Bronson Pinchot, Audible's 2010 Narrator of the Year, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible's Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for recent audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People's Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post.

Jennifer Bradshaw has lent her voice to a number of audio books, including Secret Life of a Vampire: Love at Stake,
Willow Springs, and The Crime Is Murder.

John Lee, a charming mixture of college professor and therapist, came to national prominence over a decade ago with The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man, which sold more than a quarter million copies. He has since written eight other books on anger, fathers and sons, mothers and sons, and other relationships, including Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately and Growing Yourself Back Up: Understanding Emotional Regression.

Bestselling author John Lee has been featured on Oprah, 20/20, The View, CNN, PBS, and NPR. He has been interviewed by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other national magazines and radio talk shows.

Gerard Doyle has appeared in London's West End in The Hired Man and in Shakespeare's Coriolanus and The Winter's Tale, and has toured nationally and internationally with the English Shakespeare Company. He has appeared on Broadway in The Weir and on television in New York Undercover and Law and Order. Mr. Doyle is also an award-winning audiobook narrator.

Herman Melville (1819-91) became in his late twenties a highly successful author of exotic novels based on his experiences as a sailor - writing in quick succession Typee, Omoo, Redburn and White-Jacket. However, his masterpiece Moby-Dick was met with incomprehension and the other later works which are now the basis of his reputation, such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Confidence-Man, were failures. Melville stopped writing fiction and the rest of his long life was spent first as a lecturer and then, for nineteen years, as a customs official in New York City. He was also the author of the immensely long poem Clarel, which was similarly dismissed. At the end of his life he wrote Billy Budd, Sailor which was published posthumously in 1924.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–ca. 1914) was an American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Ohio, he served in the Civil War and then settled in San Francisco. He wrote for Hearst’s Examiner, his wit and satire making him the literary dictator of the Pacific coast and strongly influencing many writers. He disappeared into war-torn Mexico in 1913.

Jack London (1876-1916) was born John Chaney in California USA. In 1896 he was caught up in the gold rush to the Klondike river in north-west Canada, which became the inspiration for The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Jack London became one of the most widely read writers in the world.

American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two published novels and close to one hundred short stories in the late nineteenth century. Most of her fictional works are set in Louisiana, and her best-known stories focus on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women, often challenging traditional family and social structures of the time.

Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, in 1836 and was raised in New York City. He had no formal education, but he inherited a love for books. In 1857, Harte moved to California and eventually wrote for the San Franciscan Golden Era paper. There he published his first condensed novels, which were brilliant parodies of the works of well-known authors, such as Dickens and Cooper. Later, he became clerk in the U.S. branch mint. This job gave Harte time to also work for the Overland Monthly, where he published his world-famous "Luck of the Roaring Camp" and commissioned Mark Twain to write weekly articles.

In 1871, Harte was hired by the Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 to write twelve stories a year, which was the highest figure paid to an American writer at the time. He moved to New England after resigning a professorship at the University of California. There he was welcomed as an equal by such writers as Longfellow and Holmes, and he received continued praise for his works. However, laden with personal and family difficulties, his work suffered. In 1878, after an unsuccessful attempt on the lecture circuit, Harte accepted consulships in Germany and, later, Scotland. In 1885, he retired to London, where he died in 1902.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) is best known as the author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Before becoming a writer, Doyle first attended the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician, and it was from his teacher Joseph Bell that he learned much of what would inspire Holmes's skills of deduction. Toward the end of his life, Doyle became a devoted spiritualist, which contributed greatly to much of his writing after Holmes, and lead him around the world as a crusader and lecturer for the movement.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Mark Twain spent his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, which forms the setting for his two greatest works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Trying his hand at printing, typesetting and then gold-mining, the former steam-boat pilot eventually found his calling in journalism and travel writing. Dubbed 'the father of American literature' by William Faulkner, Twain died in 1910 after a colourful life of travelling, bankruptcy and great literary success.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), the author of hundreds of short stories and several plays, is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama. He described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices, thereby becoming the prominent representative of the late nineteenth-century Russian realist school. His early stream-of-consciousness style strongly influenced the literary world, including writers such as James Joyce.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic, who is today considered one of the masters of the short story form.

