You can also hear the authors:

• www.lyrikline.org: Poetry from all over the world
• www.poetryarchive.org: American Poets
  

Laurence Sterne was an English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy"; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics.
When the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published, in York and London, in January 1760, Sterne became instantly famous. His witty talk in society was much applauded, and Sterne himself proved to be as great an attraction as his book. However, he was also much criticized, by people from the area around York, for his often scurrilous portraits of well-known local figures, such as the male midwife Dr. Slop, and by critics, such as Dr. Johnson, for his use of indecent innuendo.

Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that should be understood as an exploration of what constitutes the novel, were highly influential to Modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, andmore contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to Tristram Shandy as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century." The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel, of which all other novels are mere subsets: "Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature."