Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Swerve, Available as AudioBook on iTunes for $5.95

In the pref­ace of The Swerve: How the World Became Mod­ern, Stephen Green­blatt recalls the day he encoun­tered a trans­la­tion of Lucretius’ 2000 year old poem, On the Nature of Things. He was a grad stu­dent back at Yale, liv­ing on mod­est means, when he ambled into a book­store and found a copy marked down to ten cents. He picked it up, not hav­ing much to lose and not know­ing what he’d find. Soon enough he was read­ing one of the most scan­dalous and ground­break­ing texts from antiq­ui­ty, a book that even­tu­al­ly trav­eled a long and wind­ing road and changed our entire mod­ern world. That sto­ry Green­blatt tells in The Swerve.

The ten cents Green­blatt spent in the 1960s may be rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the deal you can get today. Right now, The Swerve, the win­ner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for gen­er­al non­fic­tion, can be down­loaded as an audio book for $5.95 via iTunes. Yes, we know, $5.95 is not free, and iTunes is not open, but it’s cer­tain­ly a deal worth men­tion­ing nonethe­less.

But if you’re real­ly han­ker­ing for some­thing free, then don’t miss our meta lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks, which include a copy of Lucretius’ famous work. Or def­i­nite­ly check out Audible.com’s Free Tri­al offer, which lets you down­load pret­ty much any audio book you want (clas­sic or mod­ern) for free. Get details here.