Tales of Men and Ghosts: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Tales of Men and Ghosts, credited to Edith Wharton, 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 Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton. Read by Nicholas Clifford Tales of Men and Ghosts was published as a collection in 1910, though the first eight of the stories had earlier appeared in Scribner's and the last two in the Century Magazine. Despite the title, the men outnumber the ghosts, since only "The Eyes" and "Afterward" actually call on the supernatural. In only two of the stories are women the central characters, though elsewhere they play important roles. Wharton enjoys subjecting her subjects -- all of them American gentlemen and gentlewomen, in the conventional senses of the word -- to various moral tests and sometimes ironic tests. Some of the stories deal with the intellectual fashions of the day -- "The Blond Beast" basing itself, to some degree, on Nietzsche, and "The Debt" on variants of Darwinism. Though "Afterward" is set in England, and "The Letters" in France, the rest of the stories are squarely in Wharton's own New York city, rather than (say) in what she calls "the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West," thus avoiding the need to come to terms with what fashion-conscious New Yorkers still today call "fly-over country" for everything that lies between the west bank of the Hudson River and San Francisco Bay. (Summary by Nicholas Clifford)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Tales of Men and Ghosts
• Author credits: Edith Wharton
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 12
• Listed recording duration: 9:34:54

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• ghosts
• New York

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter I, The Bolted Door, Part I — 56:02
2. 02 - Chapter I continued The Bolted Door. Part II — 38:55
3. 03 - Chapter II, His Father's Son — 38:33
4. 04 - Chapter III The Daunt Diana — 29:51
5. 05 - Chapter IV The Debt — 32:57
6. 06 - Chapter V Full Circle — 51:27
7. 07 - Chapter VI The Legend — 1:01:55
8. 08 - Chapter VII The Eyes — 45:28
9. 09 - Chapter 8 The Blond Beast — 59:49
10. 10 - Chapter IX Afterward — 1:10:14
11. 11 - Chapter X, The Letters, Part I — 39:45
12. 12 - Chapter X The Letters, Part II — 50:02

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.