About Orchids, a Chat by Frederick Boyle audiobook. Genre: science In About Orchids, a Chat, Victorian writer and enthusiastic gardener Frederick Boyle invites listeners into his small 'bungalow' garden and orchid houses for a candid, witty, and practical conversation about one of the most coveted plant families on earth. Writing as a self-confessed amateur who began with more curiosity than expertise, Boyle recounts his early misconceptions, costly mistakes, and hard-won discoveries as he learn...
Dec 27, 2025•6 hr 12 min
Is War Diminishing by Frederick Adams Woods audiobook. Genre: history Written in 1915 in the shadow of the First World War, Is War Diminishing? asks a blunt question that still unsettles modern readers: are nations actually becoming more peaceful, or do we merely change the shape and scale of conflict? Historian Frederick Adams Woods, working with Alexander Baltzly, approaches the problem with an unusually quantitative mindset for its era. Instead of relying on moral arguments or political hopes...
Dec 26, 2025•3 hr 5 min
The Influence of Monarchs by Frederick Adams Woods audiobook. Genre: history In The Influence of Monarchs, physician and early social scientist Frederick Adams Woods sets out to test a bold claim: that the personal qualities of rulers can measurably shape the fortunes of nations. Writing in 1913, Woods proposes a 'new science of history' he calls historiometry, blending biography, genealogy, and comparative historical narrative to look for patterns rather than isolated anecdotes. He surveys the ...
Dec 25, 2025•13 hr 23 min
Oscar Wilde - His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris audiobook. Genre: biography In Oscar Wilde - His Life and Confessions, journalist, editor, and notorious raconteur Frank Harris offers a vivid, argumentative portrait of one of the most dazzling figures of the late Victorian world. Part biography, part memoir, and part personal testimony, the book traces Wilde's rise from brilliant student and apostle of aestheticism to celebrated playwright and social lion, while also probing the private ap...
Dec 24, 2025•16 hr 24 min
Rural Improvement by Frank Albert Waugh audiobook. Genre: science Written in the early 20th century by landscape gardener and horticulturist Frank Albert Waugh, Rural Improvement is a practical manifesto for making the American countryside not only productive, but livable, orderly, and beautiful. Aimed at farmers, village residents, and local leaders, the book applies principles of civic art to small towns and open-country neighborhoods: how roads should be laid out and cared for, how public gro...
Dec 23, 2025•3 hr 59 min
The Four Last Things - Death, Judgement, Hell, Heaven by Fr. Martin Von Cochem audiobook. Genre: religion Written by Capuchin priest Fr. Martin von Cochem, The Four Last Things confronts the great horizons that Christian tradition says shape every human life: Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven. In four sustained meditations, von Cochem speaks with the urgency of a pastor and the imagination of a storyteller, drawing on Scripture, the Church Fathers, and moral theology to make these realities fee...
Dec 22, 2025•6 hr 35 min
Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians by Fanny Kelly audiobook. Genre: biography In Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians, Fanny Kelly recounts her ordeal as a young woman traveling west with a wagon party when a sudden attack on the frontier tears her from the life she knows. Separated from her companions and thrust into an unfamiliar world, Kelly is forced to endure long marches, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant uncertainty of what will happen next. As she is carrie...
Dec 20, 2025•6 hr 51 min
Bannertail - The Story of a Graysquirrel by Ernest Thompson Seton audiobook. Genre: family Ernest Thompson Seton invites listeners into the treetops and shadowed forest floors with Bannertail, a young gray squirrel born into a world ruled by seasons, hunger, and wary attention to every sound. From his first uncertain ventures outside the nest, Bannertail must learn the practical laws of wild living: how to read the wind, where to hide stores of food, which branches are safe, and which rustles me...
Dec 19, 2025•2 hr 51 min
World-Power and Evolution by Ellsworth Huntington audiobook. Genre: history In World-Power and Evolution (1919), Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington widens his famous climate-and-civilization argument from the map to the timeline, asking a sweeping question: if environment helps shape where civilization flourishes, can shifting weather and climate also help explain when nations surge, stall, or decline? Writing in the shadow of World War I, Huntington blends climatology, public health, economic...
Dec 18, 2025•7 hr 50 min
Civilization and Climate by Ellsworth Huntington audiobook. Genre: history In Civilization and Climate, geographer and early climate thinker Ellsworth Huntington asks a bold question: how much of human history can be understood through the rhythms of weather, seasons, and long-term climatic change? Moving across regions and centuries, Huntington traces how temperature, rainfall, and variability may shape agriculture, health, migration, labor, and the rise and decline of societies. He connects ev...
