The winners of the 2021 Nobel Prizes will be announced this month. What a great opportunity to look back at winners from the prize’s early years with 10 gems from our catalogue.

The earliest laureate on our list is Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He tells the story of Oyvind, who is in love with Marit, who only has eyes for Jan. When Oyvind decides to go to agricultural school like Jan did, he is on track to become A Happy Boy.

Happy together are Pierre and Luce, who meet in Paris, the city of love, and, in 1918, of war. Will the newly conscripted pacifist and the free-spirited artist see the end of it, together? Find out in the novella by Romain Rolland.

Berta von Suttner was one of the greatest figures of the pacifist movement. She makes her sentiments clear in Die Waffen nieder!, a story of the noble Althaus family, who is involved in no less than 4 wars between 1859 and 1870. We also have an English translation of this novel.

Another important peace activist was Jane Addams, the first female American laureate. Her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House details the founding of this important charity for immigrants in Chicago.

Most immigrants are looking for The New Freedom. This was also the name of the political program of US president Woodrow Wilson. In this book, however, he goes beyond a mere explanation of his political views.

Zenon reaches far beyond the natural world at his first spiritistic meeting, and he’s not stopping there. When he meets the Wampir in Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel, he must fear for his life’s blood – in a metaphysical sense. We also have this book in a German translation.

If you’ve now become interested in An Introduction to Metaphysics, look no further than the book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. According to him, reality is fluid and can only be grasped through intuition.

It is only intuition that tells Dona Mercedes that her friend Teodora is unfaithful to her husband. But even though Don Julian trusts his wife, their marriage is going downhill quickly in the play The Great Galeoto by José Echegaray y Eizaguirre.

Jenny also knows many ups and downs. She’s happy as an art student in Rome, but upon her return to Norway, she gets involved with the wrong man… Find out if there’s a happy ending in the early novel by Sigrid Undset.

Giosue Carducci goes back in time to life in ancient Rome with his poetry. His Odi Barbare is the first book in a cycle of poems, and our edition comes with a special note from the author.

Enjoy – and check out the other Nobel Prize winners in our catalogue!

On August 9, LibriVox celebrates 16 years of audiobooks. Since our last anniversary we have completed more than 1450 new projects, wow! Let’s celebrate with 10 gems from our new arrivals to our catalog.

One reason for our enormous growth in the last year was the pandemic. COVID-19 was not the first virus killing thousands, however. Learn more about the history of The Bubonic Plague in the book by Chief Medical Officer of Kashmir, Dr. Rai Bahadur A. Mitra.

If you go back far enough in time, history and myth often blend into each other to become one. Joseph Jacobs collected 20 More Celtic Fairy Tales from the early days of the British Isles.

Equally far back goes the history of the Macedonians. Krste Petkov Misirkov is one of their national heros. His book За македонцките работи (On Macedonian Matters) – our first stand-alone project in the Macedonian language – is a program for his people’s national liberation.

Liberation is exactly what’s disturbing the peace in the dystopian future imagined by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the collective We is paramount. But what happens when people start to fight for individual freedom of thought and action?

Thought, or rather, stream of consciousness is the trademark of Virginia Woolf. She brought it to perfection in Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most anticipated 1925 books by LibriVoxers. Follow Mrs. D. and her friends throughout a single day that culminates in a party in the evening.

For The Great Gatsby life in the Jazz Age is one big party where he surrounds himself with upper class socialites. But he is also a big romantic, who would do anything to bet back his former lover Daisy. Watch what happens in the famous 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Galileo Galilei was one of the greatest observers of the solar system in the Renaissance. His famous book Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi explains the heliocentric world view and earned him a trial in the Vatican that forced him to choose between abjuration or death.

Nicholas Carter faces an even more difficult choice: Does he help a good friend or does he try to arrest a scam artist? In the last year, we completed 14 novels about America’s greatest detective. This one, A Stolen Name, is our latest one.

Madrid dressmaker Madame Pepita is also on the lookout for scammers who she suspects behind every suitor of her daughter. But careful! In the play by Gregorio Martinez Sierra, luck and misfortune are both closer than she thinks…

In the late 19th century, three young poets from Luxembourg – Nicolas Gonner, Beckesch Klos, and Jean-Baptiste Nau – went to America to seek their fortunes. Together, they share their experiences on both sides of the Atlantic in Prairieblummen, our first stand-alone project in Luxembourgish.

Enjoy – and a big thank you to all our volunteers who keep LibriVox growing still!