia (and the title of the U.S. edition), the story centers on a pair of romantic pairings, the first involving Bertie’s nerdy friend Gussie Fink-Nottle and the goofy Madeline Bassett, and the second his cousin Angela and chubby athlete Tuppy Glossup. Things are set in motion when Bertie visits to comfort his aunt after his cousin breaks her engagement with Tuppy, and discovers that she has lost considerable sums at the gaming tables at Cannes, which threatens her ability to finance her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir. Bertie dispenses questionable advice to all parties, things unravel in classic screwball comedy style, and at the height of the chaos Bertie throws in the towel and calls on Jeeves, the consummate “gentleman’s personal gentleman” and Bertie’s all-purpose guardian angel. Jeeves manages to get Bertie out of the way for a few hours, during which time he quickly solves all the problems. The novel is considered by many to be the best in the Jeeves canon of eleven novels and is famous for its episode of a drunken Gussie presenting the prizes at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School, which appears in many collections of comic literature and is thought by some to be the funniest piece of sustained comic writing in the English language. Parts of the story were featured in the English television series Jeeves and Wooster.

The term “enemy of the people” has entered our modern lexicon, thanks to the unprecedented attacks on the press by the United States President for its stubborn insistence on reporting things as they are, not as he wishes they were in his idiosyncratic, imaginary world of “alternative facts”and fawning sycophants. This is, unfortunately,not new. The term may have first emerged in the 1882 play An Enemy of the People, written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in response to the public outcry that greeted his play Ghosts. Both the play and author were called scandalous, degenerate and immoral for daring to have an open discussion of sex outside of marriage and of syphilis. The play’s action centers on the discovery that a town’s public baths have been contaminated by syphilis. Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the protagonist and the medical officer at the baths, argues that the town be notified immediately by the town paper. The mayor, his older brother Peter,wants to lay low and handle it differently. The editor of the paper at first agrees with the doctor, and then has a change of heart, fearing damage to the town’s economy. Unbowed, the doctor calls a town meeting, at which he castigates the authorities and the cowardice of the majority of the public. Insulted and enraged, the townspeople shout repeatedly that “he is an enemy of the people”. They further react by smashing his windows, firing his schoolteacher daughter,disinheriting his wife, and evicting them from their house. Apart from its title, the play remains highly relevant today for its consideration of environmental issues, irresponsible authorities, and the moral dilemmas and perils of whistle-blowing.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories featuring the iconic consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. The stories originally appeared in the Strand Magazine and numbered twelve in all in the first U.S. edition published in 1894. “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” was omitted from subsequent editions. No reason for the suppression has been explicitly given, but it is likely that it was removed at Doyle’s request. He felt that it was unsuitable for younger readers since it included adultery. The story was later included in His Last Bow.

The Elements of Style is a guide to writing American English written in 1918 by Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr. for use in the university. It was published by Harcourt in 1920 and became an indispensable tool for writers of all stripes. It consists of “eight ‘elementary rules of usage’, ten ‘elementary principles of composition’, ’a few matters of form’, a list of 49 ‘words and expressions commonly misused’, and a list of 57 ‘words often misspelled’. “ Originally a short 52-page manual, it was eventually revised by New Yorker writer E. B. White, who had studied under Strunk, used the manual, and wrote a feature on Strunk and his dedication to lucid English prose. The revised edition, often referred to as “Strunk & White”, sold over two million copies on release in 1959 and has sold over ten million copies in three editions. This audiobook is a reading of the original 1920 edition. Perhaps the highest praise came from American poet Dorothy Parker once proclaimed, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy." (Quotations from Wikipedia)

