Through Decem­ber 22, the Guardian’s new Short Sto­ries pod­cast (iTunes — RSS — Web Site) will present 12 well-known authors read­ing sto­ries by oth­er famous writ­ers. So far, we have Philip Pull­man read­ing Chekhov, Anne Enright pre­sent­ing Ray­mond Carver’s sto­ry “Fat,” and William Boyd read­ing JG Bal­lard’s “My Dream of Fly­ing to Wake Island.” The sched­ule for the nine remain­ing sto­ries is right here.

If this pod­cast feels vague­ly famil­iar, it’s per­haps because you have already encoun­tered The New York­er Fic­tion pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Here again, lead­ing authors read short works by oth­er great writ­ers – Paul Ther­oux reads “The Gospel Accord­ing to Mark” by Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Car­ol Oates reads Eudo­ra Wel­ty’s “Where Is the Voice Com­ing From?,” Orhan Pamuk reads Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russ­ian Edu­ca­tion,” the parade of great read­ings goes on.

All of these read­ings, plus many more, are cat­a­logued in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books. And there they will remain. Thanks to Stephen for the heads up on the new Guardian pod­cast…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Great Authors (and Actors) Read Famous Lit­er­a­ture Out Loud

Pub­lished first in 1921, then again in 1944, Vir­ginia Woolf’s short sto­ry, “A Haunt­ed House,” runs a mere 692 words – which makes it a Hal­loween treat that is short and sweet. We give you an appro­pri­ate­ly somber read­ing of Woolf’s sto­ry above, with the accom­pa­ny­ing text here. Or you can find an mp3 ver­sion in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books. H/T to Mike, and enjoy the day.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Writ­ing in The Guardian in years past, Christo­pher Hitchens revis­it­ed Ani­mal Farm, George Orwell’s “dystopi­an alle­gor­i­cal novel­la” that took aim at the cor­rup­tion of the Sovi­et Union and its total­i­tar­i­an rule. Pub­lished in 1945, the short book appears on the Mod­ern Library’s list of the 100 Best Nov­els of the 20th cen­tu­ry, and Time Mag­a­zine’s own hon­ors list. But, as Hitchens reminds us, Ani­mal Farm was almost nev­er pub­lished. The man­u­script bare­ly sur­vived the Nazi bomb­ing of Lon­don dur­ing World War II, and then ini­tial­ly TS Eliot (an impor­tant edi­tor at Faber & Faber) and oth­er pub­lish­ers reject­ed the book. It even­tu­al­ly came to see the light of day, but, 65 years lat­er, Ani­mal Farm still can’t be legal­ly read in Chi­na, Bur­ma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islam­ic world. But, no mat­ter where you come from, you can lis­ten to Ani­mal Farm for free. That’s right, I said it – free. The Inter­net Archive offers free access to audio ver­sions of Ani­mal Farm and Orwell’s oth­er major clas­sic, 1984. Both texts appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books, and you can down­load them direct­ly from the Inter­net Archive here (Ani­mal Farm) and here (1984), or stream them below:

Ani­mal Farm

1984

The text ver­sions of these clas­sics also appear in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Final­ly, if you’re inter­est­ed in down­load­ing a free audio book from Audible.com (pret­ty much any book you want), you can get more details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Lit2Go’s 200 Free (and Teacher-Friend­ly) Audio Books: Ready for Down­loads

500 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

In 1865, Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky found him­self in a deep hole. He had gam­bled away his last sav­ings and wracked up big debts. He also had to sup­port the fam­i­ly of his recent­ly deceased broth­er. Look­ing to make some quick mon­ey, Dos­to­evsky asked Mikhail Katkov, pub­lish­er of The Russ­ian Mes­sen­ger, for an advance. Then he began writ­ing in earnest a novel­la that soon sprawled into a grand nov­el. The first part of Crime and Pun­ish­ment would appear in The Russ­ian Mes­sen­ger in Jan­u­ary 1866; the sec­ond part in Decem­ber of that same year. Like The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov (Dos­to­evsky’s oth­er major work), Crime and Pun­ish­ment probes the dark side of human psy­chol­o­gy and asks some hard exis­ten­tial ques­tions. Niet­zsche would lat­er call Dos­to­evsky “the only psy­chol­o­gist from whom I have some­thing to learn: he belongs to the hap­pi­est wind­falls of my life, hap­pi­er even than the dis­cov­ery of Stend­hal.” One of the mas­ter­pieces of the Russ­ian lit­er­ary tra­di­tion, Crime and Pun­ish­ment is now avail­able as a free audio book thanks to Lit2Go. You can down­load the nov­el in full via iTunes, or as mp3s via the Lit2Go web site. Mean­while, if you’re look­ing for a free etext ver­sion of the nov­el, you can find it in the fol­low­ing for­mats: Google Mobile – Kin­dle – Feed­books — ePub.

Note: Crime and Pun­ish­ment appears in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

Learn how you can get a Free Audio Book (no strings attached) from Audible.com here.