You might not be aware that as a part of the process of the Hugo Awards, most magazines release the Hugo nominated short stories to the public for free to read. This is done in the hopes that this will increase the profile of said stories, and thus increase the chances of them being voted for in this public choice award.
In recent years this has extended to Escape Pod producing free audio-story versions of the Hugo nominated stories. You can find these by using the Hugo Awards category at Escape Pod like so or the Hugo Awards tag like so… The classification of Hugo stories hasn’t been totally consistent at Escape Pod over the years so you’ll need to check out both the ‘category’ and ‘tags’ pages to get all of them.
I seriously recommend you listening to the 2012 winner The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (MP3 here), and then browse through whatever other stories take your fancy.
