Text library — read & listen
Classic books in plain text: read them right here, or have the text-to-speech voice built into your browser read them aloud for free.
Burton's unexpurgated Arabian Nights, volume 1: Scheherazade keeps her head by telling story after story of rogues, genies and unabashed erotica. Read free online or listen with your browser's text-to-speech voice.
Boccaccio's Decameron — ten Florentines flee the plague and tell a hundred stories across ten days, many of them shamelessly bawdy: the great erotic classic of medieval Italy. Read free online or listen with your browser's text-to-speech voice.
Ovid's Art of Love in plain English prose — the Roman masterclass in seduction: where to find a lover, how to win her, how to keep him, and how to be kept. Read free online or listen with browser TTS.
Pierre Louÿs's Aphrodite — the most luxurious of erotic antiquities: the courtesan Chrysis trades three kisses of the goddess for her lover's rival's death, in ancient Alexandria. Read free online or listen with your browser's text-to-speech voice.
Apuleius's Golden Asse in Adlington's Elizabethan translation — Lucius's curiosity for magic turns him into a donkey, and only desire and the goddess's mercy turn him back. The Cupid and Psyche tale sits inside. Read free or listen with browser TTS.
Petronius's Satyricon — Rome's outrageous satire of appetite: Encolpius and his companions adrift through feasts, jealousy and affairs, including Trimalchio's famous banquet. Read free online or hear it read aloud.
Vātsyāyana's Kama Sutra in Richard Burton's classic translation — the ancient Indian art of love: courtship, embraces, kissing, and the pleasures between lovers, with the comments of the later commentators. Read free online or listen via browser TTS.
John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) — the most famous erotic novel in English: Fanny's rise from innocent country girl to London's most sought-after courtesan, told with frank detail. Read free online or listen with your browser's text-to-speech voice.
James Joyce's fifteen stories of Dublin life, ending with The Dead — free to read online or listen with the browser's built-in TTS voice.
Joseph Conrad's journey up the Congo to meet Mr Kurtz — the short novel behind Apocalypse Now. Read online free or hear it aloud in your browser.
Franz Kafka in David Wyllie's translation: Gregor Samsa wakes up as a monstrous insect, and his family slowly turns away. Read free or listen with text-to-speech.
Robert Louis Stevenson's strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — a respectable doctor and the thing he becomes at night. Free to read or listen via TTS.
Robert Louis Stevenson's pirates: Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver and a map marked with an X. Read online free or let the browser voice read it to you.
H. G. Wells launches the time traveller into the far future — the Eloi, the Morlocks and the twilight of the world. Read free or listen with browser TTS.
J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy — the boy who never grows up, Tinker Bell and Neverland — free to read online or hear aloud via text-to-speech.
The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in the classic English translation, from The Frog King to Hansel and Grethel — read free or hear them read aloud.
The fables of Aesop — the Hare and the Tortoise, the Boy Who Cried Wolf — in George Fyler Townsend's classic translation. Read online free or listen with browser text-to-speech.
Arthur Conan Doyle's first twelve Sherlock Holmes cases — A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League and more — free to read or listen via your browser's TTS voice.
Lewis Carroll's Wonderland — the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and a very curious girl. Free to read online, or have your browser read it aloud with text-to-speech.
Mary Shelley's Gothic classic: Victor Frankenstein assembles a creature that turns on the maker who abandoned him. Read free online or let the browser's text-to-speech voice read it aloud.