Holiday Buying Guide 2008

Why not give somebody the gift of something they probably didn't know still existed: Virginia Woolf's voice? She made an appearance on the BBC in 1937 that is now the only surviving record of her patrician, unimaginably sophisticated-sounding voice. It has never been released before in its entirety, or at least not since the day it was broadcast, but it appears now in this astounding collection of six CDs of British and American authors speaking and reading aloud, collected by the British Library. Arthur Conan Doyle, Gertrude Stein, Raymond Chandler (chatting with Ian Fleming), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov — it's like a dream of the perfect literary cocktail party. (Cocktails sold separately.)

—Lev Grossman

Read about the best deals with these Cyber Monday tips.