The Iliad by Homer is an epic of poem over 15,000 lines that recounts the conflict between Agamemnon, the man of power, and Achilles, the genius of war, over a period of several weeks. Their contretemps is set within the larger tale of the ten year Trojan War, and is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards; by the end the poem has told a more or less complete story of the war. No television min-series has anything on this epic poem. The story is utterly human and has resonated down the centuries. There’s the ugly man of power, selfish, greedy, entitled and obsessed. There’s the young, beautiful star, burdened with greatness and by the false power of a man without merit. The authentic versus the phony - the same old story. The Iliad was composed sometime between 760 and 710 B.C., and together with The Odyssey is considered the first great work of western literature. “Composed” is the correct word because The Iliad was passed down by oral tradition. The teacher recited it, the students repeated it and memorized it – all of it. There’s a story, apocryphal or not, that around 700 B.C., a virtual riot broke out when some upstart in the Academy proposed to write it all down, because the older, wiser men believed transcription would destroy the Greek facility for memorization, not to mention the silencing of the sound of the poetry itself. This reading returns this epic to the manner of presentation in force at the time. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave reminds us that slavery at one time existed throughout the United States. Isabella Baumfree was born to a Dutch-speaking slave family 95 miles north of New York City. Her narrative describes the world of northern slavery: squalid living conditions, disruption of families, sale at auction, and cruel treatment. In 1826 she escaped to freedom. Soon after she became a devout Christian. In 1843, she became a Methodist, changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and was “called by the spirit” to preach the abolition of slavery. She took to the road as a preacher and social reformer. Her memoirs, dictated to her friend Olive Gilbert, were published in 1850. In that same year she spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention and bought a home in Northampton. Truth was a mesmerizing pubic speaker. She traveled constantly and delivered hundreds of speeches advocating equal rights for blacks and women. She gained national recognition for a speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851 that came to be known as “Ain’t I a Woman?’. During the Civil War she helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army and met with President Lincoln. In 1870 she started a movement to obtain land grants for former slaves and met with President U. S. Grant. Her accomplishments have achieved increasing recognition over the years. Honors range from a U.S. postage stamp and a bust in the Capitol to the naming of Interstate Highway 194 and Asteroid 249521. The Smithsonian Institution named her to their list of 100 Most Significant Americans in 2014 and she was chosen by the U.S. Treasury in 2016 as one of five women to appear on the back of the $10 bill.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is a comic novel written by English author Jerome K. Jerome that chronicles the antics of three mates on a two-week boating holiday on the Thames. Originally planned as a travel guide featuring articles of local historical interest, the humorous elements quickly overshadowed the serious and quaint elements and Jerome wisely tailored it as a somewhat slapstick comedy. The three men are based on Jerome and two friends, a senior manager at Barclays and the founder of a London printing press. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional, but sprang from “that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog”, according to Jerome. The book appeared at a time in the 1880’s when the commercial traffic on the Thames had largely disappeared and a mania for boating took hold as a leisure activity. Although critical reception was lukewarm at best, the book sold in huge quantities and has been in print since publication in 1889. The Guardian ranked it number 25 on its 2015 list of The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time and Esquire placed it at number 2 on its 2009 list of Funniest Books Ever. It has been adapted for the stage and at least six times for film and television.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was one of the first books in the slave narrative genre that spoke to the issues of sexual harassment and abuse faced by slave women. The book is addressed to northern white women, with the underlying message that abuse of female slaves by white male masters is corrosive to the family and marriage unit. Jacobs was urged to write her life story by her friend Amy Post and suggested she contact Harriet Beecher Stowe for help. When Stowe suggested instead that the story be part of Stowe’s own work, Jacobs started on her own account, writing secretly at night in the nursery of the home of her employer. It was serialized in the New York Tribune and then published in 1861 in book form by Thayer and Eldridge under the pseudonym Linda Brent to protect the identity of its author, who was subject to capture and return to her owner under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Names of all the key characters were changed to protect them from harm. The release of the book in 1861 met with favorable reviews but coincided with the onset of the Civil War and the bankruptcy of the publisher, suppressing awareness and demand. After the war it was considered a novel due to the use of the pseudonym. Interest was revived in the 1970’s and 1980’s when scholar Jean Fagan Yellin confirmed the identity of the author and historians began to better understand the connection to feminist issues.

When Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist and friend of Emerson, retreated to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, he stripped himself of every unnecessary object and distraction and chose to live deliberately. He sought to examine the nature of Life itself, something so dear, precious, imminent and yet so often elusive to so many. There may be no time more in need of the teachings of Thoreau’s Walden than today. In the age of instant information and big data we are bombarded with enormous amounts of facts, figures and stories from every corner of the world, both pertinent and superfluous, and left to our own devices to process the information. We become so tied to our screens and so enmeshed in the flow that we risk mistaking the virtual for the real. And our lives remain stubbornly, undeniably real, however we may wish to represent them virtually. Thoreau would counsel a pause and advise a closer examination, never blinking at the sacrifices necessary, never blinking in the face of Life itself, and never confusing the atoms of data or the molecules of information for the elements of knowledge and wisdom. (Summary by Michael Hogan) On the Duty of Civil Disobedience was first published in 1849 as Resistance To Civil Government. The central idea is that individuals should not permit government to overrule their consciences, and that there is a duty to refuse to acquiesce when governments seek to make them agents of injustice. Originally motivated by disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War, the essay became popular during the Sixties as a justification for demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People was first performed on February 14, 1895 at the St. James's Theatre in London. It is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ in order to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Contemporary reviews all praised the play's humor, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde's artistic career so far. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play. It has been revived many times since its premiere and has been adapted for the cinema on three occasions.