Books Unbound

Series produced by WFHB

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Radio reader series from Community Radio WFHB in Bloomington, Indiana.

Books burn; ideas endure. Books Unbound is a weekly showcase of literary works banned by those who fear the power of the pen. The program promotes literary reading and curiosity, challenging listeners to consider viewpoints that may be different from our own. Each week we bring you literature prohibited by governments, schools, and religious institutions. In the words of French philosopher Emile-Auguste Chartier, "nothing is as dangerous as an idea, when it’s the only one you’ve got."


150 Pieces

Order by: Newest First | Oldest First
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Our strange and surprising relationships with house and household objects are explored in an early story by Virginia Woolf, a modern adaptation of ...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Mar 14, 2016
  • Length: 58:34
  • Purchases: 2
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A struggling writer finds unexpected kindness and friendship from his poor landlord in this short story by George Gissing, whom George Orwell ranke...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Mar 07, 2016
  • Length: 57:55
  • Purchases: 2
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To close Black History Month, words that inspired hope and incited action in the struggle for the abolition of slavery and for the empowerment of p...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Feb 29, 2016
  • Length: 59:20
  • Purchases: 2
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The first published short story by an African American, “The Mulatto” appeared in 1837 in an anti-slavery magazine in France. Its author was the 19...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Feb 22, 2016
  • Length: 58:22
  • Purchases: 2
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A black man and a white woman might be the last two people on earth in the post-apocalyptic tale “The Comet,” an early example of African-American ...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Feb 15, 2016
  • Length: 58:38
  • Purchases: 2
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Illness cuts short Nurse Periwinkle’s service for the Union Army as Hospital Sketches concludes. In the last chapters of her thinly fictionalized m...

Bought by GCR (Global Community Radio) and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Feb 08, 2016
  • Length: 58:07
  • Purchases: 2
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Both Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman were profoundly affected by the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg during the American Civil War. In...

Bought by WMUU-LP


  • Added: Feb 01, 2016
  • Length: 58:40
  • Purchases: 1
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The dauntless nurse of Hospital Sketches gains a deeper understanding of the effects of war from the wounded men she cares for in the second part o...

Bought by WMUU-LP


  • Added: Jan 25, 2016
  • Length: 58:02
  • Purchases: 1
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Beloved as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott drew on her service as a Union nurse during the Civil War for her first major literary suc...

Bought by WMUU-LP


  • Added: Jan 18, 2016
  • Length: 58:40
  • Purchases: 1
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Stories about how our need for redemption from our disappointment expresses itself in the holiday season marked by the solstice and the turn of the...

Bought by KRPS, KRPS, and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Dec 23, 2015
  • Length: 58:12
  • Purchases: 3
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Christmas is the setting as sly women turn the tables on their menfolk in a pair of overlooked short stories from the classic era of magazine fiction.

Bought by KRPS, KRPS, and KREV-LP


  • Added: Dec 21, 2015
  • Length: 58:01
  • Purchases: 3
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Uyghur writer Nurmuhemmet Yasin’s poignant beast fable led to his imprisonment by the Chinese government on charges of inciting separatism. The tal...

Bought by WMUU-LP and KPIP-LP


  • Added: Dec 14, 2015
  • Length: 58:26
  • Purchases: 2
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Contemporary women poets reimagine fairy tales and the cultural icon of the ballerina—especially of the black swan school—along with two unsettling...

Bought by WVTF and WMUU-LP


  • Added: Dec 07, 2015
  • Length: 57:59
  • Purchases: 2
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In response to the November 13 attacks in Paris, Books Unbound revisits an episode originally created in the wake of the January 7 attack on the of...

  • Added: Nov 16, 2015
  • Length: 58:57
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The protagonist of "The Massacre of Yangzhou" is the southern Chinese city of Yangzhou, a rich and beautiful center of the failing Ming Dynasty as ...

Bought by WMUU-LP


  • Added: Nov 09, 2015
  • Length: 59:28
  • Purchases: 1
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“Berenice” by Edgar Allan Poe is the featured story for the Halloween finale of “American Girls Horror Stories.” One of Poe’s lesser-known tales, “...

  • Added: Nov 02, 2015
  • Length: 56:01
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Male fears of female domination form one of the strands of horror in “The Thing on the Doorstep” by H.P. Lovecraft, with marriage both transforming...

  • Added: Oct 27, 2015
  • Length: 58:25
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A hallucinatory, apocalyptic fervor pervades the 1860 short story “Circumstance” by Harriet Prescott Spofford, about a woman held all night by a my...

  • Added: Oct 19, 2015
  • Length: 58:03
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A cultural horror of women’s bodies is the theme of the second episode of “American Girls Horror Stories,” juxtaposing two 19th-century American gh...

  • Added: Oct 12, 2015
  • Length: 57:49
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A month of sci-fi, fantasy, gothic, and horror begins with two stories from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 collection Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil...

Bought by KICI Iowa City


  • Added: Oct 05, 2015
  • Length: 59:53
  • Purchases: 1