The narrators collaborating on this project are professional associates of Voices of Today, a spoken audio production house located in Perth, Western Australia.

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake, as well as the short-story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) was an English novelist and short-story writer. He also wrote numerous essays, speeches, and broadcasts, and some biographies and pageant plays. Many of his novels focus upon themes of class difference and hypocrisy. His best-known works are his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). Forster was twenty times nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) was a French novelist and the father of writers Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet. He is regarded as one of the most iconic names in French literature.

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) was an extemely prolific French writer who is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. His stories range in length from one or two pages to a full-length novel. Free from sentimentality or idealism, they expose in minute detail the pretenses and vulgarity of the period's middle class and traditional low-down of the Norman peasants. De Maupassant's style is characterized by a simplicity and directness that is sometimes comic and ironic. His work reflects his interest in the emotional problems of all classes and his passion for women. He also excelled at revealing the hidden sides of people. His first short story, "Ball of Fat," is considered one of his best. He is also the author of "The Necklace," "The House of Madame Tellier," and the novel A Woman's Life.

Anthony Hope (1863–1933), a thirty-year-old barrister, wrote The Prisoner of Zenda in 1893. His mythical Ruritania, with its witty hero and shrewd villains, became so popular that he gave up his law practice after the book’s publication.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is considered one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century. Best known for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby, he was equally hailed in the 1920s as one of America's premier short story writers. Among his other novels are Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon.


A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Willa Cather's work was profoundly influenced by her upbringing in rural Nebraska. During her young adulthood Cather proved herself intelligent and capable, initially training for a career as a medical doctor, but discovered a love of, and talent for, writing while attending the University of Nebraska. Following graduation, Cather worked as a journalist for several women s magazines before becoming a high school teacher; an opportunity work as an editor at McClure s provided Cather with her first chance to publish as the magazine serialized her first novel, Alexander s Bridge, to critical acclaim. This was soon followed by works that have since become best-loved American classics, including My Antonia, The Song of the Lark, and her Pulitzer-Prize winner, One of Ours. Cather died in 1947 at the age of 73.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was born in Boston and orphaned at an early age. Taken in by a couple from Richmond, Virginia, he spent a semester at the University of Virginia but could not afford to stay longer. After joining the Army and matriculating as a cadet, he started his literary career with the anonymous publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems, before working as a literary critic. His life was dotted with scandals, such as purposefully getting himself court-martialled to ensure dismissal from the Army, being discharged from his job at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond after being found drunk by his boss, and secretly marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia (listed twenty-one on the marriage certificate). His work took him to both New York City and Baltimore, where he died at the age of forty, two years after Virginia.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was a British writer of novels, poems, essays, short stories, and plays. Some of the books he wrote in the early 1900s became controversial because they contained direct descriptions of sexual relations. His best-known books are Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927), English humorist, novelist, and playwright, was born in Staffordshire and brought up in London. After a series of jobs including clerk, schoolmaster, actor, and journalist, he became joint editor of the Idler in 1892 and launched his own twopenny weekly, To-Day. His magnificently ridiculous Three Men in a Boat (1889) established itself as a humorous classic of the whimsical. His other books include Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886); Three Men on the Bummel (1900); Paul Kelver (1902); the morality play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1907); and his autobiography, My Life and Times (1926).

Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) was an acclaimed American novelist. Known for her use of dramatic irony, she found success early in her career with The House of Mirth, which garnered praise upon its publication. In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her tour-de-force novel, The Age of Innocence.

O. Henry (1862–1910), born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina, was a short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace, in particular, the lives of ordinary people in New York City. His stories often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name. He began writing sketches around 1887, and his stories of adventure in the Southwest United States and in Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers.