Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. Growth of the Soil was published in 1917 to universal acclaim. A mid to latecareer work for Hamsun, it was celebrated for its thenrevolutionary use of literary techniques like stream of consciousness, and for its unadorned depiction of pastoral life. Its focus on the quotidian lives of everyday people has led scholars to classify it as a novel of Norwegian New Realism. Isak, a man so strong and so simple that he echoes a primitiv...

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 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. Lilith, first published in 1895, tells the story of Mr. Vane, the owner of a library that seems to be haunted by a raven—the ghost of the library’s former owner. Mr. Vane eventually follows this strange figure through a mirror and into another world, the “region of seven dimensions.” There Vane meets a number of characters, including Biblical characters like Adam and his first wife Lilith. Thus begins a battle of good versus evil...

Please note: This audiobook has been created using AI voice. The Wealth of Nations is economist Adam Smith’s magnum opus and the foundational text of what today we call classical economics. Its publication ushered in a new era of thinking and discussion about how economies function, a sea change away from the older, increasinglyirrelevant mercantilist and physiocratic views of economics towards a new practical application of economics for the birth of the industrial era. Its scope is vast,...

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. 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. Helen Keller was just nineteen months old when, in 1882, she was struck with an illness that rendered her deaf, blind, and unable to communicate beyond basic signs. When she was seven, the arrival of Anne Sullivan, a partially blind teacher, catalysed Helen’s learning and created a completely new way of teaching deafblind children. In The Story of My Life, written when Helen was twentythree, Helen recounts her childhood and the w...

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. The first anthology of short stories by Jack London, Lost Face tells seven stories about the Klondike gold rush. In “Lost Face,” the fur thief Subienkow faces gruesome torture and execution by a tribe of Indians, armed with only his wits. “Trust” is a story about the dangers of the Yukon River. Jack London’s best known short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells the story of a nameless man and his dog attempting to survive in the froze...

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. The Dead Secret is Wilkie Collins’ fourth novel. It first appeared in serial form in Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine during 1856. Like many of Collins’ books, it features incidents and themes which were considered to be sensational at the time; in this case, sex before marriage, illegitimacy, and fraud. The novel opens with a scene at Porthgenna Tower, a mansion in Cornwall, where the lady of the house, Mrs. Treverton, ...