Classic Audiobook Collection

Tales of Hearsay by Joseph Conrad audiobook.
Genre: drama
Tales of Hearsay is a compact, wide-ranging collection of four Joseph Conrad stories that circle a single fascination: how lives are shaped by what is reported, repeated, and half-believed. In 'The Warrior's Soul,' an aging Russian officer recounts a brutal episode from the Napoleonic wars, where a young cavalryman is forced to measure compassion against duty in the chaos of retreat and pursuit. 'Prince Roman' turns to the private code of an exiled Polish aristocrat, tracing how loyalty to a lost cause can harden into a lonely, disciplined form of heroism. In 'The Tale,' a soldier on leave entertains a woman with a wartime narrative in which a commander at sea must act on uncertain information, and the cost of decision lingers long after the moment passes. Finally, 'The Black Mate' returns to the working waterfront, where a merchant ship's new officer arrives with an air of mystery and a reputation that may not match the truth. Across battlefields, drawing rooms, and decks in rough weather, Conrad builds tense moral dramas from rumor, perception, and the fragile edge between knowledge and guesswork.
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Chapters (Approximate)
(00:00:00) Chapter 01
(00:47:47) Chapter 02
(01:37:24) Chapter 03
(02:17:20) Chapter 04
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Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans audiobook.
Genre: drama
In Against the Grain, Joris-Karl Huysmans follows Jean des Esseintes, the last, sickly heir of an old French aristocratic line, as he abandons Parisian society and retreats to a secluded house outside the city. Determined to live entirely on his own terms, Des Esseintes sets out to construct a private universe ruled by taste: rare books and Latin stylists, paintings and religious art, jeweled curios, exotic perfumes, and carefully engineered sensations meant to replace ordinary life. But the more meticulously he arranges his refuge, the more his mind turns inward, and the pleasures he pursues begin to blur into obsession, anxiety, and spiritual unease. Haunted by memories, repelled by the banality of the modern world, and driven by a hunger for experiences that feel absolutely pure, he tests the limits of artifice itself. Part novel, part interior diary of a decadent sensibility, Against the Grain becomes a tense struggle between intellect and body, desire and disgust, and the longing to escape reality versus the inescapable pressure of conscience, illness, and time.
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Chapters (Approximate)
(00:00:00) Chapter 01
(00:22:56) Chapter 02
(00:43:17) Chapter 03
(01:05:56) Chapter 04
(01:43:33) Chapter 05
(02:11:51) Chapter 06
(02:53:47) Chapter 07
(03:27:52) Chapter 08
(04:01:34) Chapter 09
(04:26:50) Chapter 10
(05:00:54) Chapter 11
(05:41:44) Chapter 12
(06:11:02) Chapter 13
(06:46:20) Chapter 14
(07:18:29) Chapter 15
(07:50:27) Chapter 16
(08:23:25) Chapter 17
(08:52:27) Chapter 18
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Samson Agonistes by John Milton audiobook.
Genre: tragedy
John Milton's Samson Agonistes reimagines the final days of the biblical strongman as an intense, inward tragedy of defeat, endurance, and faith. Once Israel's champion, Samson now sits blind and captive in Gaza, mocked by the Philistines and tormented by the memory of his own choices. As he wrestles with shame and the silence of God, visitors arrive who force him to confront the life that brought him to this ruin: his father Manoa, who pleads to ransom him; the Chorus of Danites, who mirror the community's grief and doubt; and Dalila, whose arrival opens old wounds and hard questions about love, betrayal, and responsibility. Meanwhile, Philistine leaders celebrate their power and prepare a public spectacle meant to humiliate their fallen enemy. Confined, powerless, and unsure of his calling, Samson faces the central conflict of the poem: whether a broken man can still possess moral agency, and what redemption might look like when strength, certainty, and sight are gone. With austere language and mounting tension, Milton explores suffering, conscience, national identity, and the paradox of strength born from weakness.
