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The whole book. Staged. stagedBooks performs the great public-domain books complete and unaltered — every word the author wrote — as full-cast audio plays, with a companion rail on screen that keeps the cast, the calendar, the map and the footnotes in view as you listen.

  1. Oct 28

    Bobok

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873. A failed writer, told in print that his face suggests insanity, goes to a funeral for diversion, sits down on a gravestone, and begins to hear the dead talking. Under the ground a general is losing at cards, a lady of the highest society is quarrelling with a shopkeeper, a privy councillor has just arrived with a deficit of four hundred thousand roubles, and a young baron proposes that since they have two or three months of consciousness left, they should spend them casting off all shame. Dostoevsky’s strangest comedy, complete. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WKuWTwxhlQ Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/bobok/

  2. Oct 27

    The Lightning-Rod Man

    Herman Melville, 1854. A thunderstorm in the Berkshire hills, and a knock at the door. The caller is a lean, dripping stranger with a copper rod, who will not stand near the hearth, the wall, the window or the bell-wire, and who has a rod to sell for twenty dollars before the next bolt falls. The householder stays where he is. Melville’s shortest tale, a two-man argument conducted at the top of a storm. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PqT8DJCdtc Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/the-lightning-rod-man/

  3. Oct 26

    The Adventure of the Empty House

    Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903. Spring, 1894. The Honourable Ronald Adair has been shot dead in a locked room in Park Lane, and no one can say how. Watson, three years a widower of his friend, goes to look at the house, knocks over an old book-collector on the pavement, and an hour later turns to find the old man in his study. What follows is the return from the Reichenbach Falls, a night in the empty house across from Baker Street, a bust in a window, and the second most dangerous man in London. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv8OFzH3E9M Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/the-empty-house/

  4. Oct 26

    This Side of Paradise · Book One · Chapter Two: Spires and Gargoyles · Part 2

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920. Two or three sentences: the hook, in the voice of the back of a book, no spoilers. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_noSQCOXCI Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/this-side-of-paradise-2-2/

  5. Oct 24

    This Side of Paradise · Book One · Chapter Two: Spires and Gargoyles · Part 1

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920. September 1913. Amory Blaine walks up University Place with a suitcase and a derby he soon learns to leave at home. Princeton has a social system he can’t see and can’t stop thinking about; Kerry Holiday thinks he should drift, Burne Holiday is too busy to think, and a stooped freshman reading Stephen Phillips in Joe’s turns out to be the poet of the Lit. Football, the Triangle Club’s ‘Ha-Ha Hortense!’, a wet night on the sun-dial, and the petting party, by the man who named it. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oFzvQWEKx8 Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/this-side-of-paradise-2-1/

  6. Oct 22

    The Odyssey · Book I

    Homer, c. 700 BC. The gods sit in council on Olympus while Odysseus wastes on Calypso’s island, ten years after Troy. Athena takes the likeness of a stranger and goes down to Ithaca, where the wooers of Penelope eat Odysseus’s house bare and his son Telemachus sits among them grieving. By nightfall the boy has been told to call an assembly, find a ship, and go looking for his father. The first of twenty-four books, read complete. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD1ehA8Em6s Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/the-odyssey-book-1/

  7. Oct 21

    Bartleby, the Scrivener

    Herman Melville, 1853. A Wall Street lawyer, an eminently safe man, hires a pale young copyist named Bartleby. For a while he copies day and night. Then he is asked to check a document, and answers, in a mild, firm voice, that he would prefer not to. He prefers not to leave either. Melville’s most quoted sentence and his strangest story, told by the man who could not make him go. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y75u1B_Kn44 Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/bartleby-the-scrivener/

  8. Oct 20

    The Death of Iván Ilích

    Leo Tolstoy, 1886. A member of the Court of Justice dies at forty-five, and his colleagues’ first thought is who will get his place. Then Tolstoy goes back and tells the life: the career, the marriage, the apartment with the curtains he hung himself, the fall from the ladder, the doctors who will not say whether it is dangerous, and the three days of screaming at the end. Only the peasant Gerásim will hold his legs and tell him the truth. Watch it with the companion rail — cast, calendar, map and footnotes on screen — on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYqCyBaEPpE Episode page, plates and the free companion edition: https://stagedbooks.com/episodes/the-death-of-ivan-ilyich/

See All (27)

About

The whole book. Staged. stagedBooks performs the great public-domain books complete and unaltered — every word the author wrote — as full-cast audio plays, with a companion rail on screen that keeps the cast, the calendar, the map and the footnotes in view as you listen.

Information

  • Creator
    stagedBooks
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © stagedBooks. The texts are in the public domain in the United States; the performances are ours.
  • Show Website
    stagedBooks