Introduction

OverDrive is NOBLE's free downloadable audiobook service. The titles are downloaded via the Internet to a personal computer and can also be transferred to supported MP3 players. Some titles can also be burned to CD for greater portability. A significant number of titles are available to unlimited number of patrons, or "always available." To use the service, you must reside in a NOBLE community or be affiliated with a NOBLE member academic institution and have a library card from one of those libraries.

Each month this newsletter will focus on different aspects of NOBLE's ever-expanding OverDrive collection with an emphasis on "always available" titles.

In This Issue

Jane Austen
Short Stories for Long Days

Helpful Hints

Most WMA Audiobooks are now iPod®-compatible – with a quick upgrade to OverDrive Media Console™ v3.2!

iPod

With OverDrive Media Console v3.2 for Windows®, most audiobooks can now be transferred to the iPhone™ and the iPod®! In just a few clicks, send audiobooks to your Windows-formatted iPod using the built-in Transfer Wizard! The 'Plays on' icons at this site indicate whether titles are compatible with Apple® devices.

Did you know?

You now have the option to change your loan period from 14 days to either 7 days or 21 days?

You might change your loan period based on the length of, or number of books you are checking out, or on how much listening time you are likely to have in the next few weeks, etc.

If you choose a 7-day loan period you will be able to borrow books more frequently.

If you choose a 21-day loan period, you are less likely to lose a title to another borrower before you have finished it.

You may change your loan period whenever you like, but the change will apply only to titles borrowed in future, not to those currently checked out.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) began to write early for her own and her family’s amusement. Her novels, set in her own English countryside, depict the daily lives of provincial middle-class families with wry observation, a delicate irony, and a good-humored wit. She is now considered by many scholars to be the first great woman novelist.

Enjoy these classics from Jane Austen--always available from OverDrive.

Emma - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/2000
ISBN-13: 9780786143092
ISBN-10: 0786143096

First published in 1816 and considered one of Jane Austen's finest works, Emma is a humorous portrayal of a heroine whose injudicious interferences in the life of a young parlour-boarder in a neighboring village often lead to substantial mortification. Austen brings to life a myriad of engaging characters and presents a mixture of social classes as she did in Pride and Prejudice. Her two greatest comic characters are part of Emma's machinations-the eccentric Mr. Woodhouse and the quintessential bore, Miss Bates.

Delightfully funny, Emma displays the shrewd wit and delicate irony which made Jane Austen a master of the English novel. Although Austen thought that only she would like her witty, fanciful, self-deluded heroine, Emma has gained the affection of generations of readers.

Mansfield Park - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1/28/2008
ISBN-13: 9780786142651
ISBN-10: 0786142650

Mansfield Park is the study of three families-the Bertrams, the Crawfords, and the Prices. The story's heroine, Fanny Price, is at its center. She is adopted into the family of her rich uncle Thomas Bertram, and is condescendingly treated as a poor relation by "Aunt Norris." Of her cousins, only Edmund, a young clergyman, appreciates her fine qualities, and she falls in love with him. Unfortunately, however, he is drawn to the shallow and worldly Mary Crawford. Fanny's quiet passivity, steadfast loyalty, and natural goodness are matched against the wit and brilliance of her lovely rival. Jane Austen skillfully uses her characters' emotional relationships to explore the social and moral values by which they attempt to order their lives.

Northanger Abbey - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 12/31/2007
ISBN-13: 9780786142811
ISBN-10: 0786142812

Jane Austen’s first major novel, a parody of the popular literature of the time, is an ironic tale of the romantic folly of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money. The humorous adventures of young Catherine as she encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath" lead to some of Austen's most brilliant social satire. There is Catherine’s hilarious liaison with a paragon of bad manners and boastfulness; her disastrous friendship with an unforgettably crass coquette; and a whirl of cotillion dances with their timeless mortifications. A visit to ancient Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the novel’s handsome hero, excites the irrepressible Catherine’s hopes of romance amid gothic horrors. But what awaits her there is a drama of a different kind, in this most youthfully exuberant and broadly comic of Jane Austen’s works.