Dec 17, 2025•13 hr 12 min
Campaigns of Curiosity - Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London by Elizabeth L. Banks audiobook. Genre: biography In Campaigns of Curiosity, American journalist Elizabeth L. Banks arrives in London in the 1890s with ambition, nerve, and little patience for the rules of a rigid class system. Determined to break into British journalism, she turns herself into the story, adopting disguises and taking on a string of roles that place her on both sides of Victorian society. One assignme...
Dec 16, 2025•6 hr 30 min
Weather Influences by Edwin Grant Dexter audiobook. Genre: science First published in the early 1900s, Edwin Grant Dexter's Weather Influences sets out to test a question most people think they already understand: how much do day-to-day meteorological conditions shape what we feel and what we do? Dexter begins by surveying the rich tradition of weather lore - proverbs, folk beliefs, and literary portraits of 'skyey influences' - then pivots to a rigorously empirical challenge. Using meteorologic...
Dec 15, 2025•7 hr 55 min
Highways and Byways in Sussex by E. V. Lucas audiobook. Genre: history Highways and Byways in Sussex is E. V. Lucas's warm, observant journey through an English county of chalk downs, market towns, seaside resorts, and quiet lanes where history seems to press close to the present. Framed as a wanderer's progress shaped largely by railway lines, Lucas enters Sussex in the west at Midhurst and zig-zags eastward through places such as Chichester, Arundel, Petworth, Horsham, Brighton, Lewes, Eastbou...
Dec 13, 2025•14 hr 5 min
Salome and the Head by E. Nesbit audiobook. Genre: thriller Edmund Templar, a young Englishman on the verge of shipping out to the South African War, takes refuge with relatives and wanders the New Forest to steady his nerves. There, in a sunlit clearing, he witnesses an unforgettable scene: a wild, spellbinding girl dancing as a crippled boy plays a penny whistle, the two of them seeming to belong to some older, stranger story than his own. Years later, returned to civilian life and still haunt...
Dec 12, 2025•8 hr 1 min
Man and Maid by E. Nesbit audiobook. Genre: horror Man and Maid is a sharp, atmospheric collection of adult short fiction by E. Nesbit, moving from drawing-room comedy to quiet dread with the turn of a page. Across thirteen tales, Nesbit tests the fragile boundary between what society expects and what the heart, and sometimes something far stranger, demands. In one story, a newly inherited country house offers comfort, status, and a whispering legend of haunting; in another, chance encounters an...
Dec 11, 2025•6 hr 40 min
Grim Tales by E. Nesbit audiobook. Genre: horror Grim Tales by E. Nesbit is a collection of short Victorian-era stories that take the familiar comforts of drawing rooms, seaside holidays, and country houses and tilt them into the uncanny. Instead of a single hero, Nesbit presents a parade of ordinary people - curious visitors, complacent householders, and practical-minded skeptics - who find that a casual choice, a private wish, or a small act of selfishness can open the door to something coldly...
Dec 10, 2025•2 hr 40 min
Food Values by Dr. Albert Sy audiobook. Genre: science Written during the World War I era, Food Values is Dr. Albert Philip Sy's brisk, practical guide to understanding what everyday foods contribute to the body. Part primer and part reference booklet, it begins by laying out the basics of nutrition in plain language: how the body uses protein, fat, and carbohydrates, why energy (calories) matters, and what to keep in mind when choosing foods for health, work, and economy. From there, Sy turns t...
Dec 09, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Unicorns by James Huneker audiobook. Genre: speeches Unicorns (1917) is James Huneker's sharp, wide-ranging collection of essays on the arts - a roaming conversation about what happens when imagination collides with reality. Taking the unicorn as his opening emblem of the unattainable and the necessary dream, Huneker moves from concert hall to studio to library, weighing the claims of modern taste against classical standards and asking what makes an artist, a masterpiece, or a movement endure. A...
Dec 08, 2025•10 hr 19 min
Food Preparedness by Dr. Albert Sy audiobook. Genre: history Written as a wartime bulletin in the World War I era, Food Preparedness is a brisk, practical guide to eating well when supplies are uncertain. Dr. Albert Philip Sy, a Ph.D. chemist and professor at the University of Buffalo, begins by grounding the listener in the fundamentals of nutrition as his generation understood them, then turns to the urgent, everyday question families faced: how do you stretch a food budget, conserve staples, ...
Dec 06, 2025•1 hr 9 min
The Outermost House by Henry Beston audiobook. Genre: history Written from a solitary cottage on Cape Cod's Great Beach, The Outermost House is Henry Beston's luminous record of a year spent living at the edge of land and sea. Through the turning seasons, Beston watches the Atlantic's moods, the shifting dunes, and the night sky, learning the beach's daily rhythms and the larger cycles that govern weather, tides, and migration. His closest neighbors are the creatures that share this narrow margi...