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Chapters (Approximate)
(00:00:00) Chapter 00
(00:10:40) Chapter 01
(00:26:03) Chapter 02
(00:37:35) Chapter 03
(00:52:12) Chapter 04
(01:10:50) Chapter 05
(01:18:30) Chapter 06
(01:33:40) Chapter 07
(01:46:04) Chapter 08
(01:57:06) Chapter 09
(02:11:01) Chapter 10
(02:24:25) Chapter 11
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Underground London by John Hollingshead audiobook.
Genre: history
Published in 1862, John Hollingshead's Underground London invites you beneath the clamorous streets of early-to-mid Victorian London, where the citys true lifelines run in darkness. With the brisk curiosity of a reporter and the wit of an essayist, Hollingshead becomes your guide through buried rivers, old channels and forgotten passages, and into the practical, messy machinery that keeps a metropolis alive: sewers, drains, waterworks and the expanding web of gas pipes that turns night into day. Moving between lively street-level observation and below-ground investigation, he introduces the engineers, laborers and officials wrestling with a problem that touches every home and every neighborhood: how to supply a swelling population with clean water and light while carrying away its waste. Along the way, he gathers local legends and eerie stories, compares competing schemes, and builds toward the heated public debates of his moment, including bold proposals for a railway that would run underground. By turns informative, sardonic and surprisingly atmospheric, this is a portrait of a city confronting modernity from the foundations up.
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Chapters (Approximate)
(00:00:00) Chapter 01
(00:36:14) Chapter 02
(00:56:03) Chapter 03
(01:15:58) Chapter 04
(01:41:51) Chapter 05
(02:09:03) Chapter 06
(02:26:16) Chapter 07
(02:55:10) Chapter 08
(03:25:39) Chapter 09
(03:44:54) Chapter 10
(04:33:36) Chapter 11
(04:42:14) Chapter 12
(04:56:00) Chapter 13
(05:04:36) Chapter 14
(05:22:55) Chapter 15
(05:36:52) Chapter 16
(05:59:02) Chapter 17
(06:17:14) Chapter 18
(06:24:51) Chapter 19
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A Problem in Modern Ethics by John Addington Symonds audiobook.
Genre: philosophy
Privately printed in the late 19th century for a tiny circle of readers, John Addington Symonds' A Problem in Modern Ethics is a bold, carefully argued inquiry into what his era called 'sexual inversion' - same-sex desire and relationships - addressed to the people who shaped public opinion and policy: doctors, psychologists, clergy, and jurists. Writing as a humane scholar steeped in history and literature, Symonds surveys how societies across time have understood and regulated same-sex love, then turns to the competing medical explanations of his day, challenging easy assumptions that treat homosexuality as a vice, a contagion, or a simple acquired habit. He weighs the ethical stakes for individuals forced into secrecy, the damage done by stigma and blackmail, and the contradictions of laws that punish consenting adults while claiming to defend morality. Along the way, he brings a literary critic's eye to cultural evidence, including discussion of major writers whose work was implicated in contemporary debates. Part historical study, part ethical brief, and part early rights argument, the essay captures a pivotal moment when modern sexology and modern civil-liberties thinking were beginning to collide.
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Chapters (Approximate)
(00:00:00) Chapter 00
(00:10:37) Chapter 01
(00:18:30) Chapter 02
(00:30:45) Chapter 03
(00:39:01) Chapter 04
(00:55:14) Chapter 05
(01:08:34) Chapter 06
(01:18:45) Chapter 07
(01:29:17) Chapter 08
(01:48:43) Chapter 09
(02:04:35) Chapter 10
(02:20:23) Chapter 11
(02:36:37) Chapter 12
(02:54:34) Chapter 13
(03:13:53) Chapter 14
(03:26:40) Chapter 15
(03:37:15) Chapter 16
(03:53:15) Chapter 17
(04:06:22) Chapter 18
(04:17:36) Chapter 19
(04:31:00) Chapter 20
(04:41:26) Chapter 21
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