And the I'm going to be. Welcome to Snuscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. On Snuscast, we read excerpts from Public Domain Works and occasionally original stories. We'd like to thank our listeners. If you enjoy our show, please review

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This episode is brought to you by Smiling Dolphins.

Tonight we read the opening to the picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde and first published in

1890. This Gothic and philosophical story was considered offensive and indecent by Victorian English sensibilities.

It was thus censored, sparking much controversy.

The title character, Dorian Gray, sells his soul to make a portrait of himself age rather than himself. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes

body into the softness of your bed.

Now take a few deep breaths. Chapter 1. The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred

amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate

perfume of the pink flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes.

Lord Henry Wadden could just catch the gleam of the honey sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a laburnum whose tremulous branches seemed hardly

able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs. And now and then the fantastic

shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussor silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge

window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid

jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily

immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

The sullen murmur of the in more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the borden note of a distant organ.

In the center of the room clamps to an upright easel stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,

and in front of it some little distance away was sitting the artist himself.

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