We Speak Volumes: Bards Alley Podcast Specials

Of Mice and Men

Penguin Audio Classics

By: John Steinbeck
Narrated by: Gary Sinise
Length: 3 hours 11 minutes

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of... Read more

Macbeth

By: William Shakespeare
Narrated by: Full Cast
Length: 1 hour 59 minutes

Foretold he will be king, Macbeth embarks on a path of murderous treason, stopping at nothing to seize the throne...Recorded at Glamis Castle in Scotland with a full cast, Almost Tangible's multi-award winning Macbeth is a gripping, immersive sound experience that puts the listener at the heart of the action in Shakespeare's epic drama about... Read more

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

By: Robert Louis Stevenson
Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
Length: 2 hours 44 minutes

“When it comes to classics, we often feel we know the story without ever having read it for ourselves. Especially with the abundance of retellings and allusions in other media. This was definitely true for me when it came to this novel, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong! I may have known the overarching plot but the details, suspense,... Read more

Jurassic Park

A Novel

By: Michael Crichton
Narrated by: Scott Brick
Length: 15 hours 10 minutes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm.Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read“[Michael] Crichton’s dinosaurs are genuinely frightening.”—Chicago Sun-TimesAn astonishing technique for... Read more

Little Women

Little Women

By: Louisa May Alcott
Narrated by: Susie Berneis
Length: 19 hours 9 minutes

Based loosely on Louisa May Alcott's own upbringing, Little Women follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. Each girl has a vision of what their ideal future will bring, though ultimately experiencing, as most young do, something completely different. Little Women, originally written as two volumes, was a great commercial... Read more

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition

Hercule Poirot Mysteries: Book #4

By: Agatha Christie
Narrated by: Hugh Fraser
Length: 6 hours 53 minutes

Voted by the British Crime Writers’ Association as the ""Best Crime Novel of all Time""Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement in one of Agatha Christie’s ten favorite novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been... Read more

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

By: Annie Dillard
Narrated by: Nan McNamara
Length: 10 hours 31 minutes

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book ReviewPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie... Read more

Dracula

By: Bram Stoker
Narrated by: Rick Kisner
Length: 14 hours 20 minutes

“There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to... Read more

Pride and Prejudice

By: Jane Austen
Narrated by: Julliet Stevenson
Length: 14 hours 2 minutes

Jane Austen’s most popular novel, originally published in 1813, some 17 years after it was first written, presents the Bennet family of Longbourn. Against the background of gossipy Mrs Bennet and the detached Mr Bennet, the quest is on for husbands for the five daughters. The spotlight falls on Elizabeth, second eldest, who is courted by Mr... Read more

The Big Sleep

A Philip Marlowe Novel

By: Raymond Chandler
Narrated by: Scott Brick
Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

The renowned novel from the crime fiction master, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe. • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle... Read more

Jane Eyre

By: Charlotte Bronte
Narrated by: Austin Moore
Length: 18 hours 18 minutes

A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman's quest for freedom. Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an independent and spirited survivor-qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But... Read more

O Pioneers

Settling the Frontier

By: Willa Cather
Narrated by: John Rayburn
Length: 6 hours 1 minute

One January day, many years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some... Read more

The Three Musketeers

By: Alexandre Dumas
Narrated by: Pete Cross
Length: 23 hours 47 minutes

The first in Alexandre Dumas' The D'Artagnan Romances, The Three Musketeers is a classic swashbuckler and a seminal action-adventure story that has become a cornerstone of the genre since its publication in 1844. Set in the fifteenth century, it follows a young D'Artagnan leaving home for Paris with hopes of joining the King's Musketeers. He... Read more

The Great Gatsby

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Narrated by: Tim Robbins
Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

An undisputed masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, perfect for Fitzgerald lovers and classics collectors alike.
Set against a backdrop of jazz music, bootlegging, and lavish parties, The Great Gatsby is the story of Midwesterner Nick Carraway’s curious introduction to the decadent world of his mysterious, wealthy neighbor Jay Gatsby,... Read more

In the Heat of the Night

Virgil Tibbs: Book #1

By: John Ball
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 5 hours 37 minutes

The pioneering novel featuring African American police detective Virgil Tibbs “They call me Mr. Tibbs” was the line immortalized by Sidney Poitier in the 1967 Oscar-winning movie adaptation of In the Heat of the Night, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and was named one of the 100... Read more

Kindred

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Kim Staunton
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

“The novel is narrated by Dana,  a Black writer  is transported from 1976 back to a slave plantation in the Antebellum South, where she meets two of her ancestors: the White son of the slave owner, and a young free Black woman, who is eventually trapped,  enslaved and made his concubine. Dana struggles to survive in this hostile world, and has to... Read more

A Christmas Carol

By: Charles Dickens
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

“Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding,” says Scrooge. Mean old Scrooge despises Christmas, until Christmas Eve, when a haunted voice from the past changes his life––overnight!Many know the story, but few have experienced the marvel of the book. If you are one who has never read this... Read more

The Accidental Tourist

By: Anne Tyler
Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
Length: 12 hours 42 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—an irresistible novel exploring the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites, and the struggle to rebuild one’s life after unspeakable tragedy

Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is... Read more

The Stand

By: Stephen King
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 47 hours 43 minutes

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death.

And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky... Read more

Frankenstein

or The Modern Prometheus

By: Mary Shelley
Narrated by: Anthony Heald, Stefan Rudnicki & Simon Templeman
Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Soon to be a major new film adaptation written and directed by Guillermo del ToroThis special unabridged, multivoiced production of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece of nineteenth-century Gothic horror is narrated by film and television star Anthony Heald, joined by Grammy winner Stefan Rudnicki and actor Simon Templeman, under the direction of... Read more