Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness.

Willa Cather is considered to be one of the best chroniclers of pioneer life in the 20th century. She had a long and distinguished career writing essays, poems, short stories, and novels. This story is a powerful example of a frequent theme: the haunting, sometimes painful, contrast between city and country life.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life.

The Prairie Trilogy is a series of three novels centered around life in the Midwest during the late 19th/early 20th centuries by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather. First, in "O Pioneers!," we meet Alexandra Bergson, who inherits the family farm after her father dies and leaves her to care for her three siblings. While many immigrant families are giving up their farms and moving back to the city (or to their home countries), Alexandra decides to try to tough it out on the prairie.

Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.

Marian Forrester arrives in Sweet Water as the treasured bride of a retired builder. To her husband she embodies the idealism of this railroad town on the Western plains. And to Niel Herbert, a smitten young local boy, she’s so perfect as to belong to a different world. But as Niel comes of age, the fortunes of Sweet Water decline, and as the promise of the frontier fades, his perception of the fallible woman he has idolized since boyhood is shattered.

How long would you walk, if the Devil sauntered up to you of an evening, and journeyed alongside of you? Young Goodman Brown is led by the Devil to a midnight ritual, where fire, blood, and water change his opinions of the nature of humanity.

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to 12-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche.

Twelve billionaires rule the United States, while those called freemen are forced to serve the rich. But that was 60 years ago, before the Scarlet Plague. In this post-apocalyptic novella, a ragged and tattered old man tells his progeny of what life was like before The Scarlet Plague appeared - and wiped out civilization as they knew it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel of the Roaring Twenties is beloved by generations of readers and stands as his crowning work. This new audio edition, authorized by the Fitzgerald estate, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain). Gyllenhaal's performance is a faithful delivery in the voice of Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner turned New York bond salesman, who rents a small house next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby....

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, Massachusetts, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town. In a searing portrait of a community engulfed by panic—with ruthless prosecutors, and neighbors eager to testify against neighbor—The Crucible famously mirrors the anti-Communist hysteria that held the United States in its grip in the 1950’s.

Often cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, Joyce's elegant story details a New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin that is so evocative and beautiful that it prompts the protagonist's wife to make a shocking revelation to her husband - closing the story with an emotionally powerful epiphany that is unsurpassed in modern literature."The Dead" is the final short story in Joyce's 1914 collection Dubliners. It is the longest story in the collection and widely considered to be one of the greatest short stories in the English language.

Benedict Cumberbatch reads the enduring classic of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa wakes to discover that he has turned into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. He attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repelled by the horrible creature he has become. First published in 1915, Kafka's darkly comic novella explores concepts such as the absurdity of life, alienation and the disconnect between mind and body.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.