Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Iliad is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Odyssey. It was originally written in ancient Greek and utilized a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it,...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Peter Kropotkin initially published the chapters of Mutual Aid as individual essays in the intellectual periodical The Nineteenth Century over the course of six years. In 1902 the essays were published as a book. In it, Kropotkin explores the role of mutuallybeneficial cooperation across both animal and human societies. He begins by outlining how animals, both within and across species, thrive not through individual fitness, but ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Set a mere three months after The Laughing Cavalier, the titular first Sir Percy is set to wed his love Gilda in a double wedding with her brother and his intended. The attendees include many of the rich and famous, including the Stadtholder himself. But immediately after the ceremony, bad news arrives, and Percy, A.K.A. Diogenes, is tasked with rushing to get messages to two of the Stadtholder’s divisions that are in peril from ...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Nibelungenlied was Germany’s first heroic epic put into writing. Thomas Carlyle considered it “a precious national possession, recovered after six centuries of neglect, [which] takes undisputed place among the sacred books of German literature.” Due to a lack of interest in copying the manuscripts, the work was forgotten, only faintly remembered as an influence in other German writing. Today, a total of 36 manuscripts have be...

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. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the Puritan English poet John Milton between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667. This is a period of English history which encompasses the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Perhaps reflecting some of his country’s turmoil during Milton’s life, Paradise Lost deals with revolution in Heaven by Satan and his followers against God, their defea...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. In 1917 John Reed, a journalist and socialist, witnessed firsthand the 1917 Russian October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks seized power and began forming the Soviet Union. Ten Days that Shook the World is his account of the revolution, including ontheground descriptions of the days up to those portentious events. The book received a mixed reception. Some reviewers found it a powerful account of the events, one of the few ava...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Whose Body?, published in 1923, is the first in a long and very popular series of mystery novels written by Dorothy L. Sayers and featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. In this novel we are introduced to Wimsey, his imperturbable and multiskilled butler Bunter, and his close friend Charles Parker of Scotland Yard as they come together to investigate an extremely mysterious incident: the naked body of a man, weari...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Little White Bird is generally divided into three sections: the first chronicles the narrator’s life in London, beginning with how he came to know a little boy named David (who joins him on his adventures), and describes other matters of his everyday life. The second section tells the story of how Peter Pan came to be a “betwixtandbetween” and his adventures in Kensington Gardens, including his interactions with the birds as ...

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. The Country of the Pointed Firs was first published in serial form in 1896 in The Atlantic, then later expanded into a novel. The narrator, like Jewett, is a middleaged female writer. She goes to the fictional coastal town of Dunnet Landing in Maine to find time and space to write. There she meets its residents, including her landlady, Mrs. Almira Todd, a widow and herbalist; she rents the empty schoolhouse as a place to write; a...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The setting of A Passage to India is the British Raj, at a time of racial tension heightened by the burgeoning Indian independence movement. Adela Quested, a young British subject, is visiting India to decide whether to marry a suitor who works there as a city magistrate. During her visit, a local physician, Aziz, is accused of assaulting her. His trial brings tensions between the British rulers and their Indian subjects to a hea...