Résultats Éditeur "Naxos AudioBooks" dans Classiques

This is an essay from the Favorite Essays collection.

Hard Times is Dickens's most political novel. Set in the industrial north of England, in Coketown, he examines the lives of working people, who are taught by the capitalists Gradgrind and Bounderby to think only of the facts of life and not to indulge in imagination. Gradgrind’s own children have been so educated and as a result are dysfunctional and disconnected from their feelings. Only the travelling circus company of Sleary seems to offer any hope of humanity in Coketown.

Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including "The Three Strangers", "The Withered Arm", and "The Distracted Preacher", deals with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work: marriage, class, revenge, and disappointed love. Many of the tales have a supernatural tinge, and all are set around Hardy’s much loved homeland.

In The Three Musketeers, one of the greatest adventure stories ever written, we follow the fortunes of the dashing young swordsman D'Artagnan and his daredevil companions Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. As the thrilling story unfolds, "The Four" find themselveds embroiled in duels, love tangles, and sinister intrigues which threaten the furtue of the king, the queen, and France herself.

The scene is 1920s Kensington and Philip and Joan are testing the very limits of politeness and restraint as they fight to expunge the oppression of their mother–by whatever means necessary. In his first novel, Christopher Isherwood paints an intimate portrait of the battle between old and young as he explores the destruction of a son by a domineering parent.

A vivid and haunting collection of interconnected stories, Winesburg, Ohio portrays a cast of isolated individuals in a small midwestern town at the end of the 19th century. Central to the book is George Willard, a young newspaper writer, to whom a variety of Winesburg’s residents, past and present, attempt to confide their secret desires, failures and innermost truths.

In the stifling confines of Edwardian Yorkshire, Muriel Hammond is waiting for her life to begin. Marriage, respectability, duty–these are all part of the script–but just as she believes that ‘men do as they like’ while women ‘wait to see what they will do’, she dreams of a life beyond those boundaries. As war transforms the village of Marshington and friends slot into their expected roles, Muriel needs courage to reframe her sad fate as a ‘surplus woman’ and look towards her own independent future.

An inspiring and relatable heroine, Esther is a pious young servant girl who endures the terrible fate of becoming pregnant and leaving her workplace to face a desperate future... but she is tenacious and fiery, and dedicated to keeping her son and building her life against unfathomably poor odds. Society’s ills are laid bare, especially the addictive buzz, desperate drive and inevitable destruction of gambling on horses.

Published in 1915 and set in the 1890s, The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronberg, a gifted young singer who blazes her way into the world’s greatest opera houses. Thea’s arduous journey begins in Moonstone, Colorado, a burgeoning Western town, where she is one of seven children. Following an artistic awakening at an Arizona canyon, she eventually finds fame as an acclaimed opera singer, performing in Germany and at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

In the lush Shropshire countryside, free-spirited Hazel Woodus is torn between two men: the gentle parson Edward Marston and the passionate, fox-hunting squire Jack Reddin. Her wild side, deep connection to nature, and love of animals–especially Foxy, her pet fox–make for clear internal conflict: she wants to find contentment in her chaste marriage to Edward, but the allure of Reddin is inescapable....

Banned by the Nazis, the haunting novel At the Edge of the Night (Am Rande der Nacht), by the German writer Friedo Lampe, is a work of magic realism. This poignant book, beautifully translated by Simon Beattie, was, in Lampe’s own words, ‘born into a regime where it could not breathe’; he hoped that one day it might rise again. It evokes the sensations and impressions of a sultry September evening on the waterfront of Bremen, with its charm and tenderness, squalor and lust.

The first of Kafka’s three great novels, The Man Who Disappeared (America) follows the picaresque adventures of Karl Rossman, who is banished to America following a family scandal. Upon his arrival, Karl immediately happens upon his uncle, and from there follows a pattern of wandering, adoption and expulsion as Karl marches inexorably on towards the interior of the continent. With its blitheness and comical moments, The Man Who Disappeared is perhaps the most charming of Kafka’s works.

A new pupil, Augustin Meaulnes, arrives at a rural school, and his bravado and charisma make an immediate impact on all those around him, including the 15-year-old François Seurel. The newcomer suddenly disappears for several days, during which time he stumbles across a mysterious manor house, which is home to a beautiful girl, Yvonne de Galais. After returning, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ embarks on a search to find again the lost manor and the happiness he found there.

Praised by Chekhov as his favorite writer, Nikolai Leskov occupies a unique place in Russian literature. His original stories often seem like folk-tales, their larger-than-life characters including soldiers, Tsars, priests and gypsies. Leskov's storytelling, simple in its style, combines a deep religious spirit with comic absurdity. The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Leskov's best-known work, is a realist account of a young woman who escapes from her loveless marriage through adultery, leading to violence and murder

Above all, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) is concerned with the nature of happiness. Rasselas and his companions remove themselves from the pleasure of the ‘happy valley’ so that they can make their ‘choice of life’. In the course of their travels they come across scholars, astronomers, shepherds, hermits and poets, explore their way of life. Rasselas finds that complete happiness is elusive and, in the words of his mentor Imlac, ‘while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live’.

Set in the financial centres of 1820s Frankfurt and London, Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) tells the story of two widows: Madame Fontaine, who will go to any lengths to secure her daughter’s marriage, and Mrs Wagner, who devotes herself to her late husband’s social reforms. In pursuit of her endeavours, Mrs Wagner befriends Jack Straw, a former inmate of Bedlam, who plays a pivotal role as the action, full of plotting and counterplotting, unfolds, culminating in the morgue, where several lives hang in the balance.

One of the great novels in the Irish comic tradition, The Crock of Gold (1912) consists of six parts. Bringing together pagan gods, policemen, prisoners, leprechauns and animals, the narrative concerns a philosopher and his quest to find the most beautiful woman in the world, Cáitilin Ni Murrachu, who has been abducted by the god Pan. His journey takes him from dark forests to the spectacular heights of pagan gods, as he experiences encounters that will change him forever.

Old Michael Snowdon returns to London with an inheritance that he determines should go towards helping the poor—but goodness and charity are not to play a part here. Everyone has an agenda, and scheming spreads through the story like a disease. Gissing’s own experience of London as an outsider in a vast city that both fascinated and appalled him gave him the tools and the drive to create a visceral sense of place. Life is unremittingly grim for just about everyone, from the weak and well-intentioned Jane to the coarse, cunning Clem Peckover and her feckless rival Pennyloaf Candy.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the "stream of consciousness" technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions. "The Good Anna" follows a stern but kind German immigrant, "Melanctha" the tragic life of an African-American woman of the same name, and "The Gentle Lena" a dreamy and unopinionated servant whose passiveness becomes her undoing.

Rejto Jeno (1905-1943) a magyar szórakoztató irodalom egyik legnépszerubb képviseloje, aki felejthetetlen karaktereivel és a szellemes, jellegzetes aforizmáival megkerülhetetlen alakjává vált a mufajnak.