Grab the Top Full Audiobooks in Literature, Short Stories

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/245301 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Dust that was Barren

Author: P. C. Wren

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 20 minutes

Release date: September 9, 2015

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

Percival Christopher Wren (1875 - 1941) was an English writer of adventure fiction mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. 'The Dust That Was Barren' is a strange tale of a peculiar incident in the French Foreign Legion. Commandant Le Sage comes across a legionnaire who has fallen behind his comrades and has laid himself down in the sand, saying he is dying. But when the Commandant's back is turned, the legionnaire attempts to shoot him in the head. He misses, and Le Sage whips out his pistol and shoots the treacherous man dead. Shortly after this, a tombstone appears on the spot on which is written: On this spot on the 1st of December 19-- Le Légionnaire Barren was murdered by Captain Le Sage. Outraged at the lie, the General orders the stone removed and destroyed. But before long a replica stone is erected. This too is removed...and a third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh stone appear to replace the destroyed one. Nobody knows where the stones come from, who makes them and why they say what they do. And then, one day, the solution to the mystery is explained... and it is a very peculiar tale indeed.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/245300 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Cremona Violin

Author: E. T. A. Hoffmann

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 1 hour 1 minute

Release date: September 9, 2015

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror as well as a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories were highly influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. 'The Cremona Violin' is the story of Councillor Krespel, an eccentric violin maker who lives with a mysterious woman, Antonia, who has the most beautiful singing voice ever heard by anyone in the town, but she was only ever heard to sing once. Krespel makes the best violins in the world but never sells any and plays each violin only once. There is a strange secret behind this odd behaviour...but it is only years later that the strange truth comes out.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/245299 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Cost of Kindness

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 20 minutes

Release date: September 9, 2015

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) was an English writer and humourist. The Cost of Kindness is an ironic tale about a congregation desperate to see the back of their cantankerous and highly unpopular vicar. Fortunately the dreadful man has agreed to leave and is preparing a vituperative final sermon admonishing his ungrateful flock for ousting him. But then the churchwarden's wife decides it would be only Christian to show the horrid man some sympathy...an act of kindness which unleashes awful consequences.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/245298 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Anticipator

Author: Morley Roberts

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 15 minutes

Release date: September 9, 2015

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

Morley Roberts (1857 - 1942) was a popular English novelist and short-story writer. 'The Anticipator' is the tale of two rival writers. Esplan is a true craftsman. His stories are finely crafted, inspired works of true genius. His foe, Burford, is as bad a writer as Esplan is good. But Burford has an uncanny knack of publishing stories with the exact same plot as Esplan has been working on for weeks, making Esplan's tales unsaleable...or worse, making it seem that he is plagiarising his inept competitor. As Esplan sinks into a drug-fuelled spiral of bitterness and rage, he decides it is time to get rid of Burford. But then things take an unexpected turn....

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/245297 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Tiger's Skin

Author: W.W. Jacobs

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 0 hours 25 minutes

Release date: September 9, 2015

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 - 1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. Most of his works were either humorous tales or horror stories. Many of his popular tales are written in the cockney vernacular and are based either on the docks at Wapping, or in the bar of the infamous tavern The Cauliflower. 'A Tiger's Skin' is a tale narrated by the oldest regular at The Cauliflower. It is the story of the Claybury tiger...a beast which had apparently escaped from a travelling circus and terrorises the clientele of the Cauliflower and the rest of Claybury village. Every night pigs, hens and ducks disappear from their owners' yards. But nobody has seen the tiger...until suddenly, in the space of a few days, nearly every resident seems to have an encounter with the Claybury tiger. Then old man Parsley rushes into the Cauliflower with the terrible news that he has seen the tiger going into Bob Pretty's cottage and the courage of the Claybury men is put to the test....

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/240387 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: In a Glass Darkly

Author: Sheridan Le Fanu

Narrator: Alison Pettitt, Nicholas Boulton, Jonathan Keeble, Daniel Philpott, David Horovitch, Sean Barrett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 16 minutes

Release date: September 1, 2015

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2.33 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 3.5 of Total 2

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

Demons, vengeful spirits, insanity, premature burials and lesbian vampires, In a Glass Darkly contains five diabolical tales of horror and mystery that will get the heart racing. Each story, including the famous 'Green Tea' and 'Carmilla', is presented as a case from the posthumous papers of Dr Martin Hesselius, a metaphysical physician who has no doubt as to the existence of supernatural phenomena - unlike our anxious protagonists... These traditional, yet unfamiliar tales were revered upon release, with Bram Stoker writing his own vampire story some twenty years later, and Henry James once suggesting that this is 'the ideal reading... for the hours after midnight'.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/241390 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fortune Smiles: Stories

