Cabbages and Kings: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Cabbages and Kings, credited to O. Henry, 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 Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry. Read in English by Elliot Gage; Eric Metzler This work is O. Henry's first published volume and is considered to be his only novel. The plot is composed of several short stories, which were inspired by the author's six-month stay in Honduras in the late 1890s. "The incidents embracing as they do, a variety of subjects, hang loosely together, so loosely in fact, that at times one finds no apparent connection between them at all, and yet in the end one sees how each is intimately related to the other. ...Written by a less able hand than O. Henry's the book might have been a sad jumble, perhaps comprehensible to none but the Walrus--but as it is, one finds a joy in its every obscurity." -- The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 17, 1904) Great mysteries are ofen meta-mysteries. For over a century this novel has masqueraded as a collection of loosely connected short stories. Looking backwards through a prism (now a commonplace critical contortion) Cabbages and Kings foreshadows many shadings: "At Swim-Two-Birds", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", "Tyrants Destroyed", "The Continuity of Parks". -- Elliot Gage O. Henry spent his first years as a writer in Austin, Texas, and the University of Texas maintains a 219-item collection of his works at the Portal to Texas History (reference to publicly-available items which may not be in public domain offered to enthusiasts). — Eric W. Metzler

Recording facts

• Recording title: Cabbages and Kings
• Author credits: O. Henry
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 19
• Listed recording duration: 6:25:02

Track guide

1. 00 - THE PROEM: BY THE CARPENTER — 9:57
2. 01 - FOX-IN-THE-MORNING — 18:40
3. 02 - THE LOTUS AND THE BOTTLE — 24:45
4. 03 - SMITH — 22:55
5. 04 - CAUGHT — 24:18
6. 05 - CUPID'S EXILE NUMBER TWO — 11:55
7. 06 - THE PHONOGRAPH AND THE GRAFT — 25:23
8. 07 - MONEY MAZE — 21:18
9. 08 - THE ADMIRAL — 16:23
10. 09 - THE FLAG PARAMOUNT — 20:59
11. 10 - THE SHAMROCK AND THE PALM — 34:55
12. 11 - THE REMNANTS OF THE CODE — 19:30
13. 12 - SHOES — 19:22
14. 13 - SHIPS — 17:08
15. 14 - MASTERS OF ARTS — 31:29
16. 15 - DICKY — 23:49
17. 16 - ROUGE ET NOIR — 18:48
18. 17 - TWO RECALLS — 16:10
19. 18 - THE VITAGRAPHOSCOPE — 7:17

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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.