Novelist, screenwriter, poet, and translator Paul Auster has carved out a place for himself over the past several decades as a decidedly writer’s writer, a Brooklyn Borges of a sort, whose metafictional tales are often intricately constructed stories within stories (within stories).

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, his New York Times obituary claimed, “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” This is a sentence that may puzzle modern-day lovers of Fitzgerald’s enduringly-relevant fiction, but it was the judgment of the time on the exhausted, alcoholic writer’s career.

“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself.

Did you know T.S.

Before Banned Books Week comes to a close, we bring you Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, Howl. The controversial poem became his best known work, and it now occupies a central place in the Beat literary canon, standing right alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

A number of sites offer free Mp3s of public domain books—Librivox and Podiobooks, for instance. What sets apart Lit2Go, the University of South Florida’s extensive collection of free audio books (Web - iTunes), are the materials to help K-12 teachers present literature in the classroom.

Back in 1997, Hal Willner recorded, Closed On Account of Rabies, an audio compilation featuring well-known artists reading macabre stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 years later, the album has gone out of circulation. A handful of “out-of-print” CDs can be bought on Amazon.

Neil Gaiman’s novelette, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, won the Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette. And it’s now available online in text and audio.

This is a novel that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s.

Today we’re bringing you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web. And what better way to get started than with Aldous Huxley reading a dramatized recording of his 1932 novel, Brave New World. The reading aired on the CBS Radio Workshop in 1956.