The Desert by John Charles Van Dyke, published in 1901, is a lush, poetic description of the natural beauty of the American Southwest. "What land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky!" Van...

If a thing is not sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it, is how the Greeks saw...

Reputedly inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories, Austrian criminal jurist and examining magistrate Hans Gross wrote the first handbook on criminal investigation. This treatise covers everything from the qualities of a good investigating officer...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 10 recordings of Please Buy My Verses by Anonymous. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 18, 2018. ------ PLEASE BUY MY VERSES. PRICE: WHAT YOU PLEASE The Bearer Lost His Eyesight While Blasting in December,...

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is the most famous and celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. Pirandello, in the preface to the play, says that whenever a reader opens Dante’s Inferno,...

Thrown out of Russia by a powerful relative, a young American Boy Scout, Fred Waring, meets his Russian cousin, Boris Suvaroff, and together they discover the secrets of the advancing German army. Through perilous escapes, secret passages, and being...

An army officer, and a mysterious lady with a maid and baby in tow, are the only passengers on the Engadine express from Calais. The lady is afraid that someone is following her. Who is she? And what is her strange package? One suspicious...

A woman is haunted by a terrible event she witnessed in her youth but is unable to make sense of -- a murder, the sight of which is so traumatic that it drives every memory of life up to that moment from her mind. The murdered man was her father,...

The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English poet William Blake, illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the word "first".The book takes its...

Kabir (1440 - 1518) was a mystic poet and saint of India, whose writings have greatly influenced the Bhakti movement. The name Kabir comes from Arabic Al-Kabir which means 'The Great' - the 37th Name of God in the Qur'an. Kabir was influenced by the...

LibriVox volunteers bring you nine different recordings of When We Two Parted, by George Gordon, Lord Byron. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of November 26th, 2006....

There are certain names which are familiar, as names, to all mankind; and every person who seeks for any degree of mental cultivation, feels desirous of informing himself of the leading outlines of their history, that he may know, in brief, what it...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 different recordings of Saint Distaff's Day, or the Morrow After Twelfth Day, by Robert Herrick. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of January 6th, 2008. What is St. Distaff's Day? Historically, it was...

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is, arguably the earliest chronological story by Robert E. Howard in terms of Conan's life. The brief tale is set somewhere in frozen Nordheim, geographically situated north of Conan's homeland, Cimmeria. Conan is...

Aliens have invaded the earth! Horrible one celled creatures disguised as normal human beings ! Well, at least that is what it seems to the author. Yes, The Eyes Have It is a whimsical story, making gentle fun of certain writing styles, but only a...

"The only figure of literary repute who ever rated The "Genius" as first among the novels of Theodore Dreiser was Theodore Dreiser," literary historian Larzer Ziff observed. His fifth published novel, The "Genius" was actually the third novel...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 7 recordings of New Year Greeting by Louise R. Waite . This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 21st, 2010., The 21st of March is the ancient Persian festival of Naw-Rúz, also spelled "Noruz" (New Day) which is the...

47 poems, most of them sonnets, most on the subjects of beauty and death, touching the mystery just beyond the known. - Summary by Josh Mitteldorf...

LibriVox volunteers bring you ten recordings of "The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,the Fortnightly Poem for August 31, 2014. May we each be spared from the wreck of pride on the reef of Norman's Woe. (Summary by MaryAnn)....

The Way of Peace is your guide to the power of meditation; self and truth; the acquirement of spiritual power; the realization of selfless love; entering into the infinite; saints, sages, and saviors; the law of service; and the realization of...