Authors Reading Audio & Video

Join the World Book Club and listen to the globe's great authors discuss their best known works of literature. The BBC's Harriett Gilbert has been hosting this monthly radio show since 2002 with over 200 podcast episodes on the feed, interviewing winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize...

An unforgettable memoir of growing up black in the 1930s and 1940s in a tiny Arkansas town where Angelou's grandmother's store was the heart of the community and white people seemed as strange as aliens from another planet.

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, "The Kite Runner" is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul.

An adventure tale in its purest form. A thrilling and elegantly told account of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island.

Fahrenheit 451 is set in a grim alternate-future setting ruled by a tyrannical government in which firemen as we understand them no longer exist: Here, firemen don't douse fires, they ignite them.

The sights, smells and sounds of a long-ago Christmas come to life in Dylan Thomas's reading...

Allen Ginsberg's Howl is the ultimate beat poem, and what better way to experience it than listening to Ginsberg read it himself. PennSound features two recordings of Ginsberg reading Howl, one from 1956 (the year he published it) and one from 1995 (a few years before his death).

Arthur Miller reads from Death of a Salesman with actress Mildred Dunnock, who played Linda Loman in the original Broadway production. It was recorded at 92Y on February 2, 1955.

These new poems are powerful, distinctive and as always, full of lifting rhythms of love and remembering.

In 1957 and 1958 Nobel Prize-winning American novelist William Faulkner served two terms as the University of Virginia's first Writer-in-Residence. During this time Faulkner spoke and answered questions at many of the writing and literature classes and these lectures were recorded on audio.