Dec 05, 2025•5 hr 54 min
Nightmare Tales by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky audiobook. Genre: horror Before she became famous as the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky also turned her sharp eye toward fiction, producing uncanny tales that hover between ghost story, mystery, and metaphysical thought experiment. Nightmare Tales gathers a set of eerie narratives in which ordinary life cracks open to reveal doubles, strange echoes, haunted objects, and visions that refuse to be dismissed as mere sup...
Dec 04, 2025•3 hr 52 min
The Re-creation of Brian Kent by Harold Bell Wright audiobook. Genre: drama Brian Kent is a respectable young bank clerk on the outside, but inside he is fraying under pressure, temptation, and a marriage that drains his courage. When a desperate choice leaves him on the run and sick with remorse, Brian tries to vanish into the dark current of a dangerous river, hoping the water will erase what he has done. Instead, the river delivers him into the rough, beautiful Ozarks and into the care of two...
Dec 03, 2025•7 hr 50 min
Biddy and the Silver Man by Harlan Ellison audiobook. Genre: scifi In the sunblasted Arizona desert, twelve-year-old Biddy passes her days making up adventures with her burro, Buck, pushing past the limits of a leg brace and the pain of polio. Sage Bend is small, harsh, and quick to judge, but Biddy has learned to meet the world head-on - especially when the wide, empty country beyond town still feels like it belongs to her. Everything changes when she and Buck discover a hidden cave containing ...
Dec 02, 2025•1 hr 36 min
The Virgin of the Sun by H. Rider Haggard audiobook. Genre: adventure In The Virgin of the Sun, H. Rider Haggard carries listeners to a turbulent Egypt where old gods, rising faiths, and imperial ambitions collide. At the center is Neter-Tua, a young princess of royal blood whose beauty and perceived sanctity earn her the title 'the Virgin of the Sun' and make her both a symbol and a prize in a land on edge. As factions maneuver for power, she is drawn into a dangerous web of prophecy, politics,...
Dec 01, 2025•10 hr 40 min
The Lady of Blossholme by H. Rider Haggard audiobook. Genre: adventure In Tudor England, with Henry VIII's rule tightening and the north simmering with unrest, the quiet lands around Blossholme Abbey become a battleground. Sir John Foterell, stubborn lord of the district, discovers that Abbot Clement Maldon is using law, bribery, and fear to seize the Foterell inheritance and bankroll a dangerous cause. When Sir John's defiance brings deadly consequences, the burden falls on his daughter, Cicely...
Nov 29, 2025•8 hr 50 min
Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft audiobook. Genre: horror In Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft turns from fiction to criticism, offering a sweeping guided tour of the eerie, the uncanny, and the otherworldly across centuries of storytelling. Written with the authority of a master practitioner, the essay traces how supernatural terror evolved from early folklore and Gothic romance into modern weird fiction, and it argues for fear of the unknown as the genre's ...
Nov 28, 2025•3 hr 19 min
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant audiobook. Genre: horror In The Horla, Guy de Maupassant delivers a chilling psychological tale told through the private journal of a well-to-do man living quietly in late 19th century France. At first, his days are filled with ordinary pleasures: his home, the river, passing ships, and the comfort of routine. Then small disturbances begin to intrude - restless nights, strange sensations, and an unsettling feeling that he is no longer alone. As the entries continue...
Nov 27, 2025•1 hr 53 min
The Gargoyle by Greye La Spina audiobook. Genre: horror From the lurid brilliance of Weird Tales comes Greye La Spina's Gothic occult thriller, a headlong descent into a castle where reason is a thin shield. Luke Porter, a working painter with a practical mind, is approached by the flamboyant and unsettling Cagliostro Moderno, an amateur mystic who insists he has uncovered something monstrous at remote Fanewold Castle. Luke expects a crank and a curiosity, not the steady drumbeat of coincidences...
Nov 26, 2025•3 hr 35 min
Exit Betty by Grace Livingston Hill audiobook. Genre: romance On a rain-slick November night, Elizabeth 'Betty' Stanhope arrives at church dressed in satin and dread. Groomed to obey and desperate to please her late father's memory, she has been pushed toward a marriage she does not want - to the imposing Herbert Hutton, a man she has long feared. When the ceremony begins, Betty's terror finally breaks through the polished surface of society, and a sudden collapse gives her one narrow chance to ...
Nov 25, 2025•5 hr 32 min
According to the Pattern by Grace Livingston Hill audiobook. Genre: romance When Miriam Winthrop first senses that something is shifting in her home, she tries to dismiss it as tiredness, imagination, anything but the truth. She is a devoted wife and mother, certain that the vows she made to her husband, Claude, mean more than social fashion or passing excitement. Then a chance glimpse confirms her fear: Claude has been drawn into the orbit of another woman, and Miriam is left facing a heartbrea...
Nov 24, 2025•6 hr 49 min