Persuasion - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/2000
ISBN-13: 9780786151264
ISBN-10: 0786151269

The last novel completed by Jane Austen before she died in her early forties, Persuasion is often thought to be the story of the author's own lost love. The book's heroine, Anne Elliot, encounters Frederick Wentworth, the man to whom she was once engaged when he was a young naval officer. Now a captain, Wentworth is courting the rash young Louisa Musgrove. The happy ending is not one in which Austen would ever play a part.

Pride and prejudice : the Oxford illustrated Jane Austen - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 03/10/2005
ISBN-13: 9780786133673
ISBN-10: 0786133678

Called "the greatest novel ever written" by Malcolm Muggeridge, Pride and Prejudice captures the affections of class-conscious 18th-century English families with matrimonial aims and rivalries. From its famous opening sentence, the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove "rather too light and bright, and sparkling," delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who encounter it for the first time. Austen's characters are universal: they live a truth beyond time, change, or caricature.

Sense and Sensibility - Austen, Jane

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 11/09/2004
ISBN-13: 9780786151271
ISBN-10: 0786151277

The first of Jane Austen's novels to be published, Sense and Sensibility marked the debut of England's primary novelist of manners. Convinced that "3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work upon," Austen created a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly. Genteel dinner parties at a stately manor and romantic walks through luxuriant Devonshire draw two attractive sisters into the manipulations of landed gentry determined to marry well. But neither sense nor sensibility can guarantee happiness for either.

Short Stories for Long Days

Perhaps a body of work isn't necessary for a short story writer. If you do one story that survives in an anthology, that's enough."--William Maxwell

Barrel fever : stories and essays - Sedaris, David

Publisher: Hachette Audio
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 09/01/1998
ISBN-13: 9781594836688
ISBN-10: 159483668X

In David Sedaris' world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. David Sedaris considers the hazards and rewards of smoking, writing for Giantess magazine, and living with his scrappy brother Paul, a.k.a. "The Rooster."

Classic Irish short stories - Wilde, Oscar, et al.

Publisher: CSA Word
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1996
ISBN-13: 9780192819185
ISBN-10: 0192819186

Irish stories read fittingly and expertly by T.P. McKenna. The Model Millionaire / Oscar Wilde Rosanna / Agnes Castle The Brown Man / Gerald Griffin Bob Pentland, or The Gauger Outwitted / William Carleton Araby / James Joyce Adventures of a Strolling Player / Oliver Goldsmith Sir Dominick Sarsfield / Sheridan Le Fanu

The John Updike Audio Collection - Updike, John

Publisher: HarperCollins
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 3/2/2004
ISBN-13: 9780060813345
ISBN-10: 0060813342

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

In describing how he wrote these stories in a small, rented, smoke-filled office in Ipswitch, Massachusetts, he says, "I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me - to give the mundane its beautiful due."

Our story begins : new and selected stories - Wolff, Tobias

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 3/19/2008
ISBN-13: 9781433246111
ISBN-10: 1433246112

Tobias Wolff’s first two books proved how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation” (New York Times Book Review). Now after writing numerous other works, he returns to the short story with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these ten stories, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”

Table of Contents

Quantum of solace : 007, the complete James Bond short stories - Fleming, Ian

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 9/26/2008
ISBN-13: 9781433249600
ISBN-10: 143324960X

Many of Ian Fleming’s short stories have been the inspiration for the extremely successful James Bond film franchise, and included in this collection are “For Your Eyes Only,” “Octopussy,” “The Property of a Lady,” “The Living Daylights,” “Risico,” “The Hildebrand Rarity,” and “007 in New York.”

Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, Collection 1 - Serling, Rod

Publisher: Falcon Picture Group, LLC
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/2006
ISBN-13: 9780786156849
ISBN-10: 0786156848

The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas will keep you glued to the edge of your seat, whether listening in your home or in your car. Each tale unites classic stories and musical scores with contemporary sound effects and readings by distinguished guest stars.

Adapted for audio from original scripts written for the television show created by Rod Serling that aired in the 1960s, these radio dramas feature music and sound effects and a distinguished lineup of guest stars. Serling’s widow, Carol Serling, praised the radio adaptations, calling them “truly astounding.”

Collection 1 includes: “The Obsolete Man,” “Time Enough at Last,” “A Nice Place to Visit,” “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” and “The Lonely.”