A House-Boat on the Styx: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A House-Boat on the Styx, credited to John Kendrick Bangs, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A House-Boat on the Styx by John Kendrick Bangs. The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up until the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx. This does not appear to be the conventional Hell described by Dante in The Inferno, but rather the Hades described in Greek myth (both of which had Styxes): a universal collecting pot for dead souls, regardless of their deeds in life. The book begins with Charon, ferryman of the Styx (in The Inferno, he was the ferryman of the river Acheron) being startled—and annoyed—by the arrival of a house boat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed the boat's janitor. What follows are eleven more stories (for a total of twelve) which are set on the house boat. There is no central theme, and the purpose of the book appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history and mythology. (from Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: A House-Boat on the Styx
• Author credits: John Kendrick Bangs
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 12
• Listed recording duration: 2:54:17

Catalogue topics

• afterlife
• bangsian
• humor
• charon

Track guide

1. 01 - Charon Makes a Discovery — 13:25
2. 02 - A Disputed Authorship — 11:59
3. 03 - Washington Gives a Dinner — 16:11
4. 04 - Hamlet Makes a Suggestion — 13:12
5. 05 - The House Committee Discuss the Poets — 12:51
6. 06 - Some Theories, Darwinian and Otherwise — 14:15
7. 07 - A Discussion as to Ladies' Day — 13:15
8. 08 - A Discontented Shade — 16:58
9. 09 - As to Cookery and Sculpture — 15:19
10. 10 - Story-tellers' Night — 16:09
11. 11 - As to Saurians and Others — 17:02
12. 12 - The House-Boat Disappears — 13:45

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.