Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free copies for you today.

A Reddit.com user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?”
Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science.

Before the days of Harry Potter, generations of young readers let their imaginations take flight with The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels written by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R.

James Franco gave The Paris Review a hand when he jumped into bed and started reading “William Wei,” a short story published in a recent edition of the storied literary journal. Find a cleaned up audio file here, or in our collection of Free Audio Books.

Close the doors. Shut the blinds. Turn out the lights. Make that room dark. Get ready for Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People. Originally recorded in 1962, the album features 11 ghost stories introduced by Hitchcock himself and then read by actor John Allen.

We all know where books come from: a human and a muse meet, fall in love, and two months to twenty years later, a book is born. Then, as with other varieties of babies, the sleepless nights start as a writer searches for a home for the book, collecting rejections like badges of honor, testaments to determination.

Every year, thousands of American high school students read a common selection of great novels — classics loved by young and old readers alike. Today, we have selected 20 of the most popular books and highlighted ways that you can download versions for free, mostly as free audio books and ebooks, and sometimes as movies and radio dramas.

Le Monde has called Life and Fate “the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century,” and Martin Amis once described its author, Vasily Grossman, as “the Tolstoy of the USSR.” Now, if you haven’t read the novel, you can begin to understand the reason for all of the high praise.

With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never been easier.

Six years before he published his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Burroughs broke into the literary scene with Junky (sometimes also called Junkie), a candid, semi-autobiographical account of an “unredeemed drug addict.