Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young haytrusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have made him wealthy and respectable. How...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is considered one of the greatest works in world literature, and it established the standardized Italian language that is used today. Writing between 1308 and 1320, Dante draws from countless subjects including Roman Catholic theology and philosophy, the struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, Greek mythology, and geocentric cosmology to answer the ageold question: what does the afte...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text written around the 6th century BC by Laozi, a Zhoudynasty courtier. While its authorship is debated, the text remains a fundamental building block of Taoism and one of the most influential works of its time. Today it’s one of the mosttranslated works in the world. The work itself is a series of 81 short poetic sections, each one written in a fluid, ambiguous style, leaving them open to w...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Commentaries on the Gallic War describes the conflicts between Rome and the region of Gaul in western Europe, as well as the Germanic peoples who lived to the east of the river Rhine, and Britain to the north, in the later years of the Roman republic. Despite being written in the 3rd person, the commentaries are the memoirs of Julius Caesar himself, and offer a unique insight into these events. Before the Gallic war began, the Ro...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, and the novel that introduced the term “Lost Generation” to describe the generation that came to adulthood during World War I. The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American expat living in the Parisian café society of the roaring 20s. A wound sustained during the war has left him unable to have sex, and that drives a wedge between him and the woman he loves: Brett Ashl...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. After the bloody battle at Tewksbury and the second dethroning of Henry VI, England and its citizens are finally able to enjoy peace under the reign of Edward IV. The remaining Lancastrian leaders are either killed or scattered to the four winds. Within the kingdom, not everyone is happy with their new king—and when Edward falls ill, his powerhungry brother Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, sees his chance and prepares to kill any...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Thomas Paine was an American political commentator and activist in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His writing covered a wide range of subjects, but were centered on his core beliefs of republicanism and the inherent rights of people. An early pamphlet of his, “Common Sense,” was written soon after he arrived in America from Great Britain; with its focus on the ills of colonialism and the King’s veering between rationa...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Thomas Malory did not invent the stories of Arthur, King of Britain, but it is fair to say that he reinvented them. Although the legends were already hundreds of years old by the fifteenth century, the contemporary stories of Arthur in Malory’s day were primarily French. The French had added many of the elements familiar to modern readers, among them Lancelot, and the search for the Holy Grail. Malory combined, edited, and added ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. In the summer of 1869, ScottishAmerican naturalist and author John Muir spent the months of June through September in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California accompanying a group of shepherds while they led a flock of sheep to the high country to graze. During that time, Muir took every opportunity to explore the Yosemite area extensively—hiking, camping, writing, and sketching. Muir’s diary entries describing the land, flora, ...

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...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Suetonius was a Roman historian born in about 69 AD, shortly after the death of the emperor Nero. This book, detailing the lives of the twelve Roman emperors who were known as “Caesar”—some by a family connection to Julius Caesar, some just as a title—is considered to be Suetonius’ most important work. The Lives of the Caesars is a detailed account of the often dramatic lives of these emperors, whose abilities and morals varied e...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Seneca the Younger was a statesman and philosopher who lived in Rome around the dawn of the Common Era. Though he wrote a large amount of tragedies and other works, today he’s perhaps best known for his writing on Stoic philosophy and principles. Seneca didn’t write books about Stoicism; rather, he composed essays and sent letters over the course of his lifetime that addressed that philosophy. Since these essays and letters are a...