Tuesday, 19 May 2015

The Raven And Other Poems [by Edgar Allan Poe] [read by Phil Chenevert] [Audiobook]


Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849] was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.






link to the free audiobook

The Raven And Other Poems [by Edgar Allan Poe] [read by Phil Chenevert] [Audiobook]

Monday, 18 May 2015

The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life In Tales and Poems [by Sherwood Anderson]

“The Triumph of the Egg” is a collection of stories and poems by Sherwood Anderson. Abandoning the interconnected quality of his more famous “Winesburg, Ohio,” the author adopts a variety of perspectives and settings while exploring similar themes: personal growth, disillusionment, loneliness, and urban-rural contrast. In the North American Review, critic Lawrence Gilman wrote, “Mr. Anderson has achieved a beauty that irradiates his page.” Though largely overshadowed by that celebrated, earlier book, “The Triumph of the Egg” remains a foundational work for Modernist literature, proven by its winning the first annual Dial Award from the influential journal The Dial.

Read by Ben Adams.

link to the free audiobook

Thursday, 14 May 2015

The Burning Wheel [by Aldous Huxley] [Audiobook]

Though Aldous Huxley is best known for his later novels and essays, he started his writing career as a poet. The Burning Wheel is his first work, a collection of thirty poems that pay homage in style to poets who wrote in the Romantic or the French symbolist styles. Many of the poems deal with themes of light, darkness, sight, music, art, war, and idealism vs. realism. Though the optimism in his early works waned as he became older, his characteristically optimistic and determined point of view shines through

link to the free audiobook
The Burning Wheel [by Aldous Huxley]

Tuesday, 28 April 2015

Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War [by Herman Melville]

Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The “aspects” to which he refers in the title are as diverse as “the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville’s Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America.

Read in English by Clark University.


link to the free audiobook

Saturday, 25 April 2015

Spirits in Bondage: a cycle of lyrics [by C.S. Lewis]

Spirits in Bondage is C.S. Lewis's first book and the first of his works to be available in the public domain. It was released in 1919 under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton and was written in a period of darker thought for C.S. Lewis than was later evidenced in his Christian apologist writings.

The darkness of the verse is most evident in Part One (The Prison House), begins to change in the short transitional Part Two (Hesitation) and attains a more hopeful tone in the final Part Three (Escape). Yet a dreamy effect, influenced by Celtic and Druid mythology, persists throughout.

Spirits in Bondage consists of forty poems that provide an intriguing insight into the youthful heart of C.S. Lewis and occasionally provides interesting lyrical foreshadowing of some of the landscapes portrayed in his famous Chronicles of Narnia series.

Read by Robert Garrison


link to the free audiobook

Twenty One Poems [by Katharine Tynan] [1907]

Katharine Tynan first met W. B. Yeats  in 1885 and formed a lifelong friendship,and Yeats himself selected the poems for this particular anthology. Tynan besides poetry also wrote more than 100 novels, 12 collections of short stories, 3 plays, and anthologies, as well as innumerable articles on social questions such as poor children and women’s working conditions.

Links To The Free Book
Twenty One Poems [by Katharine Tynan] [1907]


Click here for links to more free high quality books by the Author

Friday, 24 April 2015

The four winds of Eirinn [by Ethna Carbery] (1902)

Ethna Carbery (born Anna Johnston) was an Irish journalist, writer and poet. She is best known for the ballad Roddy McCorley.  In 1901 she married poet and folklorist Séamus MacManus and moved with him to Revlin House in County Donegal. It was then that she began writing under the pen name of Ethna Carbery because once she took the last name of MacManus she didn't want to be confused with her husband (also a writer). She died in Revlin House of gastritis the following year, aged 35. Her husband, who was three years her junior, outlived her by 58 years Although MacManus and Johnston were only married for one year her impact on his life ran deep. Her poetry was published by her husband after her death in the The Four Winds of Erin, which was phenomenally successful over the next few years.

link to the free book
The four winds of Eirinn [by Ethna Carbery] (1902)

Click here for links to more free high quality books by the Author