Author: Adam Johnson

Narrator: Greg Chun, Johnathan Mcclain, Will Damron, W. Morgan Sheppard, Dominic Hoffman, Cassandra Campbell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 18 minutes

Release date: August 18, 2015

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.25 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson is one of America’s most provocative and powerful authors. Critics have compared him to Kurt Vonnegut, David Mitchell, and George Saunders, but Johnson’s new book will only further his reputation as one of our most original writers. Subtly surreal, darkly comic, both hilarious and heartbreaking, Fortune Smiles is a major collection of stories that gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear, while offering something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.   In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. “Nirvana,” which won the prestigious Sunday Times short story prize, portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous”—first included in the Best American Short Stories anthology—a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. Unnerving, riveting, and written with a timeless quality, these stories confirm Johnson as one of America’s greatest writers and an indispensable guide to our new century. Readers: “Nirvana” read by Johnathan McClain  “Hurricanes Anonymous” read by Dominic Hoffman  “Interesting Facts” read by Cassandra Campbell  “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” read by W. Morgan Sheppard  “Dark Meadow” read by Will Damron  “Fortune Smiles” read by Greg Chun  Advance praise for Fortune Smiles “How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel? For Johnson, the answer is a story collection, and the tales are hefty and memorable. . . . In the title story, two North Korean criminals adjust to post-defection life in South Korea. . . . Often funny, even when they’re wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A half-dozen sometimes Carver-esque yarns that find more-or-less ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges and somehow holding up. Tragedy is always close to the surface in Johnson’s work—with tragicomic layerings. . . . Bittersweet, elegant, full of hard-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book, either.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  Praise for Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son “Harrowing and deeply affecting . . . a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Remarkable . . . the single best work of fiction published [this year].”—The Wall Street Journal

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/241163 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Nocturnes

Author: John Connolly

Narrator: Jeff Harding

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

Release date: August 11, 2015

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

From #1 internationally bestselling author John Connolly comes Nocturnes, a dark, daring, utterly haunting shot story anthology of lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts. Connolly’s collection of supernatural novellas and stories echoes the work of some of the masters of the genre while never losing his own distinctive voice. In 'The New Daughter,' a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in 'The Underbury Witches,' two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella 'The Reflecting Eye,' in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/240801 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The State We're In: Maine Stories

Author: Ann Beattie

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 55 minutes

Release date: August 11, 2015

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

“Ann Beattie at her most magnificent…Her first new collection in ten years...These tales explore the range of emotional states the author is famous for: longing, disaffection, ambivalence, love, regret. It’s nice to hear her voice again” (People). “A peerless, contemplative page-turner” (Vanity Fair), The State We’re In is about how we live in the places we have chosen—or been chosen by. It’s about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love. Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We’re In is about more than geographical location. Some characters have arrived in Maine by accident, others are trying to escape. The collection is woven around Jocelyn, a wry, disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn’s, sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view. “Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown: an iconic presentation, each line and fold falling into place but allowing room for surprise” (O, The Oprah Magazine). “Splendid...memorable...every page…fitted out with the blessed finery of hypnotic storytelling” (The Washington Post), these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of being. The State We’re In explores, through women’s voices, the unexpected moments and glancing epiphanies of daily life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/240772 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Beat Goes On: The Complete Rebus Stories

Author: Ian Rankin

Narrator: James MacPherson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 30 minutes

Release date: August 11, 2015

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Short Stories

Publisher's Summary:

There is no detective like Ian Rankin's Detective Inspector John Rebus, a man The New Yorker calls 'the ideal sleuth.' Brilliant, irascible and frequently frustrating to both his friends and his long-suffering bosses, John Rebus has made the dark places of Edinburgh his home for over two decades. The Beat Goes On collects all of Ian Rankin's Rebus short stories for the first time, including two never-before published tales written specifically for this collection. From his beginnings as a young Detective Constable in Dead and Buried right up to his dramatic, but not quite final, retirement in The Very Last Drop, Rebus shines in these stories, confirming his status as one of crime fiction's most compelling, brilliant, and unforgettable characters. In these gripping, fast-paced tales, the legendary Scottish detective investigates the sinister cases that are his specialty, including a gruesome student death, the brutal murder of a woman at the crux of a love triangle, an audacious jewel heist, suspicious happenings at a nursing home, and an ominous email that brings a family's darkest secrets to light. The Beat Goes On is the ultimate Ian Rankin treasure trove -- a must-have book for crime fiction aficionados and a superb introduction for anyone looking to experience DI John Rebus, and the dark, twist-filled crimes he investigates.